this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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If anyone's unfamiliar with this client, it's been around a long time, and was previously named Vuze (and before that: Azureus)!
Tis been under active development by the two main devs for all these years. The adware crap was removed from day 1 of the fork and it's a really solid (and featurefull) client. Highly recommend. Also does I2P.
The absolute best feature is Swarm Discovery and Swarm Merge, which lets you find identical large files across different torrents and cross-seed and merge said torrents while downloading both. With Swarm, I've been able to download torrents with <1.0 availability - completing both torrents and become the seed hero. And this was before it supported the v2 BitTorrent spec (which gives you individual file hashes).
I still use qBit for my *arr automation but BiglyBT is always there for everything else and as a great backup client.
Wait can you explain what happened with the adware thing?
Towards the end of its life, Vuze started adding crap like ads in the sidepanel and spyware in the installer. Plus a bunch of useless features like DVD burning and 'content network'. My guess is the two main devs got involved with some investors at the time of the Azureus rename and didn't like the way it was heading, so forked the project and rebranded to BiglyBT so they could go it on their own. Since it was open source, and mostly their own code, they couldn't really stop them. Edit: More info at TF.
Sad thing is, many people are blissfully unaware of the history and still running Vuze to this day - when it hasn't been touched in 6+ years. Amazingly the site is still up but nobody's home, so its very risky to be using an out-of-date client like that with a spyware-laden installer - with the very real possibility of the binaries being switched out. (Their SSL cert has lapsed several times.)
The good news is, if anyone's still running Vuze, BiglyBT is a straight swap-out.