Widdle wrote:To all those MX users that love the community factor (I am one of you!). Why not have a dual presence on WinMX and Ares? The program offers everything that WinMX does plus a faster network, more stable and advanced chat connections, and without the search floods or fake files (secure hashing). I still use WinMX, and probably always will. I just see an alternative for the community that I believe could do it good. My connection is routinely maxed out when downloading off of Ares, something I can only say has happend once or twice in the 4 years that I have been an MX user.
Just looking for info from some of the MX hawks out there on this prospect.
I am sure many of us WinMX-users have tried Ares. I have at least and I can explain to you why I left it. It is very similar to MX, but it had some flaws that all in all made me leave it again. First of all, the whole channel list was often hard to get; I found myself refreshing a few times before it worked (I ran Ares Lite client with opened ports). Second, the content was mostly mainstream. While MX also has turned more mainstream, there is still some odd files to pick out. On Ares I found mostly the regular "Top40-content". Third, the hashing may be secure, but it's very slow. For a user who shares 2000+ files, it can become annoying to re-hash many changed files before being able to go unto a chat channel and start sharing. Fourth, the way you browse people annoyed me. Some users I could browse directly, but with most I had to establish something called a "direct connection" with the user, and THEN browse. Many users just closed the connection before I even had the chance to browse them. Fifth, my computer locked itself when I tried to defragment the hard drive and use Ares at the same time. This is a problem for me only of course, I use automatic defrag, but it's still a drawback worth mentioning.
So what are the good things about Ares?
1. Easy to use; point, click and share
2. Fairly light on resources
3. Stable client; no crashes
4. You can search for files in channels
5. Chat function: wide selection
6. Folder-browse function
7. Easy to configure ports
And some other minor common features.
All in all, this network had very little to offer me file-wise. WinMX is also terribly mainstream nowadays, but the channels are the key to more quality content. WinMX is far more customizable and enables you to use OpenNap if wanted.
I can however COMPLETELY understand those who find the WinMX network less good than what it used to be. It was much better 2 years ago and the fact still remains: eMule and other networks hold much more rare content, content you can be certain to get in the end.
What is most important in this discussion is the goal. What is our goal with running X client? Some seem to only care for features and interface. Others want the files, nothing else. Some love to share, not to take. Others only want to chat. Most probably enjoy doing both. I think this is what creates most of the unnecessary comments in this thread. A user who only cares about the population rate of a network will naturally disagree with a user who cares more for the content of files.
WinMX useless? Depends on what areas you attack it on, but all in all, no network is 100% useless. And I agree with Dazzle from a pro-p2p-view: Keep all eggs in one basket if you like, but don't cry when Mr. R*AA smashes them all. You see, the more networks we (WE as in all filesharers worldwide) use, the harder it will be for the bureaucratic organizations to stop our activities. I'm not going to hold a speech/rant this time, but I talk from the experience that it's POSITIVE to try out an album before buying it. If it goes out of print, I see no reason till why the music can't stay online for free.
It's always amusing to see how many users who love to argue and take stands on which clients are "the best", which networks to "worship". We're all human beings, we're all filesharers (hopefully) and we all know the reasons till why we refuse to give in on the laws this time. You can always discuss search functions, chat reliability and so forth, and this is in my opinion interesting. The problem is when people forget the reason till why the use the client in the first place.
Remember, we share to share, not to make ourself "different" or "special" in software-discussions.
) then that would be blindingly apparent.
) For small files (i.e. mp3's + appz) it's still ok and if you can get in on one of the clans/channels you can get good comparative speeds for the big files but the queuing systems is rather anti-p2p don't ya think.
