Banned because of Privileges

I pay each month my little donation to keep SLSK alive and I get the little privileges for my account.

Now a user has banned me, because I jump in the waiting queue too fast and he think, that's unfair against other users.

Is it maybe possible to protect privileged members from banning, maybe just with a hint for the user like "This member help to keep Soulseek alive with his donation. You can't ban him this way. If you have problems with this user, please contact him via Chat".

Otherwise privileged downloads makes no sense, if any user ban you, because you make a donation and download earlier as other users. It's more than questionable that protections against donators are allowed. Users ho use a proction script against donators should be removed completely from SLSK, if they don't donate fo themself.

I agree. Donations are the only way we can keep Soulseek going, and users who target donors specifically are hurting the system as a whole. We had a mechanism in place that stops returning search results from users who ban a certain number of privileged users, but it ended up blocking users who just ban a lot for a variety of other reasons, like the downloader not sharing any files. Are you certain you were banned because you have privileges?

Yes, I'm sure that I was banned of this reason. I ask the user for his reasons and I get the answer, that he banned me because I jump in the waiting queue too fast and he think, that's unfair against other users.

As I told him that I pay for this little pivilege to keep SLSk alive, I don't get another answer.

I'm concerned about this issue, too. It's very tempting to ban privileged users who queue tons of files. Whenever I run Soulseek, I'm always uploading to these folks. Meanwhile, people who just want one or two files have to wait for hours. I can use the Delete key to send unprivileged over-queuers to the back of the line after they get a few files, but that's not a viable option for handling the privileged users; they only ever get bumped to #2. What would be ideal is something that gives the privileged users higher priority, but not ultimate priority like they have now. Maybe if I could somehow ensure that my upload bandwidth were divided more fairly between privileged and unprivileged users, when both types are in the queue? Maybe stagger them, so after uploading 1 file to a privileged user, the slot then has to be filled by an unprivileged user if there are any waiting, and then the next open slot goes to a privileged user, and so on. Not sure that would truly work though.

thescarletfire's picture

I don't agree with limiting donators in ANY way, sorry. If anything needs to change it's the other side. The ban side. The ban-ner. Something else. In NO way should donators be modified to take anything away.

What message would that send?

The bottom line is that nobody is obligated to share anything with you, whether you donate or not. Sometimes you just have to accept that and move on to the next user. I can see the argument for both sides. If you have a big and slow moving queue, the donators can monopolize your queue. I think people on your userlist should be given priority over anybody with privileges. I have never used it, but I wonder how the round robin sharing system in Nicotine would work in Qt. It would prevent people from hogging your queue with many files or folders.

thescarletfire's picture

I think round robin would actually be cool to add as long as it was optional.