In an announcement made today by administrator Gary Fung, the isoHunt development team has released a new feature which allows users to comment and rate the quality of a torrent. This feature has been long desired by isoHunt users, and its release today gives isoHunt a competitive edge in a tight BitTorrent market.

Gary Fung's isoHunt, which is currently embattled in a legal dispute with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), maintains itself as one of the leading BitTorrent indexing sites. It is most easily analogous to MiniNova, as they both index torrent files hosted by a myriad of trackers. However, despite the impressive number of indexed torrents, gaging the quality of a torrent remained elusive due to the lack of a rating feature. While it's true the end user could always judge the quality of a torrent by linking back to the tracker, today's announcement bypasses this extra step and keeps the rating system in-house.

"From the Whoa-Crap-what-have-you-done-BIG department, I bring you the much requested comments system for torrents," Gary Fung's announcement reads on the isoHunt forums. "Check it out by searching for gentoo for example (our favorite server OS). You can see direct links to comments with the orange talk bubbles now under all torrents search results, with a new tabbed interface for torrent details."

The layout of the new rating and commenting feature is straight forward. Like any prior search request, the page will fill with results. However, the end user will notice a few significant changes. Next to the torrent name, there's a star indicating the quality of the torrent, with comment cloud next to it. Simply clicking on either will give the end user additional quality details and information on the torrent. The interface is tabbed, allowing for easy navigation between a torrent's rating, comments, and other miscellaneous information.

"Ratings of torrents (star counts on torrent search results) also come as bonus to the flagging. Each flag equals a -1 vote, while clicking on "Just say Thanks" found under the comment submission box constitute a +1 vote. Both ratings (when available) and comments are shown on torrents search results, as we recognize the need to involve the community to easily identify bad torrents, as well as adding a new way to form discussions surrounding shared files. As such, discussions on specific files and topics directly related to files should no longer be posted in the Forum but directly under comments of torrents."

According to Gary Fung, the project took over two months to develop and implement. The reaction so far in the isoHunt forums is overwhelmingly positive, and despite the legal action against Fung, he and his development team show no signs of slowing down.

Date: 2008-02-19 Source: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1666