by Guest on 2014/11/15 12:51:07 PM
I'm getting a lot of fake clients connecting, or ones with problems. There's a "test" one with a complex version string that downloads nothing but annoyingly takes a peer slot, some "uTorrent 3.3" (note NOT a micro character at the start, but "u") that always have "invalid meta length" as an error, and I have some annoying "libTorrent 0.12.6" right now, from China apparently, that are constantly leeching but show no change in their 0% download total so I suspect they are designed to bypass normal peering or as anti-torrent weapons by consuming bandwidth.
From the torrent window, I can set ignore one-by-one, but that's highly manual and is somewhat against the nature of seeding as a set-and-forget operation, and it doesn't stop bad clients simply reconnecting under a new IP somehow. Most of us don't sit watching our peer lists for problems, we have better things to do... If I ignore the Chinese "libTorrent" ones anyway, they spawn numerous replacements. There's no way to block partial IPs (wildcard) that I can see, as the only filtering possible seems to be through the central IP blocklist. I can't block by general location either.
What I need is a way, ideally as a right-click from the torrent window showing the currently connected peers, or at the very least as a central option list, to block clients by their reporting name, so for example ALL instances of "libTorrent 0.12.6" are permanently ignored without me having to find and select them manually. That's probably easiest (and most useful) as a global option rather than a per-torrent one. That would also be very helpful for when uTorrent (as has happened in the past) puts out bad updates that can't connect properly - perhaps the 3.3 version I mentioned above is one of those.
I'd also suggest that being able to block IPs in that way, by selecting from the peer list directly and adding to a secondary internal IP blocklist (that's processed after the main one, that most are probably like me downloading from a curated source) would be very helpful, especially if it had wildcard processing in. You'd need to add a place to manage that secondary list, though - currently the IP filter tab does very little, with only one entry...
Thanks for the update to 1.99 - it allays the fears many of us had over the last few years that we would NEVER get an update. Can I hope that more complex filtering as I've suggested is in the next version?
