Have mercy on Oz uzas

[PhilA]

I was reading on whirlpool forum that some users of azureus and uTorrent were banning a range of IP addresses from Bigpond and Optus, Australian ISPs, because they encourage leeching by charging for uploads as well. While this is true, and they are also leechers of our money, there is no reason to ban all the poor users. They only permit us 25% of bw for uploads, but many of us share what we can. In fact, after we are "shaped" (restricted bw) every month, the upload rate remains the same (at least on the low end plan like mine), and further data is not charged for. So we can then upload as much as we like without extra cost, and ones like me who have received so much, are happy to give back as much as possible. It works out that my share ratio is about 1:1.

It is true that all the 'noobs' tend to go for these services, and often have no clue as to what they're doing. Many of these don't even know if they're online or not, so have some pity please. It's not necessarily their fault. Patience. I don't know how they could manage to set up a bittorrent client. Besides, you can't tell if they're leeching just by looking at the peer list. Not only that, leeching isn't possible with uTorrent as far as I know.

[Ultima]

Indeed, it's because of stupid things like this that manual banning won't be implemented in µTorrent. People abuse the system, and even if they *think* they're helping the swarm by banning apparent leechers, they don't know if these "leechers" are really leechers to begin with. That's just counting people who are actually banning for good intentions, and doesn't even begin to count people who are true leechers hoping to abuse the manual ban system. Granted, IP range blocking can be done with ipfilter.dat, but any easier than that and abuse becomes rampant.