+1 This is a really good idea.
negge wrote:This is a tracker-specific feature and thus doesn't exactly belong in a torrent client. It is not the way the Bittorrent protocol was meant to work either. If a tracker wants to discriminate against seedboxes that is their job (e.g. by not announcing those peers).
Negge, I think you misunderstand the reason. It's not to discriminate against seed-boxes, but to keep the poorly seeded torrents alive. This would add to the quality and lifetime of torrents, both on private and open trackers. An added positive effect is that it helps those struggling with ratio limits on trackers with those systems.
Current queuing system is a round-robin style, based on the factors of seed time and ratio. It will seed every torrent equally in time, if not a specified ratio is reached before, then it will also stop/pause it and seed the next torrent. This will actually make it so that the torrents where you are needed to seed will reach it's ratio quickly and continue on to other torrents where you aren't needed, and so your client will just sit and do nothing, waiting for connections until the torrent that was seeding well is again in the queue. It's not any good system at all.
When ppl download a 'rare', old, or not-so-popular torrent, and want to help keep it alive, they now have to force it to seed in the client, if possible, or just shut of the automatic queuing system and manage it manually. This is a hassle. Also, torrents with hundreds of seeds (including seed-boxes) don't need more seeds, so let the client choose to seed the poorly seeded torrents. This will also helps "mere mortals", as topbanana expressed it, to gain ratio on trackers where ratio systems are used, because they are now seeding more on torrents that are in need of seeds, gaining ratio faster.
This system should also include seeds/peers count instead of just the seeds count to be more correct, because some torrents, even while having say 100 seeds, might have 200 peers, so seeders would still be welcome.
Example 1: I'm currently seeding a torrent where the Seeds/Peers is 402.0, with 1206 seeds and only 3 peers. I have slow upload, I'm not needed, I won't ever seed a single byte on this torrent. This is should be given low priority.
Example 2: 38 seeds, 37 peers, 1.027 s/p. If there was only a system using the seeds count, that might not work because the seeds is pretty high but peers is high also. Moderate/high priority based on s/p.
Example 3: 256 seeds, 55 peers, 4.654 s/p. Not very high s/p, but high seed count none the less, moderate/low priority.
Example 4: 4 seeds, 1 peers, 4.0 s/p. Almost the same s/p as example 3, but low seed count, high priority to keep alive.
Example 5: 2 seeds, 0 peers, infinite s/p. High priority to keep alive based on low seed count.
So you see, adding/modifying the clients queuing behavior for this would help the whole torrent community.