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Scraping isn't documented #42

Closed jzelinskie closed 8 years ago

jzelinskie commented 8 years ago

While working on chihaya, I was curious what clients are doing with the "downloaded" field in a Scrape. Not only could I not find out how this field was being used, but I discovered that BEP15 (UDP Protocol) is the first BEP to mention even mention scraping at all.

Encombe commented 8 years ago

Scrape is actually fairly well documented, but not in a BEP; https://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification#Tracker_.27scrape.27_Convention https://wiki.vuze.com/w/Scrape but I think the best 'documentation' is using Wireshark.

The "downloaded" field in a Scrape is simply a counter how many times the tracker has received 'event=completed' on that torrent.

jzelinskie commented 8 years ago

but not in a BEP

That's the problem that I'm highlighting. I don't think it's fair that something this important is not formally declared in a specification. These wikis are all third party information that one should not need to reference in order to implement a Tracker or Client.

The "downloaded" field in a Scrape is simply a counter how many times the tracker has received 'event=completed' on that torrent.

I'm know what it is. I'd like to know how it's used. If I can forgo keeping track of this value because the clients don't do anything with it, that'd be nice.

arvidn commented 8 years ago

I'm not sure I would agree that scraping is that important. But you're right, it would be nice to have it defined in a BEP. Would you want to volunteer? As far as I know, the only thing the "downloaded" field is used for is to display it to users. That's probably mostly true for the other fields too, although that could also be used as a kind of auto-balancing of seed capacity

jzelinskie commented 8 years ago

Would you want to volunteer?

Sure. Should this be a new BEP or should I create a patch to BEP3?

arvidn commented 8 years ago

I don't really have a strong opinion, I can see arguments either way. I would probably lean towards a new one though. @ssiloti do you have an opinion?

ssiloti commented 8 years ago

Make a new BEP.

jzelinskie commented 8 years ago

Closing this now that #43 is merged.