What.cd and Waffles ban Azureus and Deluge

[anon]

Spoiler: Show

As staff on this tracker, one of our responsibilities is policing the swarms and making sure that everyone plays fair. Another related responsibility is the management of the client whitelist, to ensure that new clients are added as they're deemed safe, and old clients are removed as they're deemed irrelevant/problematic. On Monday the 22nd, we will be performing a significant set of changes to the client whitelist.

Deluge will be removed from the whitelist. After performing an analysis on our swarms, we found that over 4088 downloads, deluge downloaded, on average, 15.4% more data than the size of the torrent. As it is hard enough for users to maintain ratios already, we feel that it is a bad idea to allow deluge to make this situation worse. This change affects 1.3% of our userbase.

More importantly, all versions of azureus/vuze will be removed from the whitelist. This move is being made in conjunction with our friends over at waffles.fm. Vuze users, see below for instructions on how to easily transfer the .torrent files from Vuze to any other client.
Vuze's twilight hour started approaching when they changed their name from Azureus and began to commercialize their already bloated client. Over the years, this caused its market share to shrink considerably in favour of uTorrent, rtorrent, and transmission. Its ease of modification by cheat client developers and habit of constantly reporting very low upload speeds when no one is downloading anything cause unnecessary headaches for the staff. Additionally, the notoriety of the vuze developers for disliking and refusing to cooperate with private tracker staff has only served to worsen the situation.

Vuze's market share has shrunken to 7.1% of our userbase. We are well aware that you 7.1% are still a lot of people - however, we feel that in the long run, you and the rest of the userbase will benefit if you change to a better client.

Our client recommendations are as follows:

Windows: uTorrent 2.x and uTorrent 1.8.x. There is a certain level of controversy surrounding the 'unfairness' of uTorrent 2.0's new protocol (uTP) in the private tracker community. Failing to find evidence of this unfairness ourselves, and seeing significant benefits to the adoption of uTP, we have decided to make uTorrent 2.0 our #1 recommended client - however, be aware that you may not be able to use this client on other trackers.

Mac: uTorrent Mac 0.9.x and Transmission 1.8.x. Both clients are excellent, and transmission has a very friendly and cooperative dev team. To create torrents, you can use the CreateTorrent dashboard widget or the mktorrent command line utility.

Linux: rtorrent 0.8.x, Transmission 1.8.x, KTorrent 3.x, and uTorrent in WINE. rtorrent is WhatMan's very fast personal favourite, and all hardcore linux users should be using it. There also exist numerous frontends for it, such as ntorrent, rutorrent and wTorrent, in case you aren't up to using the console like a man.

If you use deluge or vuze, we understand that this change may be inconvenient for you. We also understand that you may feel a great deal of rage right now, due to the loss of your traditional client which has no doubt treated you with loyalty for many years. However, we implore you to think of the long term benefits for the site and staff, and yourselves - you'll be surprised at what your system can do with the RAM that vuze isn't hogging anymore.

In order to make the transition easier, we have given all users the ability to download a zip file with all of their snatches - click [download] next to the 'Snatched' stat on your profile. This also means that all users now have access to the collector - a feature to download all torrents by an artist, in a collage, or in your bookmarks.

If you use Vuze, please follow these steps to export your client's .torrent files (and thanks to sonicsnare for kindly sharing this info!):

sonicsnare wrote:
Make a new folder, select all torrents, right-click or option-click->advanced->export->torrent
All your .torrent files are duplicated whether you had them or not.

We apologize for the short term inconvenience this will cause, and thank you for your cooperation.

Source: What.cd

Spoiler: Show

Waffles and What.cd, over the course of several months, have discovered that Vuze and Deluge are primarily used by ratio cheaters. We are aware there's a handful of legitimate users, though, thus we are making this announcement. Effective Monday, both clients will be banned from both sites. You will not be banned from Waffles for using either program, but your ability to seed and leech will cease until you choose new torrent software.

For Windows, if for some reason you don't want µTorrent, we do allow the official BitTorrent client, along with the latest versions of BitComet and BitTornado. If you do choose µTorrent, we suggest using version 2.0 or later, to take advantage of uTP, which connects to peers faster, is home router friendly, and doesn't overload your system connections like other torrent clients. The downside to this is that outdated clients get lower priority when connections are made. We do suggest the authors of those clients add support for uTP to their clients.

On the Mac, we suggest Transmission or µTorrent Mac.

Finally, for linux, we suggest Transmission, rtorrent, or ktorrent.

We know that this will upset a few of you, but we must do what is best for the community as a whole.

Source: Waffles

Knowing the ins and outs of cheating myself, I can assure you banning Azureus won't deter cheating at all. I wasn't aware of Deluge misreporting download stats, but I'd assume the What.cd staff have talked to its developers rather than banning the client directly, which leads me to the following point:
Additionally, the notoriety of the vuze developers for disliking and refusing to cooperate with private tracker staff has only served to worsen the situation.

I'm not sure about that. Perhaps the Vuze team hasn't talked too much to What, but looking at the release changelogs and their wiki it is clear they have gone to some extent to make life easier to private tracker admins. One of their developers even registered on my board to discuss the excessive announcing issue when the tracker returns few peers, and fixed it in the stable release that followed.

However, as they have designed a whole tracker frontend (Gazelle) by themselves, it should be clear that the What.cd staff are experienced on the matter, which pleased me when I read this:
There is a certain level of controversy surrounding the 'unfairness' of uTorrent 2.0's new protocol (uTP) in the private tracker community. Failing to find evidence of this unfairness ourselves, and seeing significant benefits to the adoption of uTP, we have decided to make uTorrent 2.0 our #1 recommended client ...

Your thoughts?

[ca_aok]

My primary thoughts are that the Az/Vuze ban was unwarranted and cheating was an excuse for them to finally do away with the queueing system which they so hate from those clients

The Deluge ban is warranted from the statistics I've seen myself.

Either way it doesn't affect me since I use uTorrent and rtorrent; however, I won't be updating to 2.0 until the dust settles a bit.

[Cabalo]

My primary thoughts are that the Az/Vuze ban was unwarranted and cheating was an excuse for them to finally do away with the queueing system which they so hate from those clients

[anon]

My primary thoughts are that the Az/Vuze ban was unwarranted and cheating was an excuse for them to finally do away with the queueing system which they so hate from those clients

Personally, I think the What and Waffles staff members are sensible enough not to fully ban a client just because its queue system makes seeding difficult at times. What.cd even has a mini-tutorial on how to "fix" those problems on their forums.

The Deluge ban is warranted from the statistics I've seen myself.

Can you post of PM me those stats? I'd be interested to check them out.

[QPD]

although I do not use azureus, I know it has a lot of great features!

[brightsid]

Staff excuses used to be smarter. This is one is good for idiots. Never though I was going to let my accounts die

[anon]

Never though I was going to let my accounts die

You're going to let your accounts at What and Waffles die?

I would certainly disagree with these client bans if I was a heavy Vuze or Deluge user, but I wouldn't deprive myself from the two best music trackers in the world...

[brightsid]

Unless there is a really easy way to move the +1000 torrent from different trackers and HDDs I'm seeding (some of them are not always active but I start them from time to time),
yes

[Tokeman]

How about moving the ones that still need to be seeded, rather then moving all of them, then just slowly add things back over time. Don't really see a need to have 1000+ torrents seeding, seems a bit overboard unless your the only seeder...

[brightsid]

If there was a logical excuse then I would try to change my client. In the announcement there isn't.
Personally I don't believe that you using rtorrent in console will make me feel more man like they are saying