@frostycab said:
Over at Torrentday you are required to seed all of your downloads to either a 1:1 ratio OR at least 72 hours within 30 days, the idea being to discourage hit & runs. If for any reason you can't then you can pay off any remaining time/MB with upload credit or points. I've advocated for doing the same here in the past but it was never taken up. Perhaps Joker and the rest of the staff here might have a discussion around it? With the whole site being updated now would be the ideal time to make the necessary technical changes.
I agree with @ianfontinell that these are bad ideas.
Why seventy-two hours? I'm sure there are members who only visit at weekends, for whatever reasons. What good does that time limit add if someone downloads a torrent on a Tuesday?
Why 1:1? What if a torrent is an old one, or has limited niche appeal? The last downloader is never going to reach that ratio, which surely discourages people from downloading once they realise that. I'm sure there are many who - for whatever reason - put a cap on the number of torrents they seed at any one time.Why expect them to seed some obscure torrent they downloaded months ago instead of one that is popular, crying out for seeds, and will help them improve their ratio?
Much better to be able to pool the total amount you're seeding rather than worry about each torrent individually. People could be motivated to keep a 1:1 ratio overall. For those who can't, there could be other ways to contribute, perhaps for example by making donations towards the cost of running the site, which obviously does need to be funded somehow. Hmmm. This all sounds familiar, for some reason.
Reseeding a dead torrent -when requested - is relatively easy. Or would be except for one thing, for me at least. That's the amount of peripheral files other than the main ones that people include - primarily images - and sometimes how they've structured subdirectories within a torrent. Many, I'm sure, are happy to download a torrent and keep it "as is" somewhere on their system. But I doubt I'm alone in maintaining my own structure, and wanting stuff I've downloaded to fit that, not a never ending variety of other structures.
"Rules" are perhaps overdoing it, merely to satisfy neat freaks like me, but perhaps some "best practice" guidance would be helpful? Making it easier to reseed when required is surely a much better way of keeping torrents alive than imposing arbitrary seeding rules which both create their own problems, and don't solve the existing ones.
