Can't Pause With 7.9.1

[loneclone]

I was updated overnight now and now I can't put torrents on Pause. I choose them, right click, choose Pause, but they stay as Queued. The torrents that had been on Pause before the upgrade were still on Pause afterwards, but they were leaking -- downloading intermittently -- even though they were on Pause, so I Stopped them, then Started them, and ended up where I am now with them all Queued instead of Paused where I want them.

[Harold Feit]

Then adjust your queueing settings.

Pause was being horridly misused, so that's why it was removed from the toolbar.

[loneclone]

Please explain what you mean by misused. In my experinece as a developer I usually found that what other developers called 'misuse' was usually bad design. The user knows what they need to do, and I have found using the Pause button the way I did very useful for what I want to do.

 

I am having another problem too. I needed to move something up 20 spots in my queue, so I clicked on it. But when I clicked on the up arrow it moved up one place and then lost focus so I had to click on the torrent again before I could click on the Up arrow again, whereupon it lost focus again. This meant that to move it up 20 places in the queue took 40 clicks instead of 21 and it took about three times as long to complete the task as it should have.

Further details -- this losing focus when moving items up in the queue only seems to effect certain torrents and not others, but I can't see what the difference was. And I just had an example where I chose three torrents that were consecutive in order. When I clicked the Up button the top one dropped out of focus, but once the other two had moved up past it in the queue I was able to add it to my selection and have it stay there when I used the Up button. (Condolences to the developers: I know from experience that these kinds of problems can be the hardest to diagnose and fix.)

 

I did not check whether the same problem occurs when moving items down in the queue.

I just tried moving the torrent that lost focus that every time I clicked on the Up button down by clicking the Down button, and the same problem occurred, so it is not affected by which direction you are moving the torrent in the queue.

[Harold Feit]

Please explain what you mean by misused. In my experinece as a developer I usually found that what other developers called 'misuse' was usually bad design. The user knows what they need to do, and I have found using the Pause button the way I did very useful for what I want to do.

Pause was being used to suspend torrents for long periods, periods long enough that stop was a far better option.

The negative effect on swarm health caused by the use of the pause function was becoming problematic, so it was removed from the toolbar.

The losing focus in listview is an already reported issue that I'm not currently aware of the internal development status of. There is a move to top/bottom function by shift-clicking the button for the appropriate direction.

[loneclone]

Thanks, wasn't aware of the swarm health issue. It was very handy to have a way to park torrents separately from stop and queued though; maybe an idea for a future enhancement?

[GinoS]

Thanks for the explanation of why Pause is bad for the swarm.  

 

But I also find I cannot move items from Queued to Stopped either.  So that doesn't help

The only time they will change their status is when they are actively Downloading, which means I have to watch them like a hawk if I want to change them.  

 

Status changing seems to be suffering multiple problems.

 

 

The technical reasons for not using Pause are now clear, but I would suggest the design was (is ) poor in the sense that someone built it and they came.   It it wasn't meant for common users then don't put it there.

 

An alternative may be to have Paused downloads moved to "Auto Stopped" or "Auto Paused" (which really means stopped, but differentiates them from those not yet Started) after a set time as Paused.

But only if status change functions are working properly and we can Start them again manually when we want to.