[arelas]

I agree. A torrent for the ROM files would be great. Things like the themes could still be hosted on a server, and probably wouldn't consume enough bandwidth to get you kicked off.

Originally Posted by drnull

I know, terrible first post just to say that you had an order of magnitude problem there... That's 479,624 MEGS of bandwidth.

So, I'll say something more useful. I know that one of the reasons you guys are against unmanaged mirrors is that it's hard to keep track of downloads. I've seen mention of torrents, but no real discussion of them. If you posted the .torrent file, it would be a small download that could be hosted anywhere, and you could keep track of the number of people who download that .torrent file. Then, the actual bandwidth could be served by the swarm of us all downloading, and the torrent could do what it is designed to do, handle heavy traffic by spreading the dissemination out over the swarm.

You guys could still use a relatively lightweight hosting service for transferring the roms back and forth to each other, but we would never need to see that. You would both just start the seeding when you were ready to release, and we would all be good members of the community and keep our µTorrent clients up and running after we got our goods.

Sorry if it's been discussed/dismissed before, but it seems like the most sensible option, unless there's a very obvious objection I'm missing.