Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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