To ban or not to ban...This is the Q..

[tippertime]

it may not be fair to ban people who have not had a chance to prove themselves...but it is a lot of work to keep tabs on people and check all the abnormals the tracker reports...75% is just too high of a number to justify the work finding good members

[Bad-Day]

@ anon And this is why youre a genius.

[anon]

75% is just too high of a number to justify the work finding good members

Then find the bad ones instead.

[The_Martinator]

I've heard from a staffer that over 80% of Romanian users got banned at his tracker.

Here's a story (a true one at that):

A Romanian user comes into IRC. Says: "How much to lift the Romanian global ban? Everyone's got a price."

I don't agree with banning whole countries, btw, but there's one thing you're forgetting, OP; torrenting is a hobby for people (even for staffers who do have RL jobs). So their time is limited plus the "budget" is limited. Not so with countries at war (well, all budgets are limited in some way, but you get what I mean).

[sez]

A villain yes but you can't take the fact that he's a genius away from him.Like its got to take a real whiz to re-mod BT clients they way he does although I wish he could transfer that energy into developing safer torrent clients for the wider BT community.
This was originally intended to be a flame post but I kinda feel that for his articulacy he does transcend the slight(plus I don't feel like going first lol).

The way I see it,its just like the way xtians see pigs as bacon and sausages while muslims consider them to be evil or something.

Simply put,we've been cultured differently.That and the fact that not all of us get to have choices to reality.

That said,I think he made a pretty descent argument as to why some people cheat,especially on scT a case that if am to disagree with,I'd maybe do so as a matter of principle.

I think he should post more often.I've enjoyed reading him.
Wonder what's his take on invite/account trading?

On a much more serious note,like really serious,I think they should get rid of country bans and start banning people by nationality.Its not like everyone who lives in romania is romanian.I've heard of romanians telling gypsies to get out of their country,wonder what's up with that.

And you know its the fuckin internet here.Assumptions are everything.If statistics say that 75 % of romanians BT users are bad users then they just assume that the other 25% are those that haven't yet been caught.
Appealing to human emotion isn't gonna help you.As far as they are concerned numbers don't lie.Besides if you were actually a good romanian user,chances are that they would have spared you just like they did the other good romanian users.Life is unfair you just gotta deal.

[QPD]

And you know its the fuckin internet here.Assumptions are everything.If statistics say that 75 % of romanians BT users are bad users then they just assume that the other 25% are those that haven't yet been caught.
Appealing to human emotion isn't gonna help you.As far as they are concerned numbers don't lie.Besides if you were actually a good romanian user,chances are that they would have spared you just like they did the other good romanian users.Life is unfair you just gotta deal.

Where did you guys take that 75%bad users from?

Why banning the inviter along with the one who cheat is not a viable solution?I am 100% sure that the inviters will be more than carefull who do they invite! ( On this matter I'd like to hear a staffer opinion )

[That1Guy]

I think the problem is that when you ban someone. They may have a dynamic ip and just get another account and do it again. If there are a large number of people doing it in a region then to keep them out you end up having to ban huge IP ranges.

If it is a tiny tracker that has a small amount of members then it is easier for staff to keep tabs. But when you have 10,000 plus members I can see why some trackers think it's just not worth the work. I'm not saying I agree with banning countries, but I dont think the sites that do it are doing it for fun or something.

[emperorIX]

I would have to agree with the country bans if the stats show that the vast majority are bad users. Like was mentioned earlier, those individuals running the trackers we all use do have real lives to live and can't spend all of their time monitoring each and every user. It only makes sense to institute such broad bans.

As for cheating, I am of the mindset that cheaters do not deserve a second chance. These are private communities after all with their own rules of conduct. Why would a community such as ScT or SCC tolerate a cheater when a good user is more than willing to take their place? If someone can't follow the rules of any private community (online or irl), they simply do not belong there.

Also, afaik, some country bans were not instituted only based on the amount of ratio cheaters or traders, but also because of the large amount of credit card fraud involved in those countries (donations), which has much more serious implications than simply cheating one's ratio.

[anon]

@sez: Thanks for your kind words. They mean a lot. If you want to see our users' stances on the matter, you can read this thread:

http://SB-I URL/f56/cheating-etiquette-15523/

I don't know if it's OK to post the full address, but it probably isn't, and since I want to "keep it cool" I'll leave it at that. You can probably Google your way through it anyway, just like we're first for many "cheating on (tracker name)" queries.

Tracker staff are against trading because invites were meant to get your friends and/or trusted people inside, not to get you inside other sites, in a lot of cases by trading with unknowns. What's to prevent someone from an anti-P2P company to make an account here (or on any trading board, I'm not attacking FST), make some posts, wait enough until you can access the BitTorrent Trades area, then start trading or applying for giveaways, and harvest IPs once he's in? There's rep, but that's a simple "the more the better" indicator of who's given a lot of invites away, or is less likely to scam you. And don't say "but the ranges they use are known" - IP filters are not and will never be 100% perfect, and if they were, they could simply "work" at home instead. Also, traders, just like cheaters, aren't "always caught" as the admins of trackers and invite forums (many of which have allowed trading in the past) want you to think. If you know how to do things correctly and take a few basic steps to ensure your security, no one but you and the person you traded with will know how you made your way in. I mean, I recently got two new accounts after being banned at a site claiming their technology for detecting dupes is beyond description.

But enough about that. I'll write my thoughts on the matter. I don't trade myself, but fail to see the problem with it if you do it with someone you know and trust, which ideally you should. If you care about the security of the tracker (whose members are kind enough to provide you with what you download), you won't do it with people you don't even know just because they have a good offer, or that high-level site you've always dreamed of having. (I have never understood what's the urge to get on sites that are difficult to get an invite to. Basically, BitTorrent is about getting your stuff, which you can do regardless of a tracker being level 2 or 10. It's sad to see how many people claim certain great ones are crap just because they're low in the levels list. Personally, I've never seen a good reason to prefer using ScT over TL, or BitMeTV over TvT.com) Traders that seem to do almost anything to get inside rare sites (like that one guy that created so many stupid threads here, for example) are just pathetic. Most of the time they'll only keep their account alive to be able to say "I'm at X" (as if there was a prize to that...), using the slot of someone that would actually participate.

About safer BitTorrent clients... private trackers should be glad stats are actually reported in the first place. We could say that was implemented "just because", since back in the day they weren't used for absolutely anything. Some developers do show support for private trackers, though - to give some examples, BT Inc. made uTorrent "forget" about all peers if you edit the tracker list for private torrents - it takes editing 7 bytes inside the EXE to bypass this, though. The Vuze team also recently fixed the "feature" that hammered trackers when they didn't return peers, after one of our coders pointed this out on a news thread. If you have any ideas to make clients safer I, as well as developers, would be interested to know them.

@emperorIX: that's a good argument. Let's just say communities such as ScT or SCC won't notice the difference.

[mievmo]

GFT, didn't ban Israel.