Make this more user-friendly + give it a unique name

[Pentaphon]

Hi, this project seems to be quite promising but there's 2 issues I see getting in the way of adoption.

1) It needs to have a unique name. Yes, this seems unimportant but if you're doing something different, a unique name goes a long way in getting people to use it. Nothing flashy, but the same way cfpp2p has transmission-daemon-cygwin really makes it easier to find on google and differentiates it from the main project without going too far. Maybe call it transmission-service or transmission-vs or transmission-minimal or something like that.

2) The project needs to become more user-friendly. Right now, the average user has no idea what to do with all those bat files. They will either ask you what they need to do or just give up, which won't help you get users. I suggest making this project as simple as possible. Perhaps you can have this run in a simple, open source installer with a simple UI? Reduce the number of bat files? Make the web-UI just work out of the box? You may not agree with any of these suggestions and I don't blame you, but overall, the advice I have is to make this project as simple to run as possible and anything you can do to streamline how a user would run this would really help your project.

I know this isn't a bug report but since there's no other issues, this can be a discussion to perhaps spur a way to take your project to another level.

[depler]

Ok, I've got your point. Here is my thoughts:

1. Changing project name is indeed a good idea, it is transmission-vs now. I was thinking about it previously.
2. I've made some "quick improvements" you've proposed: https://github.com/depler/transmission-vs/releases/tag/20211008.

As for other user-friendly changes - I don't really see the reason to do it (at least now). The transmission itself is not really popular among "mere mortals", because most of them uses uTorrent and qBittorrent. And the other users is expirienced enough to find this project on GitHub and run couple of batch files. So, if there will be interest to my project from some amount of people - I will think further about simplification and installer. So far it is just my personal project with unzip-and-run logic, and it is as simple as a brick 😊

[Pentaphon]

Sure, its a personal project, but you're also offering it up for wide use and it could be helpful to some people in the torrenting community. I get that there's way more users on uTorrent and qBittorrent but if you look closely, there's thousands of people who use transmission-daemon-cygwin every single day and there is a demand for clients that are very low-resource as opposed to the now-bloated uTorrent or run in the background without being too obvious which as you can imagine would be helpful to people with shared computers who don't want their client messed with. If you can offer people an alternative to transmission-daemon-cygwin that has all their fixes, the main project's fixes and your fixes in a very simple package that even a beginner could run, I can see thousands of potential users headed your way and wider usage of Transmission in general.

Thanks for making those adjustments and I'm glad you gave it a unique name. transmission-vs is nice and short while letting the user know this was all built with Visual Studio. I like it!

The only other thing I can suggest is letting the client run in the background without having to create a Windows service. A simple way to just run the client out of the box and close it without changing any Windows service settings, so that users can just run 1 bat file to open it as soon as they unzip your zip file and be able to connect to it with their browser, and when they are done, close it from running in the background with another bat file? I think the "service" concept might be too scary or foreign to most Windows users and they want to just open their client and torrent, you know? And since you are keeping the bat file format you might as well add a "start_background.bat" and "stop_background.bat" so that people don't need to bother with a service if they don't want to. I hope I am being clear.

[depler]

add a "start_background.bat" and "stop_background.bat" so that people don't need to bother with a service

Why someone needs to run it in background for a while and manually close it later? I mean, if you just want to see "how it works" you can run foreground. And the background task is intended to be continuous, there is no need to stop it - it has extremely low memory and power consumption.

[Pentaphon]

Well maybe they have to shut down their PC or restart it for an update, which is monthly on Windows at least. Or maybe they need to restart the client due to a tracker issue when using private trackers. Or maybe the current version of Transmission has an unexpected bug that results in high CPU usage or higher than usual disc usage and you need to kill the task and diagnose the bug. Or maybe they just want a safe way to close their client the same way they can with other torrent clients. Shutting the background task down manually is preferable to having it force close when you update Windows, no? The key is to make it work like any other client an end user would download, even if it runs silently in the background. An average end user needs a way to close the background task, just like you can stop the Windows service. I personally would expect that of any client no matter how it runs because I would want full control of it.

[depler]

Sorry, so far there will be no installer or additional scripts. But you can create your own if you really need this.

[Pentaphon]

Fair enough. Thanks for going as far as you did.