Splitting up the Hub's description

[[NL]Acolyte]

Hi there,

As a newb (but quite a long time active in p2p filesharing and "medium computerfreak") to the DC world I have not much to share yet of course. I'm busy with settling myself by downloading much mp3's (that I'm needed too) and climbed already near the 5 Gb.

BUT the hard thing is at the beginning to find a good hub between all the others that are way too far away from you yet. When you have something like 30 Gb shared then it's most of the times no problem to connect to a hub but for a newbie on the network (like me in the very beginning) it's hard to find a good hub where they have a low share limit like 1 Gb or 2 Gb.
I'm not asking if all the hub's would lower there limits but maybe there could be some more coloms with information about the hub, what's now all being told in the description. Such as minimal number of slots open, min. file share, max connections to hubs... Those could also be split-up in different coloms so the GUI is more organized AND users can now order the hubs on "min file share" or "min slots open". So that they can easely pick out the hub that they like and have access to.

[[KUN.NL]mepmuff]

Such a feature would be nice, but not usable as it depends among other things on the hubs giving that info, which it is now anyways.... (I'm not even going to get started on the technical issues)

One workaround would be for someone to put together a hublist which only allows hubs to register if they clearly state their rules in the description (or maybe just the most important eg share, slots, hubs, slot/hub ratio).

An already possible workaround for people beginning with a low share would be to sort the hublist on names and find a group of hubs with basically the same names. Those 'networks' usually redirect you to hubs where you need less share if you don't meet the sharelimit, which is good practice IMHO.

[[NL]Acolyte]

Hmmm.. Yes. Well I've managed to find some good hubs which have a limit in the range 1-5 Gb.

About the problems it will bring with it: both the client and hub software need to be updated, but the hub-owners only need to fill in a few more fields with the same info that they have in there description.

No worries though for the owners with old versions or clients with old versions because the description shall still exists. All the information for the coloms that don't exists yet in there version will just be ignored...

[GargoyleMT]

Acolyte, I see where your suggestion is coming from, but it is really bad to make assumptions about how other software parses a given file. Sure, NMDC and DC++ might ignore extra columns, but other programs might very well throw exceptions upon seeing that there's still data at the end of the line after they get through parsing the portions they know about. Extra columns could be added by the hub list makers (DC++ isn't tied to any hub list and Arnetheduck doesn't make his own list), but there is a lot of software that people would have to update.