If there’s anything that’s normal these days in the eMule community, it’s the need for mods to base their clients off the latest official version.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
Mod (modification) developers of the official eMule client do have one freedom, and that’s to expand and try new features not otherwise available on the official client. This alone highlights a very big bonus for an open source file-sharing client.
eMule has one of the largest communities of coders actively pounding out lines of code in an effort to try and take what the original developers have and make it better. One of the better known “mods” is called ‘eMule Morph XT’ which recently released a new version, but it’s not just for the purpose of staying connected to the eDonkey2000 servers. The differences are all under the hood and highlighted in their change-log.
Some of the new features include FollowTheMajority. The feature basically automatically renames the file to whatever the most common name is for a specific file on the ED2K (eDonkey2000) network. This feature may prove very useful in an effort to avoid falling for dummy files. eMule currently features a way to list out all the sources with a specific file and tallies all the sources using different names. While a great way to help users determine whether or not a file has been renamed to fool unwitting users, this feature may help users find out faster whether or not they are downloading a fake file.
Another feature added is safe Kad (Kademlia). This feature is supposed to help slow down the spreading of bad Kad nodes.
One of the most obvious changes is the removal of webcache. Apparently, this was the result of “widespread abuse”. It has been reported that a replacement is currently being sought after this month, but in the meantime, users can enjoy the uPnP feature.
Several other bug fixes and changes have also been included in the change-log. The eMule Morph XT client can be downloaded here.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
