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[TheSmyth]

Before anyone gets on their high horse about WAREZ . This has nothing to do with it!

N.B. BitTorrent itself is not illegal, neither is using it, and no-one is going to come kicking down doors just because you have it installed on your computer. Only the actual act of obtaining copyrighted material is. (Which is what abandonware is anyway)

Has the site ever considered using BitTorrent for it's downloads? Or at least giving the option of it instead, like some other sites do (HOTU does on some of it's games..... I think)

And wouldn't this help solve the problem with some of the larger games / files being only for VIP members, and also reduce server costs?

Sorry if this question has been asked before, but I did do a search for BitTorrent beforehand - it brought up 4 pages of forum stuff, none of it to do with BitTorrent? :crazy:

[The Fifth Horseman]

This has a degree of sense, but better would be just dropping the files into a P2P network of one sort or another. Safer, to a degree.

In fact, as soon as I'll get a bigger HDD here, I'll probably do just that. :whistle:

[dr_st]

I hate BitTorrent. ED2K is my thing.

[The Fifth Horseman]

ESA cannot destroy abandonware, even if they tried much harder then they did.
All they can achieve is it going underground.

[TheSmyth]

Sorry, fifth_horseman I'm not sure how familiar you are with BitTorrent (But for anyone else reading this who doesn't know, here's the basics): :help:

BitTorrent is P2P, only of a slightly different type.

The problem with regular P2P is that you need to be connected to the particular network that the files are shared on. Usually using particular type of software (WinMX, ShareAza etc..) and when you download a file, you download it via that particular network, getting your file directly from other peoples PC's one bit at a time (from the first piece of the file, until you've got it all).

With BitTorrent, all you need is the client* (ANY Client... BitTorrent, Azureus, BitTornado etc. etc.) and once you've downloaded few KB starting file from Abandonia, your client will connect to all the other BitTorrent clients accross the world, that have that same file available, and download the rest from them. (For large files, this is usually a lot faster than by regular P2P).

The idea is to encourage sharing.
Example: Abandonia has 1 complete copy of a file, it gives a copy of half to me, and a copy of the other half to the_fith_horesman, then we can also connect to each other as well as Abandonia to get our missing halves. (BitTorrent does this automatically).
So instead of 2 people downloading 2 copies of the file just from Abandonia, the site only has to give 1 copy between us, and we share the rest.
(meaning it could cut the time to download, and cut the server costs)

*Client = Downloading Program

The Abandonia Server would only have to hold the same files that it does now, and hopefully once a few people are sharing them it should lighten the load.

This is the reason HOTU have torrent downloads available, it keeps costs low for big files.

While it is usually slower than HTTP / FTP downloading, you don't have the problems of expensive bandwidth. And if enough people are sharing the files between them, the speeds are fantastic anyway.

[dr_st]

This doesn't sound too different from how ED2K works. Now, if I understood correctly when someone explained the basics of BT to me once, the speed of the download depends on how many transfers of the file currently take place, whereas on ED2K it just depends on how many sources the file has. I prefer the latter approach. Add to it the fantastic search built-in into the ED2K clients and you'll see why I prefer it.

[xoopx]

i think one of the main benefits of bittorrent is that it doesnt need the big nodes for searching like the other systems. websites can list the torrent links without having the actual files on their server at all, the seeders and leechers provide the hosting and downloading.
this is obviously good from a legal and bandwidth point of view

[Kosta]

Yes, but at the moment our server is completely undercapacitated

When we reach full capacity again, I'm all for it

[TheSmyth]

I'm suprised if no-one has ever suggested it before?! :blink:

[rabadi]

To my knowledge, it has been suggested at least twice:

http://www.abandonia.com/forum/index.php?s...8&hl=bittorrent

http://www.abandonia.com/forum/index.php?s...6&hl=bittorrent

Okay, I am against the idea of replacing the download method with bittorrent, 'cause bittorrent is blocked for me over here, but if it is just about giving an option of using bittorrent as an alternative download method then I have no problem with that