I have no problems with the noble leech which serves an important purpose in medicine, used instead of sutures to close some wounds with far less scarring and, along with its cousin the maggot, destroying infected tissue in a wound thus preventing gangrene.

There is another type of animal we refer to as a leech which is of far less value. This type of leech joins a P2P network such as Limewire and raids user files to download without reciprocating by allowing other users to download from "it!"

This parasitic behaviour not only irritates the host but the cumulative effect of this practice by the (my guess) 90% of Limewire users who DON'T SHARE - is destroying the newtwork itself. To call this type of individual a "Leech" is an insult to the legitimate one.

My settings in Limewire are supposed to block users who don't share yet as we speak there are about 30 users trying to download who are not sharing and have chat switched off (so I can't even tell them how disgusted I am). I think the software should be changed to toughen our ability to automatically. In order for Limewire and other P2P networks to survive, users should be able to completely block those who don't share if they want to. I hate having to do this manually but there IS a principle involved here.

Even better would be a pop-up to those leeches saying (for example) "Your request to download from this user has been denied until such time as you fulfill your obligation to this P2P network by sharing files similar to this one."

I would be interested in your feedback/comments on this.

Davkar

I share your views entirely. There is NO way to check in most cases if a Host is a leach or a freeloader or any sort of parasite, nor is there a way to automatically ban freeloaders from EVER uploading... BUT ... The other day I was getting seriously upset by one uploader who was taking what seemed like liberties. I eventually discovered he was a fine and generous host with whom I swap many files, but I only discovered this by making an educated guess at what he might be sharing and searching for it. The fact that he seemed to be using different ip nos, probably through no choice of his own, did not help. I have a long list of banned hosts, who will simply not share anything atall. whether this is because they are mean, or are totally unaware that they are, in fact, not sharing I usually know not. I am not keen on sharing with hosts I can not browse, but it is possible to only browse a handful, so i guess we just have to take each case as it comes.

I hgave many more thoughts on the subject, but I'll keep them for now ...

100% agree I know ther has to be a way to block LEACHES if you use WinMX there is software that is called MxMonitor with it you can set it to how many files a person must share before they will even be allowed to be in your Q it will do allot of othe things also such as autotrade. I hope that someday somebody will devolop that type of tool for LimeWire I believe it would make the network allot better for thoes who do share there would be more bandwith availble faster downloads and less waiting in line.

STOP LEACHES


Latter Grandpa