None taken. Now let's clear a few things here:
Cheating is indeed what Tv Controls you said - making it look like you've uploaded more (or at all) that what you really did. There are a variety of reasons to do it, something I won't go into. There's a variety of cheating called "no reporting", where you either don't report your download, or neither upload nor download. (It doesn't consist on not reporting your IP like the stupid guys at FSF think, giving your IP is unavoidable when a reply is required) TL's staff thinks The Flying Cow has used no reporting.
Cabalo, the completed flag is only sent when you complete the torrent, solely to increase the "snatches" counter, if any. If you finished the torrent before the 30 minutes, it should still be sent, and your stats recorded. But as TVCy said, upload shouldn't be recorded either if there was an error while updating the tracker. And TL has no freeleech.
Question I came up with while pondering this topic:
how can they distinguish between cross seeding and cheating then?
When you cross seed you have 0 mb down, but x amount up.
When you cross-seed, you start as 100% done. Your client notifies this to the tracker by sending the amount of bytes left until you have the full file as zero.
Having a load of torrents that show started and have zero data against them usually is a tell tale sign of removing the torrent announce url from your client once the download starts and you have the list of peers in your client.
If the number of announces is higher than 1 we can discard this possibility. :lol:
Personally, I believe TFC for a very simple reason - this has happened to me several times, when their tracker was down but I could still download. However, I never got banned for that, and it's really strange that TFC was - you're going to tell me the times I cheated at 1GB/s passed under the radar, but a suspicious snatchlist from
one of their hundred thousand users drew their attention? Give me a break.
What TFC could do now is going to their IRC again, explaining how he had no idea of that tracker timeouts or 0 download on his snatchlist was suspicious, and politely ask the staff to reenable his account. If they still don't want to, I can give him one of mine. It's not as old or even buffered, but he has no other place to download from.