Hacker News Reader

Also getting to like 98% and not completing the download. Very aggravating

Does the BitTorrent protocol have an announcement / stored metadata of "recently highest percentage of file seen"?

This seems like one of the biggest problems with more decentralized torrents (i.e. ones not backed by a community / core seeder), but also most a UX issue and seemingly trivially solvable.

No, but clients do advertise how much of the torrent they have, so you can glance at your peer list and if you have 2 peers stuck at 10%... there's a good chance that you won't get more than 10%.

Yeah, and while current peer % is useful, it doesn't answer the other user question of "What percent of this thing has been seen anywhere recently?"

Which seems a pretty reasonable question for a user to have, if we're talking about fully decentralized torrents without a tracker.

QBittorrent will tell you if the swarm is currently missing any pieces. But it doesn't have historical data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com