The return of the file-sharing program DC++ to Carleton has thrilled many students who found themselves without access to the program following the shutdown of its servers in early November.
“Life came to a screeching halt when DC++ went offline,” said first-year student Jory Kettles.
The new DC++ hub, found online at hub.grenradio.com, is being run by Kelly Bond, a first-year bachelor of information technology student. Currently set up under Bond’s bed in his Grenville House room, the server is responsible for co-ordinating the connections between users.
Though the new server was originally intended only for the use of third-floor Grenville residents, Bond said, “Word spread out of the floor pretty quickly.”
“[Monday] night it peaked at 150 users and [Tuesday] morning at 8 a.m. it was at about 100, which is higher than the day before which was 40 at that point,” Bond said.
Bond explained that this was significant progress since usually user levels are very low in mornings and only rise to higher levels in the evening.
The previous hub reached about 1,200 Carleton residence students last year, according to the former administrators.
They said they disconnected the former hub purely because it was taking too much of their time to maintain.
Bond admitted the new program has already become somewhat time consuming, and that since its launch, he has been spending more time refining the system then he has on homework.
He said he hopes this won’t be the case for long.
“Most of this is getting everything set up and working correctly,” Bond said. “But once it’s all working correctly, there should be very little maintenance.”
Though the previous admins said they had never encountered any legal problems, this type of file-sharing system falls into something of a legal grey area. To avoid any such concerns, Bond has restricted access to the new DC++ hub to Carleton residence students, making it something internal to the residence community, as was the previous hub.
Bond and his team of admins have also laid out a set of strict rules on the new site, displayed prominently on the chat page for the program, in order to avoid some of the problems the previous admins had in enforcing the rules. Inappropriate content, vulgar language and leeching, the practice of not sharing your own files but downloading others’, will not be allowed.
To those who relied on the old DC++ the new hub has made it much easier to download the music and videos that they had been cut off from.
First-year student Corinne Boschma said DC++ being down “made it more difficult to find what I wanted to watch, I had to start looking at many different websites on the Internet just so that I could watch one show.”
With the new DC++ expanding daily and Bond continuing to refine the code which makes it work, he said he hopes that in years to come he will be able to continue to be involved in its development. Once he moves out of residence, however, he said he will be looking for somebody to take over physically housing the server on campus.
The previous administrators of DC++ said they were not involved with the creation of the new hub.
Though the new system has not yet reached the scale or level of sophistication as the previous one, Bond and his administration team have made progress in the two weeks it has been running and have no plans to slow down.