Things to implement for Tribler to be useful: Tags/Categories in search

Hi,

I’m very interested in the promise that Tribler and its underlying technologies could provide, I check it now and then (once a year or so for several years) to see whether I could use it as my primary client. However I always come away disappointed so far and uninstall it to try the next year so I would like to detail why this is so for me in hopes it could be improved.

The primary appeal of Tribler for me is to have a way to discover content without any centralized service like a torrent site - this is your focus also as I understand it. If I already have the torrent, I can use far more efficient client to download it, simple download is not a strong side of Tribler and is not your focus which is fine. So I’ll concern myself with this aspect.

It boils down pretty much to usability - too often I can not find what I’m looking for and miss the option to organize channels and torrents in them in any meaningful manner.

  1. Decentralized search is hard, I understand that however as implemented right now it’s nearly unusable. In order to be usable, it must be at least as useful as a torrent site - that means having categories of content and all kinds of tags to be able to narrow down the search.

Since this tagging would be specific to Tribler, it is a question whether this would be implemented only in channels or also in general search. You have something like this in channels, I’ll comment on that later.

If implemented in general search, this how I would imagine it would work:

  1. standardize the tag structure hierarchy
  • video
    – movie
    – series
  • software
    – video editing
    etc

and give it a name and version

  1. introduce new extension for torrent files where this meta-data as tags would be stored with fields like name of the tagging structure, it’s version (to allow for custom ones and updates to them) and tags themselves

  2. in order to allow for current torrents without this information to be shared, create kind of a “meta-torrent” extension where the original torrent file would be referenced (by DHT hash) so the data is downloaded from the original torrent (and can be advertised and shared as the original torrent) and the meta-data is downloaded from the meta-torrent, this way backwards compatibility is achieved.

  3. implement search to support these tags and client to display, sort and organize torrents based on them

This took more time than I anticipated to type so I’ll make other suggestion in separate threads when I have the time :slight_smile:

However the most glaring usability issue and easiest to fix I think is that I’m unable to sort a channel based on a date the torrent was added, you have this for comments so why not for torrents in a channel? It’s such a basic feature and the channels are barely usable without it. the list of torrents is a soup without any way to navigate through them unless I know already what i’m looking for which makes them unnecessary in the first place.

Keep up the good work and I’m looking forward for your comments.

1 Like

I would also like to see the sorting bit worked out immediately and some of the other finer points could be worked in. Even simple text sort would be better than none, e.g. "no peers found could be lumped together or S05.xx.xx could be alphabetized or even the file size simply using data that is already being captured.

Cheers!