Add the Popularity metric

[Jamim]

Hello,

Thank you for this amazing torrent client! 🙇🏻‍♂️

I believe it would be nice to have a metric that shows how popular a torrent is.
It's especially helpful for clean up purposes if you want to delete the least popular torrents.
So I'd like to suggest an implementation of the Popularity metric.

Popularity

A new metric is inspired by the Interest Rate from the finance world.
An implementation is adapted to the use-case and has nothing to do with money.

Popularity is an average number that represents how many times a torrent is seeded back on a monthly basis calculated as all_time_upload / all_time_download / (activeTime() / MONTHS_SECONDS), translated to realRatio() / activeMonths for simplicity. The resulting values are reasonably small and easy to comprehend, just as for the classic Ratio metric.

Metric's name might be different, but I've kept it due to lack of creativity 🤷🏻‍♂️
Thanks to @Mazino-Urek and @LordNyriox for suggesting a better name!

Screenshots

Native UI

Web UI

Best regards!

[glassez]

@Jamim
Is this some kind of commonly used (well-known) metric?
Anyway would you mind to provide more details about it in the OP?

[glassez]

I don't believe that it should be declared public. Just move its declaration in "torrentimpl.cpp".

[Jamim]

Thanks! INTEREST_RATE_PERIOD has been renamed to MONTH_SECONDS and moved to torrentimpl.cpp.

[glassez]

We discourage to use numbers as booleans.

[thalieht]

Can't elapsed ever be zero?

[Jamim]

We discourage to use numbers as booleans.

A comparison to zero has been added.

Can't elapsed ever be zero?

Yes, it's zero in case a torrent is added but not yet started due to the Start torrent checkbox was toggled.

[thalieht]

Can't elapsed ever be zero?

Oops, i was asking for division by zero but didn't pay attention to the left side.

[Jamim]

Hello @glassez and @thalieht,

Thank you for reviewing this PR so quickly! 🚀

I've added some information about the metric to the original post and made necessary changes to the code. Could you please take a look once again?

Thanks in advance!

[thalieht]

It's especially helpful for clean up purposes if you want to delete the least popular torrents.

all_time_upload / all_time_download / (activeTime() / MONTHS_SECONDS)

100 GB / 10 GB / 2 months = 5
100 GB / 100 GB / 2 months = 0.5

You don't like big torrents huh :)

[Jamim]

100 GB / 10 GB / 2 months = 5
100 GB / 100 GB / 2 months = 0.5

You don't like big torrents huh :)

Being as helpful for the community while using only 1/10 of the volume is an appealing option 😅

[Mazino-Urek]

Well, I am from Finance World and find this analogy to be a bit hilarious.

Probably a better naming would be just "interest" or "Popularity". Nice idea, though.

[Jamim]

Thank you @Mazino-Urek and @LordNyriox for suggesting a better name! 🙇🏻‍♂️
I've made necessary changes to rename the suggested metric to Popularity.

[glassez]

Maybe I just don't understand something, or it's because I'm not familiar with its use, but will Popularity have the expected value if, for example, a torrent reached a large ratio (say 10.0) in the first month after it was added, and then it had it (almost) unchanged for several months?

[thalieht]

IMO "popularity" would be (finished or active time / time spent actually seeding) or something of the sort and maybe put the month somewhere in there.
Even then it could be skewed by other things e.g. not enough upload slots i.e. all currently available upload slots are occupied by other torrents.

[Jamim]

Hello @glassez,

will Popularity have the expected value if, for example, a torrent reached a large ratio (say 10.0) in the first month after it was added, and then it had it (almost) unchanged for several months?

Based on your input, I've prepared a script that draws a plot which shows a correlation between Ratio and Popularity metrics over time.
Popularity will slowly decay with deceleration after first 25 days 📉

You can play with the ratio curve to see how it affects Popularity.

Regarding expectations, the values look fine to me ✅

[Jamim]

Hello @thalieht,

IMO "popularity" would be (finished or active time / time spent actually seeding) or something of the sort and maybe put the month somewhere in there.

By actually seeding, do you mean time while data was actively uploaded after completion of downloading, excluding idle? If so, I'm not sure how to receive such information.

Even then it could be skewed by other things e.g. not enough upload slots i.e. all currently available upload slots are occupied by other torrents.

That's true. I understand there's no perfect formula for the popularity, but at least it's a good starting point and the initial formula might be changed based on user feedback in the future.

[thalieht]

By actually seeding, do you mean time while data was actively uploaded after completion of downloading, excluding idle?

Yep.

If so, I'm not sure how to receive such information.

Wow. I was sure libtorrent would have such a counter but i can't find anything. Let's forget about it then.

[Jamim]

In order to gather some additional feedback, I've submitted a post to Reddit:

• 📈 Adding the Popularity metric to qBittorrent

[Chocobo1]

Probably the last comment, other code looks fine.
ps. I didn't consider the usefulness of this metric, I'll leave it for others to decide.

[Chocobo1]

Suggested change

	case TR_POPULARITY: return tr("Popularity", "Ratio / Time Active (in months), indicates how popular the torrent is");
	case TR_POPULARITY: return tr("Popularity");

The second parameter is for translation disambiguation so you don't need it.

However I think you should move the explanation of the metric to a tooltip (preferably in both GUI and WebUI). The tooltip can be set on the label.

[Jamim]

Thanks! I've applied your suggestion. Now I'm working on adding tooltips.

[Jamim]

I've added tooltips where it was possible without making a lot of additional changes.
It's not trivial to do so for the WebUI in most cases. It would be better to submit an additional PR to avoid unnecessary discussions on this one.

[github-actions]

This PR is stale because it has been 60 days with no activity. This PR will be automatically closed within 7 days if there is no further activity.

[Jamim]

Hello @glassez, @thalieht, and @Chocobo1!

Would you mind reviewing the current version of changes?

Thanks in advance!

[glassez]

@Jamim
Thank you!

[sp33dy85]

Is this metric also seen on public torrents? Maybe thats a bad idea since public torrents often already has low health/popularity and this will make it worse. Only show the metric for private torrents and for public torrents show 'N/A' or 'public' (or something similar).

[Jamim]

Hello @sp33dy85,

Thank you for the feedback! 🙇🏼

Is this metric also seen on public torrents?

This metric is available on any torrent in the client.
Also, I don't think I quite understand what the private torrents are.

Maybe thats a bad idea since public torrents often already has low health/popularity and this will make it worse. Only show the metric for private torrents and for public torrents show 'N/A' or 'public' (or something similar).

Do you mean that revealing this metric to users will push them to make rare torrents extinct by deleting them?

If so, I believe that users deserve to have an ability to make an informed decision.
Only users decide if they want to collect seldom stuff or not.

[Another-1]

I think that all_time_upload / size / (activeTime() / MONTHS_SECONDS) would be more useful. Let's say you download and seed a multi-season TV show and sometimes a new episode arrives. You delete an old torrent keeping files on disk. Then get a new torrent, it rechecks and downloads a new episode only (since other ones are already downloaded). So your all_time_download for this new torrent will be relatively small and have no correlation with a size of entire torrent. Thus making "popularity" for this torrent incorrectly high.

[stalkerok]

You can edit the .fastresume file of this torrent by replacing the value of total_downloaded with 0.

[Another-1]

You can edit the .fastresume file of this torrent by replacing the value of total_downloaded with 0.

Or simply add a torrent that you already have as files (the torrent created by you, for example). It will have total_downloaded = 0 and popularity = infinity probably. Not good.

[nostrus-dominion]

I've had a thought on this.

Is there a way to have it so that popularity will give an "N/A" or "Not Meet" for any torrent that has been active for under 1 month? That way I know what's gotten stale and what hasn't after the 30 days. Or maybe even have that as a configurable time period on the end user?