To ban or not to ban...This is the Q..

ca_aok said:
I'm sure they also thank you for cheating and getting them banned from these sites in the first place. You're a great example to your countrymen.
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Yeah.I got the whole country banned on SCC you know:lol:
Serios now, Romania was banned because of too many noobs who cheat too much and just want those accounts to trade them or sell them.And I'm sure none of my 4 accounts I had there were banned until this day...
 
Why dont you move your reunions outside this topic?
The original theme was :
Do you think Romania and Israel should ever be allowed again on SCC,SCT and GFT?And what should change in order to make it possible?
 
You know, mockery only works when you have an understanding of the subject. I didn't say cheating was right. I didn't say it was wrong, either. And you're welcome to point me out to where I hinted at the slightest of what it should be or whether it should be allowed. I didn't point out the moral implications of an immoral individual talking about ethics. I don't give a rats ass about any of those subjects.

What I do have a problem with are hypocrites. This must be the thousandth time I'm explaining it but here it goes. We are pirates, we discard the rules society imposes on us. And yet, some of us go as far as attempting to establish a moral doctorate [EDIT:] doctrine by which we all must abide by. Do you not see how hypocritical it is for a law breaker to attempt and set laws and expect people to follow them? The same people that raise a finger to "the system" because they have a fundamental understanding that not all rules should be followed are distraught when someone breaks their own rules; nay, they go as far as referring to it (with great audacity, if I may add so myself) as immoral.

All of us act by the unspoken acceptance of the fact that we all are allowed to make choices based on our personal and exclusive moral codes instilled within out personalities. You don't see two pirates pointing fingers at one another and blaming the other for torrenting the latest movie. It's basic logic and understanding. Yet it is lost when someone demeans or crosses the "moral" borders that we as pirates decided not to cross. We lose that understanding and go on a ridiculous witch hunt to ban traders/cheaters, when really, all they're doing is cheating the cheaters by the same code the cheaters cheat the system.

My argument is, as long as one reserves the liberty to set his own moral code, he has no right to impose said code on another individual. Do I think traders are wrong? I do. Do I think cheaters are wrong? Yes. Will I tell them so? Heck to the no. I let them make their own choices, just as they let me make mine.

Aristocles said:
This is an appropriate reply to the argument that one "finds no honor among thieves".

Of course one can find a certain ethos among certain criminals. There are certain dictates that even the most hardened of confederated criminals do not violate. Call it the 'moral code' of the confederated criminal.

It's still the old adage about oxen and goring :blink:
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Thank you for understanding and not resorting to low forms of wit to argue. :yes: (for once, I'm not being sarcastic when giving a compliment)
 
@sez: Thanks for your kind words. They mean a lot. If you want to see our users' stances on the matter, you can read this thread:
Code: 
http://SB-I URL/f56/cheating-etiquette-15523/
I don't know if it's OK to post the full address, but it probably isn't, and since I want to "keep it cool" I'll leave it at that. You can probably Google your way through it anyway, just like we're first for many "cheating on (tracker name)" queries.

Tracker staff are against trading because invites were meant to get your friends and/or trusted people inside, not to get you inside other sites, in a lot of cases by trading with unknowns. What's to prevent someone from an anti-P2P company to make an account here (or on any trading board, I'm not attacking FST), make some posts, wait enough until you can access the BitTorrent Trades area, then start trading or applying for giveaways, and harvest IPs once he's in? There's rep, but that's a simple "the more the better" indicator of who's given a lot of invites away, or is less likely to scam you. And don't say "but the ranges they use are known" - IP filters are not and will never be 100% perfect, and if they were, they could simply "work" at home instead. Also, traders, just like cheaters, aren't "always caught" as the admins of trackers and invite forums (many of which have allowed trading in the past) want you to think. If you know how to do things correctly and take a few basic steps to ensure your security, no one but you and the person you traded with will know how you made your way in. I mean, I recently got two new accounts after being banned at a site claiming their technology for detecting dupes is beyond description.

But enough about that. I'll write my thoughts on the matter. I don't trade myself, but fail to see the problem with it if you do it with someone you know and trust, which ideally you should. If you care about the security of the tracker (whose members are kind enough to provide you with what you download), you won't do it with people you don't even know just because they have a good offer, or that high-level site you've always dreamed of having. (I have never understood what's the urge to get on sites that are difficult to get an invite to. Basically, BitTorrent is about getting your stuff, which you can do regardless of a tracker being level 2 or 10. It's sad to see how many people claim certain great ones are crap just because they're low in the levels list. Personally, I've never seen a good reason to prefer using ScT over TL, or BitMeTV over TvT.com) Traders that seem to do almost anything to get inside rare sites (like that one guy that created so many stupid threads here, for example) are just pathetic. Most of the time they'll only keep their account alive to be able to say "I'm at X" (as if there was a prize to that...), using the slot of someone that would actually participate.

About safer BitTorrent clients... private trackers should be glad stats are actually reported in the first place. We could say that was implemented "just because", since back in the day they weren't used for absolutely anything. Some developers do show support for private trackers, though - to give some examples, BT Inc. made uTorrent "forget" about all peers if you edit the tracker list for private torrents - it takes editing 7 bytes inside the EXE to bypass this, though. The Vuze team also recently fixed the "feature" that hammered trackers when they didn't return peers, after one of our coders pointed this out on a news thread. If you have any ideas to make clients safer I, as well as developers, would be interested to know them. :)

@emperorIX: that's a good argument. Let's just say communities such as ScT or SCC won't notice the difference.
 
^^^
there is a lot of il and ro users that are members at sct and have access to them at this time why those have access and another that there is a possiblity that there are better dont get access to those trackers i agree with u that not all users must have access to those trackers they must choose good users and there is alot of ways to do that.
 
Maybe Romulans need to stop telling other people what to do?:idunno:


Leave out the word cheat and it seems to be almost a saintly act.:OOf course leave the words "She was brutally raped " out this sentence " and then she had a lovely baby"and it doesn't sound kinda heart-warming too.
Anyway some sites are unreasonable and apparently run by idiots ,some cheaters are probably decent people, the average torrenter cares only about others so far as it effects himself and believe it or not apparently some Canadian mods are cawks .(I know I'm shocked by the last one as well)
Now that we have that all clear could someone explain to the OP why life isn't fair so that we may all move on.
Btw clearly anon-sbi isn't a dupe account but since Cabalo gave the infraction it's Cabalo decision whether to re-enable the account or not.
 
ovisan said:
The yank was just messing about QPD.

SCT is the best scene tracker. [full stop]
I agree that banning a whole country is not fair but I am pretty sure that decision whas not taken over night. And above all SCT is not a public tracker, it is private, it is Feeling's tracker. He can do whatever he wants with it, he can take it down, he can ban half of the world's countries, he can ban top users without reason. Also if the MPAA will catch him we will not hear about him for a pretty long time I guess, power implies taking risks.
So let's respect him and his decisions and move on, there are many brilliant trackers, good speed, community, anything you need and guess what: they accept Romanian users.
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Oh there you have it, wise comment. His house, his rules.
 
ca_aok said:
I'm sure they also thank you for cheating and getting them banned from these sites in the first place.
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While this obviously isn't Mihai's case, some aren't that knowledgeable with torrents and think cheating is the way to increase your ratio, so they don't even see it as such. This view is further fueled by the fact most Romanian trackers don't even care about faking upload and have no scripts against it, the administration of one of them openly admitting this. Then they join international sites where the staff does care, try to cheat as in .ro trackers, get banned, and probably don't even know why.

It sounds stupid to informed users like you and me, but how do you convince someone that doesn't know any better?
 
anon-sbi said:
If you need an explanation to cheat, take sites like ScT. There's a thread right on this board about how they reached 190MB/s, which is 9500 times my upload speed of 20kB/s. On my eyes, such sites simply don't need me to seed.
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Wtf does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
In reality the true reason why someone like you cheats is far different than that.:dry:
 
FST is notorious for the constant off-topic discussions inside threads, but I'll try to stay on topic :P

Do you think Romania and Israel should ever be allowed again on SCC,SCT and GFT?And what should change in order to make it possible?
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Yes. I don't think country bans are the solution. Cheaters come from all sides of the world, and it's not fair to ban a whole country just because a lot of members coming from it wanted to see what happened if they grabbed their ratio cheating tool (I'll try to keep it cool, so I won't mention names) and faked 1000GB in one minute. Also, I have read on TL's FAQ that at least one Israeli ISP modifies your tracker announces to report millions of terabytes of upload, to get you banned and thus save international bandwidth. It's possible that a lot of people from that country were banned for this "cheating" a.k.a. violation of Net neutrality, while they have no real control over that, other than using SSL trackers if the site allows it.

How to make it possible:
Implement actual anti-cheating scripts ("detect abnormal uploads" doesn't count). Make them warn the staffers if someone is caught, and have one of them review the case. Don't act like on BitMeTV, where they once banned a donor with a good ratio beacuse their anti-cheat picked up Vuze's latest version as a cheat mod (there's a well-known Vuze mod to disable uploading, cheat, and spoof other clients, but he wasn't using that).

When someone is caught for the first time, give them a warning and remove their fake upload, like a few trackers have done with me back when I was new to cheating. Perhaps the guy will change his mind and start seeding honestly, and if he doesn't, ban him - you won't have wasted but 5 minutes.

If you want to keep track of ratios, that's fine - but mathematically, it's impossible for everyone to have one above 1.0 if we take real upload as the only factor that can increase it. Implement a system where simply seeding counts, like BCG's Seed Points, for example. I only cheated there very few times, and it was to know if certain mods and tools worked. After that, I simply left my client open to gain SP and survive honestly. What I like about them is that the torrent's size is taken into consideration when calculating how much time you'll have to seed it for, so it won't be the same for a 10MB mobile game pack as with the latest PC game weighting 10GB.

Bonus points and/or a ratio-free system are also cool, although I think you should have enough activity on your tracker before switching to the latter.

As I see it, you need to basically give users an incentive to seed that doesn't consist on "do or die". Those of you that think "so you want to let people leech GBs by just leaving their client open" can make the amount of both real and "artificial" upload traffic be shown in profiles. This way you can know exactly how much you've really uploaded, and if you could be doing better at real seeding.

There have also been more suggestions on how to make the system more fair to everyone. These two are from Bram Cohen, the BitTorrent protocol's creator:
"A better approach would be to not count it against people when they download from heavily overseeded torrents. Or to just not use total upload/download ratios at all, or if you do only make them advisory and not a source of banning"

"When a client reports new downloads to the tracker, the tracker can multiply the amount by (number of current peers total - number of current seeds) / (number of current peers total) and add that to the 'total downloaded'. This results in most people having a 'ratio' of more than 1, but that isn't actually a problem unless you're more interested in mathematical purity than practical behavior."
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And I found these on the Azureus wiki:
* Cap the ratio someone can achieve and discard any amount of upload until they fall below it again
* Weight bytes uploaded/downloaded accounting by the seed to peer ratio of the swarm, this will encourage seeding on swarms in need, allow people to download from overseeded swarms without (huge) penalty, discourage leeching from swarms in need, discourage overseeding since it's less rewareded
* apply the same penalties that apply to low ratios to ratios that are too high (this may seem counterintuitive but would force everyone to stay within a certain ratio window)
* dynamically adjust the rules based on the global statistics... if 1 person overseeds to a 2.0 ratio someone else could have a free ride or the whole community can stay below 1.0 on average.
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Source: http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/User:The8472/Private_trackers

Based on the "why do you cheat" thread on SB-I, the top reasons why people cheat would be:
1. having a crappy upload speed
2. not having a seedbox or money to rent one to make up for that
3. the Internet "stops" when they run their BitTorrent client
4. having an ISP traffic cap/sandvining
5. they don't think the tracker deserves their upload
6. the "thrill of the chase"
7. he only wants to leech

How I think you can deal with them:
1. what I mentioned above + what's on point 3 - sometimes people can't upload as much as their connection allows them to simply because of bad settings. Also make sure users know about uTP, uTorrent's UDP torrenting protocol. With it, you can leave your upload speed limit set to unlimited and still surf/chat/etc. almost lag-free. This gives a great incentive to seed, just leave the
 
Cabalo said:
The fact they gave the users a chance to prove themselves is the reason why they are banning them now, no ?
If they don't give them the chance, then they won't face potential problems, i suppose.
Not that I agree with the theory about banning entire countries, but when they present such arguments, as these 75%, what can one say?
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Cabalo, what you say is true , and a safe bet, but immagine if this would apply to wounded soldiers in a war...

There are a lot of simple precedures to prevent this,For example:

1.Controll the .ro invitations with speedtest, reccomendations and ohter trackers activity ( or forums activity )
2.Ban the inviter along with the invited one (in case of faking or other missbehaviour).This way the inviter will be more prudent in choosing his invitees.

I am a former admin on a 10k+ user tracker.I know that it;s not hard to put this in practice.
 
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