I like the sound of this idea very much.

Does this mean that I could put a load of personal family photos into this folder then phone my parents so that only they could upload them?

It's a great use of p2p, means I could let my family get Mbs of photos and video footage - this being difficult by email limits.

This can be nice for web-forums, but it might drain p2p-networks.

People may download from the general net but share only to a specific group. That is "using gnutella as kickstart" revamped, but now for many small networks.

Gnutella doesn't get more uploaders this way.

So it is kinda dangerous to implement, but it could also strengthen the Gnutella network, when files downloaded from the general net are automatically shared in the general net, and have to be explicitly marked private, to be taken out of that share.

So it is a bit sensitive, but it is also something, which many users want (I'd also kinda like to be able to do it).

Besides (out of caution): Advertising in this board about anything which is not directly useful as tool for writing Gnutella-related software, is prohibited (and will be deleted).

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No offense but that's a really stupid idea. As soon as you share your files with some of your "buddies" or your "family" you can consider them public domain. It's the typical end-user nonsense request anyway. Every tool has a very precise purpose and if you turn it into a can-do-everything it becomes digusting crap before you counted to 3.

There is a bazillion of possibilities to share "private" files using password protection. Why the hell wouldn't you use one of those? Right, because your screw driver should be able to, shouldn't it?

@Deathly Viper: Don't be so quick to diismiss the Idea as stupid.

If files from the private folder get stored in another private folder, thhe flles stay private.

Even small-scale companies could use this technique to allow their emploees to access relevant files, while also allowing them access to the GNet (maybe they need it for researrch purposes, or because there are already quite many legal and useful files out there, if you are able to filter out the porn).

Besides: End-user requests are seldom nonsense to me, for they have simply a different perspective than programmers: An end-user wants to have to spend the least possible work to getthe most from the tool, and that is completely legit.
Creating programs in a way which fits the end-users is called "user-friendly", and I don't deem it a bad habit for progammers to write user-friendly programs.
But sometimes it can be necessary to interpret the feature-request, so that the end-user is happy and the program still works as well as it should (else the end-user also wouldn't be happy).

If this sounded a bit scholarlike, sorry 'bout that.

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Well said arne_bab

Too many times I have come across programmers that were in such a hurry to finish their task that they completely forgot, or didn't care, about the end user. So that the poor user ended up with a program that they couldn't use or was so difficult that it was abandoned.

Most programmers forget that most users are not computer literate and so can't explain properly what they want or need. Likewise, users believe that since programmers know "everything" they will instinctively know what the users want.

This is a recipe for disaster.

Therefore, it is refreshing to see a programmer that puts users first.



UK Bob

Oh, well, if you can call me programmer

I'm doing bits here and there (where I can, that is; my masterpiece still is Gnutella For Users, a guide to Gnutella: http://gnufu.net ) but hey, I'm lazy at times, and at those times I want to have to use the least possible number of clicks to get what I want from a program (see the different definitiion of lazy? ).
And that is, what I try to remember, when I write code myself, and I hope I'll be able to stick to that, because I assume, it is very easy to forget it (and to forget, that every programmer was a user once and faced the same problems other users face now).

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