Filetopia 3.01 out

[TankGirl]

Here is InfoAnarchy's informative review of Filetopia 3.01:

Posted by erik on Sat Aug 3rd, 2002

After almost a year, the new version of Filetopia (Win32, closed source) has finally been released. Filetopia is one of the oldest file sharing networks, the application itself has been around since 1997.

Earlier versions of Filetopia followed a Napster-style network model, with a centralized indexing server serving all clients. This severely limited the scalability of the network. One key difference of Filetopia to other file sharing networks is the use of strong encryption for all data transfers. This should not be confused with anonymity -- it merely makes it harder for a third party to detect what files you are downloading and sending.

The new version of Filetopia uses a "decentralized network" (no further details are provided) and includes a long-awaited feature, multi-source downloading. The application now has support for other languages, although I couldn't find any language packs.

Filetopia is packed with features: IRC-like chat rooms, a private messaging system, text-to-speech engine support, a "trade mode" for limiting sharing to users who return the favor, etc. Unfortunately, the features are not always well integrated into the user interface: There are lots of unintuitive menus, icons and buttons and you often have to go by "Trial and Error" to figure out what's going on. There is often redundancy -- for example, there's an "Options" menu and an "Options" entry in the "Tools" menu.

The signal-to-noise ratio in the chat rooms is very low: You feel almost like you're on AOL. This may have something to do with the focus on gimmicky functionality in the chat part of the application -- you can change fonts and colors of your messages, insert icons like beer mugs or smileys, send an audio message etc. "Away messages" are abused for regular annoying announcements. I've almost immediately received unwanted chat room invitations. Fortunately, at least the fonts and colors can be overridden.

The main problem I had was that the channel-wide search for files didn't work at all. I could search the files that are shared by the users on a specific channel, but not all the files shared on the network. Since channels are typically rather small, I didn't find a file shared by many users that would have allowed me to test the multi-source-downloading.

All in all, Filetopia still needs a lot of polishing, and the search problem makes it unusable for me. Still, it remains probably the most feature-rich file sharing application out there.