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

Originally Posted by IdolEyes787

Originally Posted by anon-sbi

Have to do with what? I think my point was quite clear. 90% of ScT's users have seedboxes or 100Mbit lines. I don't see the need to seed with my crappy upload speed.

And please define how someone like me is.

With why you cheat.
And since I don't know you I cannot say definitively what kind of person you are but at the risk of generalization I would say that the vast majority of people you cheat or steal don't do it out of necessity.

You are perfectly right, that's why I don't belive in sudden change about .ro banning.The question is what should the rest of us do...

That's too bad, I guess.

Why dont you move your reunions outside this topic?
The original theme was :
Do you think Romania and Israel should ever be allowed again on SCC,SCT and GFT?And what should change in order to make it possible?

Originally Posted by QPD

Why dont you move your reunions outside this topic?

FST is notorious for the constant off-topic discussions inside threads, but I'll try to stay on topic

Do you think Romania and Israel should ever be allowed again on SCC,SCT and GFT?And what should change in order to make it possible?

Yes. I don't think country bans are the solution. Cheaters come from all sides of the world, and it's not fair to ban a whole country just because a lot of members coming from it wanted to see what happened if they grabbed their ratio cheating tool (I'll try to keep it cool, so I won't mention names) and faked 1000GB in one minute. Also, I have read on TL's FAQ that at least one Israeli ISP modifies your tracker announces to report millions of terabytes of upload, to get you banned and thus save international bandwidth. It's possible that a lot of people from that country were banned for this "cheating" a.k.a. violation of Net neutrality, while they have no real control over that, other than using SSL trackers if the site allows it.

How to make it possible:
Implement actual anti-cheating scripts ("detect abnormal uploads" doesn't count). Make them warn the staffers if someone is caught, and have one of them review the case. Don't act like on BitMeTV, where they once banned a donor with a good ratio beacuse their anti-cheat picked up Vuze's latest version as a cheat mod (there's a well-known Vuze mod to disable uploading, cheat, and spoof other clients, but he wasn't using that).

When someone is caught for the first time, give them a warning and remove their fake upload, like a few trackers have done with me back when I was new to cheating. Perhaps the guy will change his mind and start seeding honestly, and if he doesn't, ban him - you won't have wasted but 5 minutes.

If you want to keep track of ratios, that's fine - but mathematically, it's impossible for everyone to have one above 1.0 if we take real upload as the only factor that can increase it. Implement a system where simply seeding counts, like BCG's Seed Points, for example. I only cheated there very few times, and it was to know if certain mods and tools worked. After that, I simply left my client open to gain SP and survive honestly. What I like about them is that the torrent's size is taken into consideration when calculating how much time you'll have to seed it for, so it won't be the same for a 10MB mobile game pack as with the latest PC game weighting 10GB.

Bonus points and/or a ratio-free system are also cool, although I think you should have enough activity on your tracker before switching to the latter.

As I see it, you need to basically give users an incentive to seed that doesn't consist on "do or die". Those of you that think "so you want to let people leech GBs by just leaving their client open" can make the amount of both real and "artificial" upload traffic be shown in profiles. This way you can know exactly how much you've really uploaded, and if you could be doing better at real seeding.

There have also been more suggestions on how to make the system more fair to everyone. These two are from Bram Cohen, the BitTorrent protocol's creator:

"A better approach would be to not count it against people when they download from heavily overseeded torrents. Or to just not use total upload/download ratios at all, or if you do only make them advisory and not a source of banning"

"When a client reports new downloads to the tracker, the tracker can multiply the amount by (number of current peers total - number of current seeds) / (number of current peers total) and add that to the 'total downloaded'. This results in most people having a 'ratio' of more than 1, but that isn't actually a problem unless you're more interested in mathematical purity than practical behavior."

And I found these on the Azureus wiki:

* Cap the ratio someone can achieve and discard any amount of upload until they fall below it again
* Weight bytes uploaded/downloaded accounting by the seed to peer ratio of the swarm, this will encourage seeding on swarms in need, allow people to download from overseeded swarms without (huge) penalty, discourage leeching from swarms in need, discourage overseeding since it's less rewareded
* apply the same penalties that apply to low ratios to ratios that are too high (this may seem counterintuitive but would force everyone to stay within a certain ratio window)
* dynamically adjust the rules based on the global statistics... if 1 person overseeds to a 2.0 ratio someone else could have a free ride or the whole community can stay below 1.0 on average.

Source: http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php...ivate_trackers

Based on the "why do you cheat" thread on SB-I, the top reasons why people cheat would be:
1. having a crappy upload speed
2. not having a seedbox or money to rent one to make up for that
3. the Internet "stops" when they run their BitTorrent client
4. having an ISP traffic cap/sandvining
5. they don't think the tracker deserves their upload
6. the "thrill of the chase"
7. he only wants to leech

How I think you can deal with them:
1. what I mentioned above + what's on point 3 - sometimes people can't upload as much as their connection allows them to simply because of bad settings. Also make sure users know about uTP, uTorrent's UDP torrenting protocol. With it, you can leave your upload speed limit set to unlimited and still surf/chat/etc. almost lag-free. This gives a great incentive to seed, just leave the µ icon in the tray and work as you improve your ratio.
2. inform the user about cheap seedbox resellers. Go to point 1 if that's still not within his reach.
3. have a topic about correct client settings and port forwarding in the tracker's forum. Some people are simply unaware they shouldn't set uTorrent to make a maximum of 1000 connections when they have a cheap router on an average Broadband connection. Highlight its importance (via a System PM everyone gets when joining, for example) and make sure they read it.
4. check if the possibility of renting a seedbox or changing his ISP is within reach. Give him the possibility of using another IP that's not capped (a friend's, for example) for torrenting. In the case of sandvining, inform users about how uTP can't be shaped, or uTP transfers reset.
5. have a look at how you're handling things. Perhaps the thought is justified? (Many users with fast lines, a huge userbase where 2000 others will seed if he doesn't, etc.)
6. banning and improving your scripts every time will just make him want to get another invite to see if a new mod/method works. I guess there's no real solution, other than waiting until he gets tired of it.
7. making sure the user knows he's not on a One-Click Hoster or Usenet where he can download anything without uploading, and ask him to retire if he doesn't get it.