Jeffrey Paul

Today, it was announced by both Waffles.fm and What.CD that they would be disabling the use of their trackers by two popular BitTorrent clients. This in itself is not news.

One of the clients that the updates will disable is called Vuze, and is an open-source program written in Java. Apparently, lots of people like to take advantage of the source code to modify Vuze (formerly called Azureus) to report false data to the tracker (run by the torrent site), thereby cheating the ratio (upload to download amounts) requirements put in place by the site admins.

Their solution? Ban Vuze from the tracker, solving the ratio cheating problem— or so it would seem.

However, it’s not quite that simple. Just as the amounts uploaded and downloaded on a given torrent are reported to the tracker by the client (and thus subject to interference by a malicious user), so is the name of the client software. See the problem yet?

If the reason they’re really banning Vuze/Azureus from their tracker is for ratio cheaters, then an honest, non-ratio-cheating user could, in clear conscience, modify their program to report a different version string to the tracker, thereby evading the ban. This is irrelevant, though, because…

…the fact also remains that the cheaters (currently ignoring the site rules) could perform this same modification, continue using the banned client, and continue cheating the ratio rules, rendering the entire policy change pointless.

It’s worth noting that I’ve been a Waffles.fm user for well over a year, maintaining an respectable upload-to-download ratio (1.6x), with a huge amount uploaded (~200GB, if I recall correctly). (This entitled me to a similar amount of downloading.) I’ve donated money to their organization to support the continued maintenance and operation of the site. I’ve encoded albums specifically for upload to the site, meticulously tagging and formatting according to their strict rules.

I pointed the deficiencies in their client-banning logic on the Waffles.fm forums this afternoon. (An aside: I don’t use Vuze. I use ‘rtorrent’, a command-line program, making me completely unaffected by these changes.) Two hours later, I logged in to download some Joy Division, only to find that my account no longer existed. A single, logical comment on their new policy and they saw fit to vaporize my account.

To be fair, it’s their site, and they can run it how they’d like. I’m certainly not entitled to service from them.

I posted much the same analysis on the What.CD forums, who had today announced the exact same policy change in tandem with the Waffles.fm administrators. They deleted my account minutes later, as well. I asked them on IRC about it, and they said that I was encouraging users to break their rules, and that furthermore, I knew it.

If you run a site that has a strict set of rules and a forum post posing simple questions can be seen as enough of a catalyst to cause a statistically significant percentage of those users to break your rules, perhaps your policy of administrating your userbase should be reviewed. Until today, I’d never consider cheating my ratio or modifying my client to evade the wishes of an admin. It’s quite sad to see that a community that I enjoyed as much as Waffles (and, to a much lesser degree, What) is policed by such reactionary and illogical moderators.

This whole thing will probably just make me get a fresh invite and make a new account (having multiple accounts, even when not evading an explicit ban is a huge rule violation) and use a hacked client to cheat the ratio system to recover the ~100GB of downloads I’m “owed” (in the loosest sense of the term). Their mods are really just making the whole situation worse by burning up their community goodwill.

So… anyone got a Waffles invite? (Don’t send it to the usual email…)