Isn't it actually because the seedboxes that keep every BBT file we have on their servers?
Seedboxes, especially privately-owned ones, have no incentive to keep every single torrent alive (apart from the owner’s personal reasons). We cannot rely on them alone because ultimately we cannot
force them to keep all these torrents seeded. What we can do instead is offer incentives to keep torrents alive (because, hey, even if it’s a first-world problem, a 1-year ETA is better than no ETA), to those for whom every single bonus point matters. It is not meant for people like you who have no trouble seeding.
Before people go shooting off wondering how
anybody could possibly have trouble seeding, we have had users come into #bakabt-support with upload bandwidth of 5KB/s or thereabouts. Laugh all you like, but I see no reason to actively discourage people from seeding, whatever their bandwidths or motivations, especially if a little incentive can help keep unpopular torrents alive. For them the bonus points are a useful incentive, and thus far it seems to be working at reducing the number of unseeded torrents.
Before the bonus points system was implemented we had a large number of unseeded torrents; some were ‘fixable’ because the files still existed somewhere, some unfixable because... well, the seeder disappeared and nobody had the files anymore. After Jaru implemented the
adoption and
bonus points system and dead torrents were put up for adoption/replacement, the number of dead torrents
quickly dropped (compare Jaru’s thread update with the date of posting), eventually reaching zero after
I fixed the last unseeded torrent (with much help from various people; /shameless-self-promotion), and have stayed that way pretty much since, barring occasional problems like extended downtime or DDoS.
Is it going to last forever? Maybe not. But for now it works, and if people who have no problems seeding don’t find it worth gaming the bonus points system, then it seems to me that it’s
working as intended.
Actually uploading bits and bytes should be the primary way of earning upload.
