After a nearly two years of downloading via bit torrent, I relaize how spoilt I've become. Amidst the fallout of the MPAA swoop, which closed numerous torrent and edonkey sites, I am one amongst many refugees from communities whose golden age has passed.

In my case, a forum dedicated entirely to independent, arthouse and documentary genrers kept the client occupied virtually 24/7. In fact, it was becomiung distinctly unhealthy; the first task of every day was to check the new arrivals and calibrate a downloading schedule for the day - it was becoming like a job!

Now that it has closed - although we hope that it will reopen as things "quieten down", I have been obliged to take recourse to simply using the edonkey client and its integrated seach function. There are lots of interesting materials, but the predestrian nature of the data transfer is pure torture: usually it takes several days to complete a download.

Even more than the efficiency woes what I miss is the community which allowed me to discover an unbelievable amount of interesting flics, by directors whom I had never heard of. There was a strong collective spirit such that we would seartch out titles and encode films for one another, and in the cas eof the torrent being old, all; that it required was a personal maessage to another user so as to have them make it available again. 90% of the files we shared are of no interest whatsoever to the studio industry, many of them not even being available on VHS or DVD, but amidst the general panic generated by the raids, closures and arrests, we too became a victim. In spote of all this I'm confident that new techniques that are more robust to such legal attacks will emerge, and that all the binjured communities can get themselves back in action....

I don't use Windows, but I have recently heard of a usenet search and transfer client called Grabit which might eb worth checking out if you use that platform. I'd be interested in hearing other user's evaluation of it....

http://www.shemes.com/