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by ethbr0 1673 days ago
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.
2 comments
allset_ 1672 days ago
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%.
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ethbr0 1672 days ago
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.

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kevincox 1672 days ago
QBittorrent will tell you if the swarm is currently missing any pieces. But it doesn't have historical data.
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