Bizzare search problem - Any help welcome!
 

When I search (mainly for movies/TV shows) I am returned with tens of thousands of search results, each result having over 50 hosts. I was used to about a thousand return searches on a good day before.

This wouldn't bother me, except if i try to download from any of these returned searches above 50 hosts it displays a 'need more souces' box in the download area. Any below 50 still seem to work, but these are a very limited number (perhas 1 or 2 results which work out of 10,000 which don't!). What I find curious is that altough none of these returns work when I try to download, each one is unique (with different names, types and file sizes), and it appears as if they are genuine files. Does anyone have any explanation for this, or know a way to fix it?

At the same time, no one uploads from me and the downloads which do work take a long time. Limewire will also occassionaly force quit. I am using a G5, OS 10.3.9 (latest Panther), updated java, etc. All prefernces set to default, and for all purposes i'm a 'normal' user (I'm not running the stock exchange or a nuclear reactor through my computer!).

If this is a problem with a simple solution - I appologise. If not, any help would be appreciated. Im just a simple lad with a rather complex problem! Thanks.

No simple solution. About a month ago a new type of spam appeared which are all dud/fake results. You will never downld them. They are obvious by the high no. of results for each search result. Choose those with less than 20 or 10 results. Else, do a bitzi search to see if there's any reports on the particular file: How to use Bitzi Web Lookup

Any way to elminate them completely?

I don't know whether the junk filter will be able to do much with these files. Because they're not a certain file size or named in a certain way. I really don't know if just the huge numbers of sources would be enough for it to reliably recognise this spam.

Anybody else know for sure??

:)

I alerted the LW proggies about this issue when it 1st surfaced. I'm not sure what the outcome will be I haven't heard back. It may take a while to find a solution ... I don't know.

It's possible that this isn't true spam but just fallout. It can happen that all results bearing addresses used by spammers are filtered out and you receive only the red herrings they emit. What's the largest file you've noticed this problem with? If it's in the Sub-Meg area I wouldn't be worried. If it's several hundred Megabytes this might be interesting.

Video file size!!! (500-700 MB) I have posted some sample images "somewhere". What I found noticeable was say, 101 results for one file, 100 for the next, 99 for the next, etc. ending up with perhaps 20,000 results for the one search. I think I have that figure right ... from memory.

Ugh! I just realised that since the forums went onto a backup database a week or 2 ago, we're missing about 6 weeks of posts so my samples aren't present at the moment. But I could repost it.

Here ... I do have more than one example but this is good enough ... below attachment. Part 2 of the Gif is exactly directly under the 1st part of the same search results. That's what makes it so obvious with the massive results.

yeah, exactly that. I start with 101 and work down to 50. Anything below 50 normally works. Just like the gif you put up. I have a JPEG o show but I can't put it on here for people to see.

I managed to get 1 or 2 'good' search results today out of maybe a hundred

Each file size is normal, for instance, an episode of a TV show is around 350 megabytes. Movies are around 600 - 700 megs.

Oh yeah, and why me??!

Why is this so rare?

Not so rare now. Not for copyright material be it video or TV material. This spam type has started to come in strong for such material. Almost as though there's preset keywords for both tv & video material to grab the spam engine's attention. Such a list wouldn't take too long to put together. It seems to have happened gradually which suggests an ongoing process of adding to this list by the overpeers which perhaps are the ancestors of the present gangs/thugs/overpeers/r*aa/child rapists.

I don't know how LimeWire displays search results especially when it comes to showing the count of sources. So I'm not sure whether I've seen this or not. I searched for episodes of Lost b/c I don't really know what's popular in the US nowadays or what Wollyhood is doing anyways. I didn't find anything with more than ~30 hits but many of those hits had 10 and more alt-locs. That could have been what you see. As far as I know, LimeWire doesn't filter any bad or non-assigned addresses at all, so someone might just send tons of results with such addresses just to turn everyone off. PeerGuardian won't help you one bit b/c it can only see incoming and outgoing traffic but none of the addresses exchanged within any protocol. Well, even if you filter such bogus addresses, they could simply use random addresses for the same effect.

Then again it could simply be a bug. Maybe LimeWire has an endian issue with its new DHT toy? You could actually take that for granted if it happens with the Mac version only.

What I forgot to mention is that for me anyway (nobody else seemed to notice this), is that the file chosen to downld would cancel itself after some minutes of trying to connect. Now I use a mac but the others who have complained about this have been mostly windows users. Self-cancellation is something I'd never seen before. And that is at least one way of knowing these are false results or dud files. In the sample image I provided I didn't cancel any of those ... they cancelled themselves (the torn/shredded paper indicates cancellation of downld.)