Intro

Soulseek makes it WAY easier to share files with everyone than Torrenting.

You need an account anyways, so all you need is a VPN that allows you to forward ports, or (if you are a country that doesnt care) open them in your router.

Yes that is a barrier and yes there are many privacy friendly VPNs out there that don’t allow port forwarding (mostly not because of filesharing, but because people hosted CSAM and other horrible shit). But still there are very cheap VPNs out there that offer port forwarding (hint: some of which might currently offer big discounts because of their anniversary).

So assume that someone who wants to download from other people is unmotivated, lazy and does not want to spend money. Yes it is a barrier, but come on, it is not big.

Side note: legal issues

Many countries like Poland dont care about downloads and only ban uploads of countries.

This can mean that people there don’t even care about using a VPN and simply never share.

Reminder: not sharing is still the default on most filesharing networks!

So by blocking leeching-only users, you will block those.

Copyright companies

It is generally also not a legal problem for copyright companies to download “their” media from filesharing sites.

So by allowing users who do not share to download things, expect that you will get downloads by them. I have had weird users that downloaded every first file of every one of my albums for example.

You will block those, unless they share their “own” content (which would be ironic) or random other content (which would be very illegal).

Block leechers

There is a family of extensions that do this, forked from each other.

I use this one that is simple, kinda up-to-date but has no weird things.

The +proveit variant also adds a sort of captcha system, which resulted in everyone getting banned for me.

Sadly common for all of them is that the in-app documentation is kind of nonexistent, so you need to guess a bit what each option does.

I will refer to the former extension from now on.

You can set a message to write to people who were blocked, and choose to block “suspicious sharing patterns” whatever that is.

You can also set a minimum of files and folders shared. I would say setting 10 files and no folder limit would be a friendly preset.

Missing…

There are a bunch of slsk_xxxxxxxxx users downloading singular files from me and never sharing back.

Those might be using some braindead automated streaming software (hence the automated username and single files).

They appear to share files, but none of them are “enabled”. I dont know what that means, but I will try to block all of them.

Anyone know how to auto-block users based on username? This might require a fork of the extension.