I was looking at how private torrents are handled in KTorrent and had a couple of questions.

1. Why is the feature to automatically try to get more peers from the tracker if the torrent is stalled disabled for private torrents?

2. Shouldn't the ability to add trackers to the torrent in the infowidget plugin be disabled if the torrent is private?

Thanks.

1. I think this is done because most private trackers don't like announces faster then the standard. It works in both ways: users will be able to use ktorrent on more places, and trackers are happy with ktorrent following their wish. (afterall they also want choices for their users)

2. Dunno really. If a torrent's TTL ends you'll like to add another tracker. Adding or replacing a tracker is not an automated procedure done by a setting in the client either, it must be done by the person using the client himself.
Is it the defacto standard to forbid this?
Because if not i think we would ask ourself "is being able to add an alternative tracker that bad?" I personally think not, because i feel most people wouldn't use it illegally.

1. KT was banned on a private tracker so we asked them to unban it, they had some concerns, to many announces being one of them. So it seemed logical to disable this feature. As a result 2.0 beta and later will not be banned.

2. Sure you can add one, and this can be abused, but I do not think it's a big problem. Even if we disable it, if a person is really determined to abuse it, he or she can just edit the torrent file itself and manually add the tracker. The format is public knowledge. It's not a text file, but it isn't difficult.

Thanks for the answers. This is somewhat unrelated, but the manual announce frequency limit doesn't look at when the last automatic tracker update was done, so it's possible to to two updates in a few seconds if you do a manual update immediatly after an automatic one. Not a big deal, just something I noticed.

I still think the trackers tab should have add tracker be disabled for private torrents. I was under the impression that the private flag was specifically intended to be a way to disable multi-tracker use, before there was such a thing as DHT.

It seems inconsistent to change ktorrent to prevent some things that should be disallowed, then leave others because someone could just edit the torrent. Someone could always just edit ktorrent too, or any other bittorrent program, to do lots of things that they are not supposed to do, that is not a reason to allow them to be done in the interface. I also don't think this is removing an important functionality so it shouldn't be a big deal.

I'll write a patch to disable adding trackers for private torrents if it will be accepted.

In the mean time somebody has provided a patch to block adding trackers to private torrents. We have committed that.

In the mean time somebody has provided a patch to block adding trackers to private torrents.

I would say that this it's the same guy who started this thread

Yup. I just posted the thread to make sure I wasn't confused before I tried to do something about it.

Ivan wrote:

In the mean time somebody has provided a patch to block adding trackers to private torrents.

I would say that this it's the same guy who started this thread

Must have missed that

I think you made up for it by improving my patch

It's much better the way you did it.