We (the support staff) don’t know many of the answers. Torrent-sharing was dropped on us by surprise too, and we’re in the process of figuring out how it works. But I can supply some definite answers, and we can conjecture from there:
BitComet can’t unilaterally change what it reports or how it reports it, to trackers. That’s rigidly defined by the Bittorrent protocol, it’s too late to change that now, and there is no provision for reporting any data about .torrent files.
If Bitcomet tried to change this, trackers everywhere would reject the information, the metafile, as garbled, please resend.
The share ratio is computed by the tracker, at sites that track ratios. They don’t care what your client may have to say about it, and there’s no provision in the metafile definition for your client to tell the tracker what it thinks your ratio is anyway. Bram Cohen, the guy who created bittorrent, didn’t include provisions for ratios, and discommended them in his blog, when the notion came up and trackers started using them. (He was right.)
People who run trackers are vastly disinterested in arguing with you about what you or your client think your ratio is. Theirs is the first, last and only word, and if you don’t like it, don’t use their tracker, kthxbye.
You can get the metafile definitions from www.bittorrent.org in the developers section, if you want them. The metafile definition contains “Kbytes uploaded” and “Kbytes downloaded”, but not “U/D ratio”. The tracker has to compute the ratios for itself.
Those definitions are frozen in the sense that if you wanted to change them, you’d have to get all the other programmers of trackers and other clients to agree, and to make it all backwards-compatible so nothing breaks for those who won’t do it.
Nevva happen.
(BitComet tried unilaterally introducing padding files to align file and piece boundaries. The results were painful. Other clients COULD have easily hidden those empty files too, but they chose instead to whine, b**** and moan about it. Torrent sharing is also a unilateral change, not supported by any other client, but it also won’t affect any other client. They could add it but almost certainly will not.)
There is no central authority, and the internet is an anarchy, so it’s empirically impossible to change any definitions now. (It’s been tried once and went nowhere. The effort was abandoned.) The only reason that DHT worked, was that it was a simple overlay. It needed no serious changes in the existing code of any client, merely add-ons. Even so, we’ve ended up with two different, incompatible versions of it.
Moral: you can’t change any core bittorrent definitions or behaviors.
In light of that, what your BitComet reports any ratio to be, really and truly does not matter to anyone except you, and maybe not even to you. This applies to both the regular task ratio column, and to whatever the torrentshare ratio column really means.
What DOES ratio mean in the torrent sharing context? On one hand, I don’t actually know, I haven’t seen the code. On the other hand, as a programmer, I sympathize with the desire to re-use code, and I can understand not taking the extra trouble to remove the ratio column from existing display code, even though it’s not needed and doesn’t really make sense. Much more trouble to take it out & louse up the page formatting, than to just leave it there and ignore it. Nobody’s paying for anything at all, much less aesthetics.
(On the gripping hand, as a software quality engineer I wince at the confusion this creates.)
Put all that together and I think you can safely say that in this torrentshare screen, the “ratio” column contains a meaningless number, no matter how it’s calculated, and it should just be ignored. Not a very satisfactory answer, I know.
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