Thanks Firon

[Wozza]

I appologise for the rules breach.

However your response of :

Those are tracker errors. They have nothing to do with the software.

As a way of helping someone is unbelievable !!!

I won't take to personal abuse (against the rules ) but quite honestly a response with a little more helpful information for someone who is new to this would be far more beneficial. It may be a tracker error, but it is utorrent that is displaying it !!!!!

Normal software development would result in a "passed through" error being displayed with the "error source" being displayed. This avoids the confussion of reporting an error in one part of a system, which in reality, is simply relaying an error deeper in the system. It is just poor GUI and program design (lazy actually).

SO back to the problem - I have tracker error - how do I go about finding out about it, how to fix it etc. If there is no help then say so - and admit this is a shortcoming in the software.

Thanks

Warwick

[Firon]

So, when your browser tells you "403 unauthorized" when visiting a website, you blame the browser instead of the site? Excellent logic there.

The error is displayed next to "Tracker Status." Just because YOU don't know what a tracker is doesn't make it a fault with the program. Go learn the basics of BitTorrent (Google is your friend!) before blaming the program.

In simpler terms, it is a website out of our control giving an error of their choosing. We can do NOTHING about it. Use Google to figure out what you can do.

And just fyi, Mininova is not a tracker. Neither is Isohunt.

[Wozza]

Excelent. So you are comparing a thin client (web browser) against a rich client (utorrent) !!! Maybe you should go back to school and see the difference.

The 403 error is a server side error which - because it is thin client architecture - has no other way of being interpreted other than what is passed to it - no table look up on the client. On the other hand the rich client of utorrent has all sort of capabilities - otherwise I have no doubt it would be deployed as a browser web page...

With respect to looking up the definition and meaning of a tracker is reasonable - if it provided as part of the FAQ and Guides provided in on the utorrent site. I did look - repeatedly. IF you get a Windows error, do you go to the Microsoft site to see what the error might be, or do you go straight for Google ??? If it is the latter then God help utorrent. I suspect you would look to the software provider to assist and provide help - especially for a newcomer, also it would seem I am not alone in this problem as I added my comment onto a thread with an identical problem.

Maybe you may care to think about adding this issue to your FAQ's or a special FAQ for idiots (like me) who have not had cause to use this technology before. I will admit I have used Bittorrent before - I won't lie - but it was with another client provider. I'm sure your response will be "well go and use them, then". If it is, I pity utorrent .......

I would like to suggest you look at a technical site which provides excelent support for all manner of issues but I think that would be against the rules. I shall try there and I'm sure I shall get the help I need.

It is a pity since I have been in the IT industry for 37 years, and this would probably be the worst experience of how a forum is run. I'm sure you have lots of supporters and I wish you well with them.

For those of you reading this (if this post isn't deleted) I have no problem with the product, I have no problem with the forum, just the way the responses have been addressed.

REMEMBER - you can only make ONE first impression (that works both ways I know)

Warwick

[Firon]

µTorrent has no way of interpreting the message. Essentially, it boils down to the tracker saying the announce failed and giving some text to display (not even an error code, like you get with HTTP). I don't see what's so hard to understand about that.

Oh, and there is a beginner's guide. It links to a nice explanation on what a tracker is. And other BT resources to explain other BT terms. http://utorrent.com/beginners-guide.php

[Wozza]

Thats exactly where I went and read BEFORE I started trying to use utorrent !!

It says:

Once you've obtained the torrent file from wherever, you simply need to import it into your BitTorrent client (hopefully µTorrent!). There are several ways of doing this in µTorrent:

Click File then Add Torrent in µTorrent (or press CTRL+O) and locate the torrent file.

Double-click the torrent file. (Only works if you've associated .torrent files with µTorrent - µTorrent asks you if it should do this the first time you run it. If you clicked 'No', you can do this by going to Options, then Preferences in µTorrent, then clicking Associate with .torrent files under Windows Integration.)

(advanced) Click File then Add Torrent from URL in µTorrent (or press CTRL+U), and enter a URL from which the .torrent file can be obtained.

If you're using another BT client, consult its documentation for instructions.

But as you can see it is not that simple - is it !!!

Also this so called Beginners guide does NOT explain about trackers or the likely problems that may be encountered.

Under the circumstances - this thread is going nowhere, and may actually be unhelpful to others. So maybe we should just agree to differ and I will go elsewhere and let you get on with your life. Lets just put it down to experience

[Saribro]

The beginners guide doesn't really help me, but, it has a section with links to sources with more info. The first one:

http://btfaq.com/

is described as: "a great resource to all things BitTorrent, with far more info than this page - though some of it is a bit more technical."

Some browsing on this page gets me to the section "Getting Started with BitTorrent": http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/15.html

which has an intriguingly named section: "What do all these words mean? (seeding, uploading, share rating, etc.)": http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/23.html

Some scrolling on this page gives me a nice explanation of what a tracker is:

"A server on the Internet that acts to coordinate the action of BitTorrent clients. When you open a torrent, your machine contacts the tracker and asks for a list of peers to contact. Periodically throughout the transfer, your machine will check in with the tracker, telling it how much you've downloaded and uploaded, how much you have left before finishing, and the state you're in (starting, finished download, stopping.) If a tracker is down and you try to open a torrent, you will be unable to connect. If a tracker goes down during a torrent (i.e., you have already connected at some point and are already talking to peers), you will be able to continue transferring with those peers, but no new peers will be able to contact you. Often tracker errors are temporary, so the best thing to do is just wait and leave the client open to continue trying."

This is helpful, and already insinuates that tracker errors come from the tracker (as I've already been informed by another forum member), but I'm still curious for more information.

To figure out how a tracker informs a client about failure, we go back to the beginner guide and find a link to the BT technical info:

http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification

On this page, it is very easy to find:

http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification#Tracker_Response

Which states pretty clearly:

The tracker responds with "text/plain" document consisting of a bencoded dictionary with the following keys:

*failure reason: If present, then no other keys may be present. The value is a human-readable error message as to why the request failed (string).

*...etc...

This leads me to conclude µTorrent does not (and needs not, according to the spec) interpret error messages from the tracker, nor can it "fix" them, similar to how my browser can't fix a '404 - Page not found' error. Perhaps I should check whether there is a forum on the tracker's site that might help me figure out what the problem is.

All this with my 0 years of IT industry experience.