How about a survival indicator for the torrents?

[wwwlewis]

How do one settle for how long to seed?

My proposal is a survival indicator for the torrent that is a function between the health of the torrent file, seeds and peers, average time of sharing for each seeder and peer and total maximal share ratio of all files. In that way one can find out if a file is "popular" or in need of support in the swarm. I know it means a lot of logging of individual usage but the value would be usefull

wwwlewis

[DreadWingKnight]

Not practical with the protocol.

There are too many "trust factor" variables that make this plain not work.

[wwwlewis]

I am not sure I understand? Maybe for a new protocol - pass it on. What are the trust factors?

[DreadWingKnight]

There are enough issues with the information that needs to be reported by clients to each other and to trackers that are so easily falsified that it is basically impossible to write any such statistics as you're after for them.

All the information you want to base this on you need to trust the client isn't falsifying (which you can't)