I must admit several things.
I find LimeWire a fantastically innovative piece of software. It's so fantastically innovative, it should win several awards, the programmers should get immensely rich, and should also be lounging on a nice beach on Ursa Minor Beta with a few scantily clad women. In my opinion. I must also admit that it is mindbogglingly terrific, and is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike much of the software I throw in the trash can (Not the recycle bin, no, no... I don't like recycling my bits. I like them thoroughly off--I don't want to download a recycled version of something I threw away.). That being a good thing. A very astoundingly good thing. Something so vastly and totally terrific and nice. Its so nice in fact, I think I'll use it. And if you were hoping I'd steal it, you're sorely wrong. I'm not Zaphod Beeblebrox or anything. I'm just this guy, you know?

Anyway, I'd also like to admit that it could definitely be improved. And I don't mean that in the way that a UMAX SuperMac S900d needs more ram, an extra hard drive, and carrier ZIF along with its respective multi-megahert G4 dual processors. I mean it in the way that a Titanium Powerbook could do with several G5 multi-gigahert quad peltier-cooled processors, two type three PCMCIA slots, a built in tri-flash card reader, a couple of those neat (and expensive) little RGB LED's with the four wires situated behind the Apple logos, and some foldable titanium tailfins.

One of the things I've found with the Gnutella nets is that the amount of and type of data available varies widely due to temporal flux. By that, I mean, the files you desperately need are only in your grasp when, by a remarkable coincidence, at 7:30 AM, a time that very few respectable computer nerds would possibly log into Gnutella, be they students, employees, or unemployed. But what if you left LimeWire open, and tell it to search the temporal ether of the 'nets with some carefully set parameters, so when that file unexpectedly pops up when you aren't there, it automatically downloads it. Of course, there are a couple of problems with that, I know. Like, say, there are two related files that pop up over time and strike the LimeWire client as being particularly important. You can either set a preference so that when this happens, LimeWire will download all occurrences, but only 10 times. Or it will only download 10 files. So if for some reason LimeWire can't make the connection, that download didn't count. Or you could tell it to download all occurrences until 12:00 PM, etc. I think that would be just real neat.

Another thing that would be cool would be to add better text messaging capabilities. The ideal setup would be a plug-in oriented interface that allows for all common text messaging clients like AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, etc. Then, instead of the bulky chat interface that LimeWire has currently, you can chat with your downloading buddies or make new friends through Gnutella in a couple of separate windows that are much more flexible and don't clutter the screen. It would also be nice to talk with the people who are uploading from you.

One thing that troubles me is that when I go to get info for LimeWire (In Mac OS 10.1.5), it tells me the version number of the InstallAnywhere 4.5 client (which is © 2001 Zero G Software) instead of the real version number, which is version 2.5.5. This is very confusing. I don't like it. It's very rude not only to me, my OS, and my computer, but also the version tracking software installed on my computer, and consequently, is insulting to my honor. Unless, somebody gets around to fixing that. Please, please, fix that.

Finally, in order to facilitate the sharing of files, it would be nice to have a total of how many files and megabytes you have either uploaded and downloaded. There would be two of these, one for this session, and a combined one for all sessions. The ratio between uploaded and downloaded files should be available to all other LimeWire clients just like the freeloading feature. If a freeloader has a ratio that says that all he/she does is download, and not upload, then the uploader could refuse to serve this client.

To conclude, I really like your software, but there is room for improvement, and I really appreciate the fact that you have this neat little features forum to let your users give you some ideas. Thank you in advance.

hm i think your idea of a down/upload ratio wont work.
i.e. I have downloaded about 20 files but I only saw two people downloading from my machine. but im sharing over 800 files (its not much but everything i have :P)

What you've got to do is leave your LW client open all night, and enable incoming searches (shielded by an UP, of course). But you do have a good point. You aren't exactly a freeloader, because you are sharing, and you have no control of who downloads from you. But I just thought it would offer people more choices as to who downloads their files, and maybe LW could post a list of the top 10 (or 50, or 100, etc.) uploaders.