DHT To have or to have not

[linny57]

Hi, I hope someone can help me with this should i have DHT on my Torrents or not, I use IPT for nearly all my Torrents, but they say not to have DHT on as it will not show my correct ratio and some on there say's it's Cheating ??????. Can someone help.

[ktetch]

Hi, I hope someone can help me with this should i have DHT on my Torrents or not, I use IPT for nearly all my Torrents, but they say not to have DHT on as it will not show my correct ratio and some on there say's it's Cheating ??????. Can someone help.

Certainly.

Turn it on, and ignore them. They're talking absolute rubbish. They're talking about myths that are passed around by the ignorant and long proven to be completely baseless (and by 'long', I mean "since 2005"). There was AN issue, with ONE BUILD of ONE CLIENT (Bitcomet 0.60) for 6 weeks in late 05 that caused some issues, and only then under a specific set of circumstances, but that was a long time ago.

Generally, there's one of two reasons for this claim to be repeated by 'activity logging trackers' (don't call them "private trackers", because there is nothing private about them; they log all kinds of data about you, and require you to provide more, and then they share it with others)

1) They're completely ignorant.

This is more common than you'd think. Setting up one of these sites requires as much knowledge as setting up Wordpress - in both the most complex thing is themeing it to look how you want. So instead they rely on specialist forums where they can tell each other. But to be honest it's like going to a school for the blind for Art Appreciation. I saw one well-regarded site admin lecture at length about the problems DHT being enabled had caused on his site, and lots of others say 'well that must be our problem too'. The only problem, that client wasn't the cause, mainly because it didn't have DHT. Most of the time the problems are caused by terrible settings or configurations of the site. Not unexpected when most of the people behind it have no clue how torrents work.

2) Power trip

Some people get off on having control over people, and making them believe things, and having them spread. Makes them feel powerful and important. Doesn't make it true though.

So, about 4 years ago, we at TorrentFreak made a quick list of all the most common DHT myths, and went through the facts of them. That they're still going strong after all this time, just shows the depths of idiocy out there, nominally in charge of torrent sites.

There's a real easy way to tell how ignorant a site/tracker's admin team is. Look at the allowed client lists. If there's more than half a dozen entries, or if a client has to be white-listed before it can be used, then they've no clue what they're doing. They're trying to shift blame for bad coding and setup onto other people because they're lost.

Hope this helps.