Website: .zim Torrent: USABILITY: very difficult to locate .zim.torrent files

[andim2]

Hello,

I knew that there are .torrent files for Wikipedia .zim files, but I was astonished to find that these are VERY difficult to discover, currently.

https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/
lists .zim only (in Firefox, at least).
Dito its parent dir, https://download.kiwix.org/zim/
HOWEVER, that directory does contain .torrent files!
(as can be discovered at discussion
https://www.reddit.com/r/Kiwix/comments/v88rwg/updated_wikipedia_torrents/?tl=de&rdt=35925
)

$ wget https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia_de_all_nopic.zim.torrent
...
024-11-08 20:54:26 (666 KB/s) - »wikipedia_de_all_nopic.zim.torrent« gespeichert [90759]

(and these do work in bittorrent client transmission-gtk)

Plus,
https://www.reddit.com/r/Kiwix/comments/v88rwg/updated_wikipedia_torrents/?tl=de&rdt=35925
is complaining that
https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages
is not actually listing torrents either.
"Once Kiwix (the software) is installed you have many ways to download content (files):
...
BitTorrent which downloads the file with a torrent software. Using BitTorrent saves our bandwidth and verifies that your file is not corrupted during the download process.
"
Yeah - but if I wanted to download these files externally (via desktop, and then USB-transferring to my mobile phone), then I obviously wouldn't be able to do so via the Kiwix app...

IOW, you've got a very grave usability issue (.torrent files not to be seen or announced anywhere, AFAICT - ouch!).
Thus, download.kiwix.org apparently is blessed with incredibly unlimited data transfer capacity, else you wouldn't... ;-)

Thank you for a very valuable service!!

[kelson42]

AFAIK everything (we are in charge) should lead you to https://library.kiwix.org/ and all the .torrent are available there. Thx for reporting but honestly this is not clear to me how you could have missed that content should be downloaded from there (for later side loading in Kiwix).

[andim2]

Ah, I didn't go via kiwix.org (or even much more specifically, library.kiwix.org).
Rather, I simply did an Internet search for "Wikipedia zim torrent", with no results turning up (most likely since kiwix.org websites don't visibly announce, somewhere, that zim torrents can be downloaded).

library.kiwix.org does torrent file download link announcing only in rather private (thus, not engine-crawled?) popups.

So, that means we end up with a download.kiwix.org URL folder which does contain .torrent files yet which are:

• not listed (hidden) in browser
• not to be found via Internet search

Thus, would be nice to get this fixed, somehow.

Thanks for your very fast reply!

[kelson42]

Our Web site is not perfect but already quit clear about where content are and then you just need to click on the "download" button.

I see no easy way to get search engine to know about that .torrent links because of the dynamic nature of library.kiwix.org. For the moment we will stay to this I guess.

That said, I fully agree that BitTorrent is very important, we currently improve our infra. around this and will launch a superseeder and tools to easily create superseeders. In a next steü, I hope to make the Kiwix readers BitTorrent capable.

[andim2]

quite clear: yup - I guess my "problem" was that I was trying to discover this content externally (via search engine).
Still, an opportunity for search engines to pick up that information would be very worthwhile. But: "dynamic nature" indeed.

BitTorrent (non-central download) support: that would be really good indeed.

BTW library.kiwix.org is awesome!
So much diverse content provided in all these diverse languages! Massive effort, congrats!

[kelson42]

quite clear: yup - I guess my "problem" was that I was trying to discover this content externally (via search engine). Still, an opportunity for search engines to pick up that information would be very worthwhile. But: "dynamic nature" indeed.

I will keep the issue a bit open to try to find a solution to that.

BTW library.kiwix.org is awesome! So much diverse content provided in all these diverse languages! Massive effort, congrats!

Thank you.