I was on the network using Limewire and it reported that there was 40 TB of files available and that there was 8 billion files on the network. Now, my question is, is this a problem with the Limewire program or is it a bunch of freeloaders sharing bogus files(like junk text files) just so they can get a free ride? Considering I share almost 5 gigs of stuff(and plan to share more when I get more available disk space) on a very fast T3, this gets me mad.

Can anyone else noticed this?

Yes, I've seen the same thing over the last few days. You'll be sitting at maybe 500K files and 10 TB and suddenly you'll be at 4B files and still 10 TB! Out of curiosity I started killing my connections and you do find that when you kill the right one, your file count drops back to normal. If it's not just a bug, I'd like to find who's doing it so I can filter their address.

Ya I was trying that last night, noticed that any host starting with 24.x.x.x or 65-66.x.x.x seemed to be connected to the person or group of people doing this crap. Unfortunately I wasn't able to narrow it farther. I did find one user with a modem(don't have his IP address in front of me) that was sharing a bunch of crap gif and xrc files with names like "aaaa" and such. Oh well, I wonder if Limewire can add a feature to allow the user to filter out freeloaders by amount of files as in size of them.

mabey people with more popular files could be given some sort of priority , like people with faster connections are given with lime wire.

What I would like is for Limewire and other clients to allow settings where you can either determine freeloading by number of files being shared and/or the total space those files take up, that would probably curb the problem pretty well.

But I noticed the same thing on Napster (huh? did he just say the 7 letter N word?!?) Yes I did, I just wanted to make it clear that this is a problem beyond Limewire, Bearshare, Phex, Gnutella itself.

<b>Crap</b>ster's a bad word. Never mind

Isn't it understandable that modem users are often freeloaders.

Why do you speak of them as if they were criminal or even antisocial.
They don't have the same conditions as an T3 user.

Sharing as many popular files as you do would cost him kBugs.
I'm sure, freeloaders would share files, too, if they had the same connection to the Internet like you.
There are very few people fast an cheap connected, outside the USA

So, is it sooo baad not to share files, but trying to get some?

I know, If all would do so, it wouln't work. But thats no problem at this time, is it?

scotti

But the people that make example.mp3 and leave it blank, being 0 bytes, so that they appear to be sharing files, but in fact are only appearing to, so that they may download more themselves.

Yes, I can understand the trouble with this.
I wouldn't do so! I would share unpopular files instead. (Which is often better music than popular one. So no one should be angry. And some people should be happy to find good music!)