Karma points. I've just skimmed through here and havent seen it as a request.

That would need a central server though, wouldnt it....
damn gnutella.

Lets just get some ultra anti-freeloading into the next gnutella spec, along with limewire blocking old gnutella clients. That is better anyway.

Karma points.

Neither karma points nor the blocking of old clients is likely to come. - The LimeWire developers don't seem too concerned about the freeloading issue. - In two or three month we will have partial file sharing, that means you can't download without sharing the files you are downloading at the moment. - I guess that will solve many of the problems you have with gnutella.

Kewl, at least that will help.

I just downloaded songspy yesterday, and when I saw that, damn, I was happy. (Starting Karma: 167, not too shabby)

Why should LimeWire block other gnutella clients? Gnutella is an open network. There is no point in blocking users based on what client they use. What if someone could not use LimeWire because they did not wish to install Java, or they want to use a non-gui based client? I love LimeWire, but there is no way to block people based on what client they use. Blocking them based on how many files they share is OK, but I do not care what client they use.

1) "What if someone could not use LimeWire because they did not wish to install Java"

- Huh?

2) And we've ALREADY blocked older clients, whats wrong with doing it again?

- Try getting on with the original Gnutella 0.56 client. Try using a browser based gnutella portal.

3) I love LimeWire, but there is no way to block people based on what client they use.

- Well, BearShare prefers BearShare... Im sure other clients do it too.

Here's how to block all non-limewire cliensts (solely for educational purpose):
Download the source code
Open the file core/com/limegroup/gnutella/filters/RequeryFilter.java
and edit this fuction (paste the three lines marked with ">>"):

private boolean allow(QueryRequest q) {
//Kill automated requeries from LW 2.3 and earlier.
byte[] guid=q.getGUID();
>> //Filter ALL none-LimeWire queries
>> if (!GUID.isLimeGUID(guid))
>> return false;
if (GUID.isLimeGUID(guid)) {
if (GUID.isLimeRequeryGUID(guid, 0) //LW 2.2.0-2.2.3
|| GUID.isLimeRequeryGUID(guid, 1)) { //LW 2.2.4-2.3.x
return false;
}
}
return true;
}

Compile and voilà, you are filtering all queries from non-limewire hosts, while at the same time being able to download from them. - I'm not encouraging anybody to do so, however (although it saves a lot of your bandwidth).

Blocking freeloaders is a lot more complicated and almost impossible. LimeWire's freeloader-blocking does NOT work except for browsers.