Older versions of uTorrent (the newer ones have ads now), or qBittorrent mostly

Always used Transimission.app

Deluge still works the best in my opinion, and it's open source. Not super popular though, most people use the *torrent named clients.

rtorrent with unbound to mitigate the UI hangs from DNS lookups (serve-expired = true). The rtorrent config file is extremely hacky and every time I have to muck with it I wonder it why a friendlier interface to libtorrent hasn't overtaken it. But it gets the job done.

I moved on to Transmission after getting tired of the synchronous DNS lookups.

I tried Transmission for a while, but it seemed to stall arbitrarily (maybe requiring restarting?) and I couldn't figure out what the problem was. I know it's a popular option, it just didn't work for me, in the time I wanted to spend on setting it up.

The first time I tried it, there were issues. That's why I stayed a long time with rtorrent.

But that was a good decade ago. No issues now (for me).

Why not compile curl with c-ares?

I was scratching my head trying to figure out what curl has to do with rtorrent. But now I'm realizing that it could indeed be using libcurl as torrents use HTTP every place they use DNS.

But still I like to run a recursive resolver locally (rather than using a well known public resolver), and part of the problem is that I was getting SERVFAIL responses due to bits of the lookup getting dropped or taking too long (high latency VPN). So unbound fixes that, for rtorrent as well as other software running on the same machine. But maybe next time I visit that aspect of my setup, I'll look into making a Nix derivation for rtorrent with c-ares.

I've seen posts of three asterisks around before, but never spoken to someone who uses them. May I ask what they're for please?

Edit: Also consider ruTorrent for a friendlier interface.

> I've seen posts of three asterisks around before, but never spoken to someone who uses them. May I ask what they're for please?

I'm seriously confused. What are you referring to?

Oh interesting! I'm subscribed to my replies via hnreplies.com, and your replies come through as just `* * *`, and I could swear I've seen it on the actual site before. Like maybe people were reserving their reply slot or something.

Ah, that must be hnreplies behavior. I've never seen that on HN itself.

It could have something to do with me having delay=5 in my profile settings? (This setting makes it so it takes 5 minutes for a comment to show up publicly, in case one wants to reconsider)

Ah that'll be it, and would explain why I see it on the actual site! Thanks!

FYI, that feature makes the comment completely invisible on pages where it would otherwise show up in the basic HN web interface (no asterisks or anything). But it appears that if I go to the URL comment directly from a non-logged-in browser, it does show the three asterisks. So it looks like hnstatus becomes aware of the new comment (probably just enumerating IDs?), and can see its parent but but can't read the content.

(I edited this comment based on investigation I did while this comment was in its delay period)

cc @dangrossman (not sure if this works?)

I still love Transmission.

qBitTorreny is the modern legitimate open source app.

Netflix