Utorrent 3.3.2 tracker issues?

[Duki3003]

The constant nagging and bickering only contributed to the request client whitelist topic closure, nothing else.

And yes, we are aware that the bugs present in the latest build are present in all earlier builds, and to be honest I would like nothing better than to disallow all uT 3.x versions until the problems are dealt with. However, we won't be taking such a step due to the fact that the large portion of our userbase uses uT 3 despite all of its bugs. And none of the ones we know of explicitly affect the tracker, rather the user and with it the swarm.
It is also our intention to in a way shield the user by forcing him to use older versions which we know are stable. That is why most of the staff will always recommend versions below 2.2.1 or other clients, and not uT 3.x which is also on our whitelist. I know that statement does in a way contradict itself, because we allow earlier versions of uT 3.x which we know are unstable, and do not deserve to be called stable builds - but again, I believe that removing 3.x from our whitelist would greatly inconvenience a large portion of our userbase.

[Mhei]

1) Torrent clients aren't disallowed merely for causing issues with the tracker, although that IS the primary reason.

2) uTorrent builds from 3.0 on are notorious for seeding, and even occasionally leeching issues.  This IS a direct harm to swarms.  there are also several other issues, for example HD "thrashing", that simp[ly should not happen.  If your BitTorrent client can't keep up with HD speeds, except possibly with gigabit internet, there is a serious problem!

3) You quite obviously didn't do much reading on the forums.  It's not difficult to find this stuff.  If you had, you wouldn't be doing exactly what got the client named "persona non grata" in the 1st place, now would you?

Your attitude, in a nutshell, is exactly why you don't get to use 3.3.2 on BakaBT, which you'd know if you'd read much of the thread I linked for you, much less searched the forums and read a few similar threads.  Being snotty about it, especially to staff/admins, will net you exactly zip, zilch, and nada.  What, you want a refund of the money you didn't pay to use the site/tracker..?!  This is not even remotely a democracy; if BakaBT staff/admins decide they don't like a given client, "just because", well, guess what?  You either deal with it or get lost.

This community is not fond of the kind of hand-holding you apparently desire.  If you read the Wiki (as you stated you would, when you clicked "I agree" when you signed up), you'd actually have many of the answers you say you want.

i salute you Sir.

[sneaker2]

@Duki3003
Thanks for the insight. Though I still do oppose white-listing it's good to get the reasons behind it explained - especially that the reasons are intended for the benefit of the users, not to "punish" the people that've nagging out of spite.

[Freedom Kira]

I just browsed the thread list about one year back and I didn't see a single post where this could be tracked back to µtorrent 3.x problems. The starter of the most recent thread was simply on 3.3.2, the thread before that never got an answer from the thread starter again. Another one was because the user's ratio was too bad. Then another one with not yet (at that time) white-listed µtorrent.

I tried searching for "Disk overload" and aside from the very recent thread with tips on the issue the next recent thread is from August 2012. (The user had problems with 3.1.2, which is white-listed, but asked for white-listing of 3.3 to fix his problem.)

I'm curious if you actually read every single thread posted in the last year, because if you did, hats off to you, as that must have taken several hours, but on the other hand, I'm a bit surprised you didn't see uTorrent 3.x come up at all. I visit the help board at least once a day, and I recall uTorrent 3.x coming up at least once every couple weeks. More recently it's been swarmed by 3.3.2, of course.

The disk overload issue is a more recent one, like I said. It only came up a couple times in the last year, if I recall correctly, but the most recent one should have been about a month or two ago at most. Probably because net speeds fast enough to exceed HDD access speeds are not at all common.

[lordjb]

Heh 3.3.2 seems to still be updated on occasion despite being marked as "stable" for quite some time now, just yesterday it seems build 30448 was released.

3.4 might be better but it's at RC4 and according to the forum posts there's still a number of issues that remain unfixed, a 3.4.1 build also appeared briefly for download so 3.4 will probably be released shortly despite that and then 3.4.1 will begin with beta testing.
(I had hoped 3.4 would distance itself from 3.3.x and fix many of the complaints and bugs that have carried over from version to version but it seems that won't be the case unfortunately.)

(Although at least they have fixed a number of issues with 3.4 instead of just adding or tweaking additional features.)

[Clannad_92]

telling us the uTorrent latest update? not happening and maybe never will be...

[cablop]

o.o

According to software versioning (and supposing µTorrent developer follows it) 3.3.2 it's the same as 3.3 but with more bugs fixed than 3.3.1...
In other words, i mean if 3.3.1 was approved and 3.3.2 is supposedly a better version, WHY not to approve it?

In the other hand the developer included new features in 3.3.2, like the auto-update feature (something that will spawn a minor version like 3.4.0... but... that's another tale).

I think this is a controversy with no solution... Despite µTorrent 3.3.2 would be almost 3.3.1, the auto-update feature means for us, µTorrent users a BIG issue, cause the version is going to keep changing and going to keep falling in the no whitelisted area...

Sadly i think the solution is to move to other torrent clients, but the bad thing is µTorrent is one of the most lightweight clients out there and one of the most whitelisted in many other torrent trackers...

[Bob2004]

Lets stick to the "buggy and unstable" story because ya that really explains everything.

Try searching the help forum for "Finding Peers," that's one particularly notorious issue that many post-3.0 users experience.

Just to pick out this one point, since I know better than to wade too deeply into this minefield, but this is something that really annoys me, since people always use it as a reason why utorrent 3 is so terrible, when it really is totally irrelevant. Having a torrent stuck at "Finding Peers" is not an issue in itself, and not necessarily even an indicator of an issue with utorrent.

When the developers redesigned the UI for utorrent 3, changing the colour scheme and such, they also changed what information is displayed in the 'status' column of utorrent. Previously in the event all trackers returned an error, it would simply display the error in the status column. In the new version, they changed what messages are displayed and when, however. Now, when a torrent is first started, and the client is updating trackers and finding peers, it displays "Finding peers" in the status column. If, in the event a tracker error means the torrent is unable to find any peers, the status column will just say "Finding peers" permanently. The ACTUAL error will be displayed in the tracker pane at the bottom of the screen, next to each tracker.

An example: If a user were to try to download a BBT torrent using a blacklisted version of utorrent, in the past the status column would have shown the not whitelisted tracker error. Now, in 3.x, the status column just shows "Finding peers", and in order to see the tracker error the user would have to navigate to the tracker pane (not selected by default), and look in the status column there.

The end result of which is that people who are unfamiliar with utorrent, or torrenting in general, don't know to look there to find the real error, and all end up posting on forums about how their torrent client is stuck at "Finding peers" - when actually they are probably all suffering myriad different problems, many of which may not even be anything to do with their client at all.

If the client is able to locate any peers at all at any point - even if it can't connect to them - then, even if an error occurs after that point, the torrent will still remain stuck at "downloading - x.x%". The finding peers message only remains if utorrent was never able to locate a single peer for that torrent.

So yeah. A silly design decision on the developer's part, since it's caused all this confusion, and made their client look far buggier than it perhaps actually is - but not really a notable issue. I think the idea is that the tracker pane's status column is for tracker errors, and the torrent list's status column is for torrent errors - since it displays errors relating to the torrent itself, such as file not found errors and such.

[Bozobub]

Cablop, just because a version number is incremented, had no actual bearing on whether that version is better, sorry, that's just how it is; you're making a false assumption.  You can look at their own changelogs from uTorrent 3.0 on, to see how many NEW problems were introduced in each new "stable" version.

Bob, not only should you also take a look at those changelogs, you should note that uTorrent 3.x.x has leeching, seeding, AND HD thrashing issues - according to the devs themselves - and those three issues alone are among the worst possible problems in a BitTorrent client.  You don't have to accept that, but it is what it is.

[Mhei]

i can attest to the HD thrashing of utorrent, main reason why i switched to deluge.

[sneaker2]

You can look at their own changelogs from uTorrent 3.0 on, to see how many NEW problems were introduced in each new "stable" version.

No, you can't, because that's not how changelogs work. They just show bug fixes, they don't list known/new problems or tell you if fixes are for regressions within the 3.x branch.

[Freedom Kira]

When the developers redesigned the UI for utorrent 3, changing the colour scheme and such, they also changed what information is displayed in the 'status' column of utorrent. Previously in the event all trackers returned an error, it would simply display the error in the status column. In the new version, they changed what messages are displayed and when, however. Now, when a torrent is first started, and the client is updating trackers and finding peers, it displays "Finding peers" in the status column. If, in the event a tracker error means the torrent is unable to find any peers, the status column will just say "Finding peers" permanently. The ACTUAL error will be displayed in the tracker pane at the bottom of the screen, next to each tracker.

I'll admit I only had a vague idea of what the message meant and your explanation clarifies everything, but in my defense I said it was an issue, not a bug. If what you are saying is correct, it most definitely is an issue because it's causing so much confusion and raises a lot of questions about what it means. Not necessarily saying that the torrent itself that has that message is having issues, either; while the appearance of the message in the client does not always indicate a problem, it almost always does when it's brought up in a forum topic (though usually it indicates a Whitelist problem for us).

I personally don't use uTorrent regularly (and don't use 3.x at all) because most of my torrenting isn't done on Windows. Therefore, when I talk about uTorrent, I can only discuss what I know from what I hear about around here.

No, you can't, because that's not how changelogs work. They just show bug fixes, they don't list known/new problems or tell you if fixes are for regressions within the 3.x branch.

Yeah, this. Sorry, Bozobub, I know we both hate uTorrent 3.x, but you should at least make true statements about it. Changelogs never go "so we did something and now this thing doesn't work."

[Bozobub]

You can look at their own changelogs from uTorrent 3.0 on, to see how many NEW problems were introduced in each new "stable" version.

No, you can't, because that's not how changelogs work. They just show bug fixes, they don't list known/new problems or tell you if fixes are for regressions within the 3.x branch.

Utterly false.  That's exactly how changelogs work, silly; they reflect the changes to fix known bugs/issues or to add new features.  For example, "Changed {x} due to {y} known bug, that was introduced in version {z}."  Freedom Kira, you're quite obviously misunderstanding me.

First off, if the problems I'm referencing didn't exist before 3.0 - and they did not - they were introduced in 3.0 on, Q.E.D.

Second, the changelogs certainly do show you the (attempted) fixes for bugs they themselves introduced in a previous version - it's not like no one can read them, homes - and generally state it directly in that manner.  It's quite easy to follow the progression of bugs, at least once they finally publish the damn log.  This, of course, does not reflect the most recent "stable" build, until there's a new build with a new changelog.

Still thinking you're going to successfully argue for the whitelisting of 3.3.2, sneaker2?  How's that working out for you?

[sneaker2]

Utterly false.  That's exactly how changelogs work, silly; they reflect the changes to fix known bugs/issues or to add new features. For example, "Changed {x} due to {y} known bug, that was introduced in version {z}."

No, the µtorrent logs don't tell you all those details:

Fix: crashes
Fix: various web seeding bugs (redirect, url encoding)
Fix: crash when using the webui
Fix: Clicking from Getting Started to Find Content after watching a video now works
Fix: Allow user to chow/hide "Has Header" column in files tab.
Fix: bugs in web remote cache and pairing apps
Change: Refactor visibility code. Make utorrent and bittorrent visible when launched, but mirror last state at startup.

Zero information about when about the time/version a bug was introduced, no list of known issues of the current version. A list of bug fixes is simply not a suitable indicator of current problems.

[ConsiderPhlebas]

Working in SW development for a couple of decades: the only thing indicative of a software product's quality is its actual behavior...

And if you want to use uTorrent for some reason, just switch off auto update.

* ConsiderPhlebas fails to see the problem.

[xelasneko]

And if you want to use uTorrent for some reason, just switch off auto update.

I didn't realized uTorrent has auto update option until the tracker issue happened to me. It's a good thing for me overall, since I don't venture into the preference settings often.

[cablop]

Cablop, just because a version number is incremented, had no actual bearing on whether that version is better, sorry, that's just how it is; you're making a false assumption.  You can look at their own changelogs from uTorrent 3.0 on, to see how many NEW problems were introduced in each new "stable" version.

Bozobub, not making false assumptions. Let me explain you: µTorrent version numbering seems to be according to the Semantic Versioning specification (here a link for you to learn about it before telling people they're jumping into "false" conclusions: http://semver.org/spec/v2.0.0.html). According to that, v3.3.2 should mean it is a patch version, with more bugs fixed for v3.3.0 than v3.3.1 is and no new features added.

I'm not talking about minor versions, like comparing v3.4.x to v3.3.x or major versions, like 4.x.x and 3.x.x.

I followed your suggestion and opened the v3.3.2 changelog (here for you, http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=137620). Almost all log entries are tagged FIX or CHANGE. No new features there... except one (but i'll talk about it later). That makes sense with the assumption that v3.3.2 is a patch version and not a minor neither a major version.

I'm not asking for v3.3.2 to be approved; not to be banned. But i'm pointing my finger into a few things:

Considering:

• v3.3.1 is approved.
• v3.3.2 is a patch version that fixed many of the bugs still present in v3.3.1, meaning it is better or at least the same as v3.3.1.
• v3.3.2 changelog states that.
• Enough people know about software versioning. And many of them among the people able to torrent files.
• There's a new feature introduced in v3.3.2. That alone, according to good practices, should cause the version to be a minor version and not a patch version.
• But, sadly few people is going to know that fact.
• And that new feature is autoupdate! Unaware people is going to ignore their µTorrents are going to keep updating themselves into new versions, either patch, minor and even major before they can do anything.
• Many people are allowing µTorrent to update to the next version, thinking they're doing it for good; just finding they did it for wrong.
• Bob2004 pointed a real issue. µTorrent has a bad design to show some errors/issues and if a user don't know where to look, the user will blame many things as the root of the problem, tracker included.

Then:

• People understanding versioning will surely understand why a v3.4 introducing new features will not be whitelisted, but will wonder why a patch version, focused in fixing bugs is not; while previous patch version already is.
• Sadly not too many people will know - without browsing that changelog - that this supposedly patch version has a new feature that can cause new bugs...
• ... and that feature, autoupdate, is going to keep jumping them into not yet whitelisted µTorrent versions.
• ConsiderPhlebas: is right about telling to turn autoupdate off...
• But not many people will realize the autoupdate option is running until it's too late.

In my opinion, your arguments against v3.3.2 are poor in this case, cause this is a patch version; even the mentioned changelog speaks in favor of people willing for v3.3.2 to be approved, cause it fixed many bugs present in an (again) already approved version. Statements like "v3.3.2 approval is not happening and maybe never will be" are based more on speculation than logic and hard facts.

But, i think to allow 3.3.2 is a bad idea. Why? Because of its new feature. No one is willing to keep jumping into uncharted waters everytime just to find themselves badly messed with a buggy software. No one is willing to find their µTorrent moved forward to a new "better" version, that has to wait about two weeks to allow them to leech and seed again. But just by disabling that new feature v3.3.2 should be working as good as v3.3.1 and supposedly better; even in the case those many fixes won't work then it will be the same as v3.3.1. People just need to know about disabling that feature.

I think you should remove from the whitelist v3.3.x of µTorrent if it is that buggy, otherwise the problem is going to be haunting the forums for months.

I also think you have to make a different policy for not whitelisted clients. Maybe allow them to work but limit them in some ways, so people can use them while they find better alternatives. Or allow us to use the points earned in buying time for not whitelisted clients until we find better alternatives...

Definitely you have a problem here that is going to be recurrent about µTorrent. I'm not asking for versions to be whitelisted but showing why people are expecting it to happen.

We all live surrounded by software and a lot of it has bugs. What we people do? Just relax our demands and live with it. It's not the solution for a perfect world, but this is not a perfect world.[/list]

[Duki3003]

And now this topic is closed as well.