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Simon Morris

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Of course not. I'm all in favor of people getting paid as much as they can. I'm an open market capitalist and I think it's a worthy aim. I don't understand why there are no ads on this forum for example; that would provide revenue and wouldn't bother me or my ad blocker.

But I think Mr. Morris' statement is disingenuous. Most of the internet now runs on people doing things without monetary remuneration, like all the testers on this forum for example.

I agree with Rekrul, I don't know anyone that uses computers a lot who install toolbars. They're considered bloat, regardless how benign they or their progenitors might be.

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@Huggybaby: Its a shame you doubt my candor - I've literally nothing to hide - we do a great deal of work to promote Bittorrent in general and the uTorrent client specifically. You think the "majority of the internet runs on people doing things without monetary remuneration". What a ridiculous statement. No doubt volunteerism on the internet has resulted in some amazing things (e.g. uTorrent forum testers are definitely extremely valuable to us) but if you think all internet technology and content is based on nothing but volunteerism then I'm afraid you're sadly deluded.

Browser toolbars have proven a simple way to make some money and pay some bills. I understand that some people dislike them, and I'm sorry about that. We ARE looking at ways to make this general "search syndication" approach more appealing to our users. This may work or it may not - we'll have to see. We're also looking at some new and innovative ways of making money that we think bring great value to users.

At the end of the day your feedback is welcomed although constructive feedback is highly preferred. It frustrates me that you doubt my sincerity. If volunteer developers are so important to you then you'd probably be happier using a different Bittorrent client.

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Love you too, sweetness.

Anyway, I doubt BT Inc needs the ad revenue, which is/was the relevant issue here.

But enjoy bundling your bloatware with a questionable (at best) bittorrent client.

I will enjoy Azureus or something other than mutorrent.

Thank you and gubai.

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the toolbar is optional and will always be optional – you can choose not to have it and you will never be forced to get it

umm i just tried to install utorrent and i cant install it without first checking the box that says "I accept license agreement and want to install ask.com toolbar" . nice :rolleyes:

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Bullshit link with no confirmed info. Yes, uTorrent makes outgoing connections while running...even if you have NO torrents active if you have DHT and/or Local Peer Discovery enabled. It also makes at least 1 outgoing connection to uTorrent.com's DHT server to get some DHT ip nodes the first time it's run too...It may even do that ONCE even if DHT is disabled.

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Mr. Morris, I take issue with your one statement

This type of magic doesn't happen for free.

and that is all. The overwhelming majority of applications available for download were written for free, on the coders' own time. (Whether the author then sells the app is a different matter.) Look at the number of apps available at MajorGeeks, FileHippo, sourceforge, DonationCoder, etc. etc. and tell me they don't outnumber all the commercial apps combined.

You think the "majority of the internet runs on people doing things without monetary remuneration". What a ridiculous statement.

I'm not the one worthy of ridicule, and you're the one resorting to insults, which means you've conceded a weak position. Every time I look at mame, or DosBox, or OpenOffice, or Azureus, I see hundreds of thousands of hours of development time, all done for free. Whether you admit it or not, the internet is mostly a huge collaborative effort. The DARPANET days are LONG gone.

but if you think all internet technology and content is based on nothing but volunteerism then I'm afraid you're sadly deluded.

I didn't say ALL technology, did I? Why must you exaggerate and again insult?

If volunteer developers are so important to you then you'd probably be happier using a different Bittorrent client.

I didn't say they were SO important to me, did I? Why do you take me out of context to fabricate your points? Your points stand alone quite well, or they did until you became irrational. Now the user that offends you can piss off eh? Good attitude. Very defensive. You should work for the RIAA. Your attitude does not bode well for the future of uTorrent. The bean counters will continue to apply pressure, wondering why uTorrent has not been sufficiently "monetized" and "leveraged", it never fails. Well, good luck with that, I can only imagine the pressure you're under and I don't want to be in your shoes.

You want constructive criticism? Didn't you see my idea about placing ads on the forum? No, you were too busy taking umbrage.

And if you really have the user's interests at heart, prove it by making the ask toolbar Opt IN, not Opt OUT.

There, not one but two good suggestions for you, should you choose to pay attention to them. Or you can continue to shoot the messenger. You know, the ridiculous, deluded one.

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I have done my own research. And I am not following anyone 'blindly'. And whether Phoenix Labs and Blutack are overly paranoid or not is not my concern, thanks. I'd really just rather not use a BT downloading client that has 1) made deals with previously or current anti-p2p organizations 2) merged with big business 3) bundles adware with their program 4) has various people, organizations, and anti-virus/malware companies taking issue with their software

Also the forums suck, and I wish you'd go do something you're good at like play WoW or Eve online instead of just shooting down other peoples' opinions on here without presenting any alternative views or constructive input at all, really.

Oh, and as far as the posts on phoenix labs's site about mutorrent being relevant, that is up to the users of mutorrent to decide, and as much as I'm sure you believe you are the be all end all judge of 'what's relevant on teh internetsz', excuse me if I have a differing opinion. I'm sure when the time for my death comes, you will punish me greatly for my insolence on your message board. Lord.

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OK – why don't we all cool it a bit…

@Huggybaby – you said (I quote) "most of the internet now runs on people doing things without monetary remuneration" and you claimed I was "disingenuous" i.e. that I was a liar.

*It doesn't* and *I'm not*. Those are my only points.

But in getting my attention you've made me think about things more broadly, and for that I thank you. I realize that there's probably some amount of interest in what we're actually doing here at Bittorrent, especially when it comes to prioritizing what we do to make μTorrent both a better piece of software, and also part of a sustainable business. In support of this I'm going to start a new discussion topic under "feature requests" to try to explain a bit better how we're prioritizing stuff. This doesn't need to be such a black box. We're not a big company and when the dust settles, we may even agree more often than we differ. I realize that lack of information breeds distrust, and I want to try to address that as best I can.

But I will talk about your constructive suggestions here (ads in the forums and opt-in vs opt-out). Here's the facts on those ideas:

We took the ads off the forums as we wanted to clean up the site and we didn't make much money from it anyway. We figured if we put an "ad" in the installer for a toolbar, we might try to dial back elsewhere - we don't want to turn everything μTorrent into a giant billboard for other people's ads.

As for opt-in vs opt-out, the practice for browser toolbars has for a long time been opt-out (see Azureus, Bitcomet, Limewire, DivX as well as many other pieces of free software) and (more important) we are constrained by our contracts. As I have said previously, I'm not trying to offer an unqualified defense of the "plain-vanilla-opt-out-search-toolbars" approach to making money, and we're working hard on ways to move beyond this stage, but sometimes the answer you live with in the immediate term is a compromise. That's where we're at right now.

For broader discussion about what we're trying to do and how we try to balance things I'll pick up on a different thread inside the Feature Requests section of the forums.

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@GTHK - Ask told me that they did indeed have a problem in the Fall of last year that they fixed, but this should not be a problem now. If you have more specifics I'm happy to pass them on directly to someone who will help.

While you can uninstall the toolbar and uTorrent the changes to the address bar based searching still aren't undone. I find this behavior unacceptable. In order to undo the changes, so that Google is once again allowed to run as the search provider when a query is typed into the address bar, it is necessary to change settings in the about:config dialog (which contains very sensitive settings!). I'm worried about the less inclined among us failing to opt out, and getting stuck like this. The uninstaller is in essence leaving crumbs behind.

Also, any mistake or oversight in changing those settings results in the search from address bar capability being broken, which I have easily done several times, and have had to go back to make corrections during my testing.

While the introduction of the Ask Toolbar is saddening for me, I can deal with it as long as it is well behaved.

Edit: I think it actually broke Chatzilla extension too, I was chatting with Switeck when I got an error similar to the one it introduces when searching from addressbar. A webpage error does not belong in an IRC window >-< Don't forget to delete AskSearch.js :|

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@now banned member.

Why did you have to drown a valid complaint in crap? 1) Old thread is old and 2) Azureus is the king of ads and bloatware, not sure how it got brought up as an alternative to an ad toolbar when not only does it have an identical one itself, but it has all that Vuze Platform bloat built on it.

On the matter itself, just because other questionable programs have ad toolbars doesn't mean every other program out there should. "Azureus, Bitcomet, Limewire, DivX" are the masters of bundled crapware and have been so for years, not sure why uTorrent should relate to or imitate them.

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Mr. Morris,

Thank you. It's clear that we both want the same thing, that is, what is best for uTorrent. We will have to disagree on how the internet is primarily constructed I suppose.

Perhaps I misused the word disingenuous. I don't think you are a liar by any means, I just think you're wrong on that one account. Regardless, no hard feelings I hope. But I'll continue to use uTorrent whether its developers are paid or not, and I hope they're paid well in these hard times.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Bitch bitch bitch....

An optional anything is just that - OPTIONAL

Is it really so difficult to tick a box?

Thanks to all these educated folk who have kept me from having to:

1. Get Glasses

2. Learn to type

3. Learn code

4. Do something for myself.

5. Find a shoulder I can see over to copy all of the above [that's why #1]

Anyway just another rant.....Sorry - Sort of -

Metako-a-o-yasin

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You can remove the Ask toolbar completely by going to Add/Remove Programs, selecting "Ask Toolbar" and removing it.

If you accept "set Ask.com as my default search" and later want to change that, then there is a useful post on the subject at http://www.paperstreet.com/blog/index.php/archives/582

It includes advice from a product manager at Ask.com on how to make changes.

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I wouldn't say it's entirely optional if you can't easily remove it

That's... besides the point. To not be entirely optional means that even if you tell µTorrent you don't want to install it, µTorrent installs some of it anyway (not the case).

If you are given an option to not install it, and µTorrent obeys (it does), then it's completely optional. If it gets installed, then you bypassed the option to not install it -- that doesn't mean the option wasn't there to skip the install.

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