cypr Yngling gojira667 bigguy_foryou
Okay, so for the zipping - there's a few reasons why I do it. So there's the afore mentioned inode thing but there's also a few more:
1. It allows me to generate a hashsum of the entire "release", so to speak.
2. It stops people knowingly or unknowingly modifying what they're seeding. For example, if somebody downloaded a torrent but the Mac files were inside and they deleted them, they'd still be reporting to the tracker that they have them and it's just messy all around. Then if they got an error from the tracker, they'd need to "recheck" their files and I think that's going a bit too far into what's needed of people (if they want to seed).
3. Compression! It might feel miniscule on a per-game basis but that 5-10% really adds up when you're archiving + seeding 500+ torrents at once. Not only on the disk space side of things, but the bandwidth side of things too.
Aside from the "i don't want to have 2 copies of the game" to seed, is there any other arguments against serving them zipped?
I'm aware people might feel uneasy if there's a tag before it (IE rpdl.net-) but it's the same for all, if I was going to sabotage a torrent or if any of the compressors would, they would just do it - but we don't. It's all down to trust at the end of the day and I like to think part of the reason my torrents are popular is because I'm trusted, at least to some extent - it's something that'll build up as time goes on too. I don't plan on stopping making torrents and obviously, I'm never going to attach anything malicious to one.
One other important thing too is that there's a form of responsibility on me with regards to f95 users if they're seeding. When I post torrents they're leaked pretty quickly to chinese sites. I toyed with passwording the zips in the past (IE Password = f95zone) to remind people where it comes from but I think that's a step too far, at least for now. There's no real "perfect" solution to this so I think reminding people where/who created the torrents and is the primary driver behind the traffic is a small price to pay. As a note too, I can't and shouldn't use the f95zone URL as this isn't an official f95zone project, it'd be unfair to add additional scrutiny on the staff here for something I'm doing, which is why I use my own domain.
If there was a way to lock torrent access to only this forum, great, I'd love to - but there isn't. Even if I added the private flag, anyone can still take the torrent and post it elsewhere. I'd need to incorporate a passkey and by then, we're basically talking about just hosting a private tracker and that's not the way I want to take things. It needs to be open first and foremost.
Let me know what you guys think on the above, it's quite a bit to digest but I think it should explain my reasoning behind it!
