Hi, Folks. If it's not already planned, I'd like to request, when time allows, that an additional piece of information be added to the search result display page. We need to see the IP address of each source in the page.
The reason this is needed is that when a download is resumed from a previous session, and the search is open so that current sources can be found, there is no way to tell if an entry in the search results matches a source that is already downloading or in the download queue. Unless the IP of the source is displayed, there is no way to match them up to existing download/queue selections. In the case of a file that already completed downloading, the checkbox 'hide downloaded files' will allow the user to ignore files that have completed. But partially downloaded files from a previous session, which have restarted, can't currently be identified in the search panel as matching a particular source. The addition of the IP address as part of the source info would allow the user to manually match up the existing download slot and the source in the search results. Or an even better approach might be to just check the search results against the current download/queue entries, and to not display them in the search results panel if they match an entry in either the queue or the active connections. Perhaps a flag could be added to the file info, indicating if it should be displayed or not, so that the screen updates could be done quickly without having to check each line against the download/queue entries. However it's implemented, I would not discard the search entry from the result set if it's active. Just mark it in some way as 'not to be displayed', so that if the connection to that particular source fails or aborts, it can be re-added later by re-selecting it. Or, alternately, search results that match an active download/queue entry could be displayed in the results pane in some way that indicates that they have already been selected, so that the user won't try to select them a second time. I think that the user should actually be prevented from adding them to the download queue a second time. Whatever approach is used should prevent the user from selecting the same file/source combination multiple times. It will also prevent the user from annoying the source owner, who might not like to receive additional requests from someone who is already enqueued, or already downloading. If this is already being done in some way that is not obvious, then the display needs to show it more clearly to the user. In other words, the user needs some way to know that a search entry has already been selected for download, so that they won't do it again. And the program needs to prevent duplicate entries in the queue. The reason I ask for this is I found that I did select a unique file/source combination multiple times, and was surprised to later find duplicate IP addresses in the download displays for the same file. It appears that most sources do prevent duplicate active downloads to a particular user. But some of them don't prevent the user from queuing up a second download request of the same file. While it may do no harm to select a duplicate download from a source, it's not a useful feature either, and may annoy the source owner. And if it actually downloaded twice, it would be wasting bandwidth, using up double what was really needed. I also notice that the download page is just about the only page that does not support sorting by clicking on the column headings. Is this intentional, to always show the entries in 'time' order (i.e., oldest events are at the top, as is done with the connection information)? Or is the code just not completed yet to allow this? I think it would be useful to be able to sort downloads or queue entries by IP, so that it's easy to identify what requests are being served by a particular server. It may be useful to know how many reqests are made to an IP address, and it's not as easy to do unless the IP's are sorted. It would also be useful to break the status information up into more columns, so that the percent complete, current thruput, and time remaining are in their columns. The 'status' column could then be used only for 'active', 'queued', 'push sent', or the queue status. With multiple active downloads, I think this would make the display much more readable for the user. The current status format varies from item to item, depending on what client program is connected, I think, and it can be hard to get a feeling of the overall status at a glance. Breaking the info into more columns will make it easier for the user to grasp the overall status in a glance. I have found this to be true in similar programs. Thanks, --Carl ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Gtk-gnutella-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gtk-gnutella-devel
