DimeFAQ:Naming Rules

From DimeWiki

DIME does not require strict adherence to Etree's naming standards, but we will ban a torrent for structure errors if the directory naming or filenaming is platform-dependent because it causes problems for some OSes or some clients, or if the naming is unclear or interferes with other torrents.

Legal Characters

Update 2006-09-15: square brackets -- [ and ] -- and zero-size files no longer cause difficulty for Mainline and henceforth are permitted.

In directory names, subfolder names, and filenames

to avoid trouble for Windows users,

no names beginning or ending with a space

none of these characters: " * : / < > ? \ |

no filenames without an extension

no names with a tilde ~ that could be the 8.3 form of another name at the same level
(If you aren't sure how to avoid that, stay away from tildes.)

to avoid trouble with the official client,

no names beginning with period . or tilde ~ (and that means no .DS_Store files)

to avoid a lot of messes because various clients and browsers treat them differently,

no control characters

no non-ASCII characters

to avoid trouble with EzTorrent,

We recommend that you stick with these:

! # $ % & ' ( ) + , - ; = @ [ ] ^ _ ` { }

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

space only when medial

period . only when medial (final OK in a directory name)

tilde ~ only if you're familiar enough with 8.3 naming to avoid any possible clashes, and never as the first character

Eight-bit characters from the Latin-1 or Windows-1252 sets are permitted if they are UTF-8 encoded in the dot-torrent file. Most torrent creation utilities will take care of that for you, and better clients understand UTF-8 and will re-create the original names on downloaders’ drives.

We advise against including song titles in filenames, and one of the reasons is that they can lead to insertion of problematic characters such as those listed above.

Certain of the punctuation marks we've listed as safe can cause mild annoyance for Linux users, not during their BitTorrent transfers, but in post-processing the files for listening, viewing, or burning, unless they quote them properly. However, that's also true of a space in the middle of a filename or directory name, and we're not going to ask users not to use spaces between words. Therefore we expect members who run Linux to be responsible for their own quoting, and we will not disqualify a torrent if the only problem is that Linux users will need to quote the names.

Also, a torrent must have no empty subdirectories. That usually is not a problem, because almost all torrent creation tools are smart enough to skip empty directories and fallow directory paths. The only exceptions we've found that don't know any better and include them are BitComet and BitLord. Also, more recent versions of BitComet add superfluous padding to make every file begin on a piece boundary. So this can be summed up this way: don't use BitComet nor BitLord for creating your torrents. Update 2007-10-21: EzTorrent now rejects torrents that include empty directories.

In the dot-torrent blueprint file's name

The permitted characters for the dot-torrent metafile's name are almost the same as those for other files, as detailed in the section above. These are the differences:

the percent sign (%) and the octothorpe (#) are prohibited

control characters are forbidden

the semicolon (;) is prohibited because it causes problems for some browsers to download the blueprint file

We strongly advise using only ASCII characters if you can, because if any non-ASCII characters are in the dot-torrent metafile's name, some OS X browsers have trouble downloading it. See the related item in the FAQ.

#characters

The Top Directory Name of a Torrent

The top directory name for your torrent, which comes from the name of your own directory that you're making the torrent from and becomes the Downloads-As name of the torrent and the directory name on every downloader's hard drive, must be clear, specifying the artist plus either the date or the boot name. A vague name like "Torrent" or "Torrents" or "My Torrent" or "FLAC" or "FLACs" or "New Folder" -- all of which are real examples we've seen -- will leave users confused as they look through the download areas on their own hard drives later.

Using only the name of the artist and nothing more isn't much better: it's not as if there cannot be, never before was, and never again will be another download of the same artist's music. Always pick something that is specific to that torrent's content and very unlikely to be used for any other material.

And that goes double for DVDs

The absolute worst case of an overly generic directory name, though, comes when the uploader users the VIDEO_TS folder of a DVD for the top directory of a torrent of the DVD. Since all DVDs have a VIDEO_TS folder with the same filenames inside it, any DVD torrent presented as an unwrapped VIDEO_TS folder will overwrite any other (and a downloader trying to get two DVDs at once will have a real mess).

A torrent of a DVD must have a proper wrapper directory with a name specifically for the DVD in it. The VIDEO_TS folder must be a subfolder inside there. The .txt file, the checksum file, and any art files or folders of artwork must be in the wrapper directory, alongside -- not inside -- the VIDEO_TS subfolder. The empty AUDIO_TS subfolder must be omitted from the torrent; the BitTorrent protocol does not support empty subfolders. (Most torrent creation utilities know to skip an empty subfolder and leave it out of the torrent, so if you make your dot-torrent file with anything except BitComet or BitLord, you'll be OK. When downloaders go to burn their video DVDs, their burning software should automatically create an empty AUDIO_TS folder on their discs.) Then make the dot-torrent file of the descriptively named wrapper directory, not just of the VIDEO_TS folder.

#directoryname

Track Numbering

Files for audio tracks must be named in such a way that file browsers (such as Windows Explorer, Mac Finder, and ls under Linux) will display them in playback sequence to make it easy for downloaders to make proper CD-DA burns. An audio torrent with filenames that do not sort into playback sequence, especially one with no track numbers in the filenames at all, causes unnecessary difficulty for downloaders. That is contra bonos mores of live music trading.

The individual files in audio torrents must include track numbers, which should to the left of any song title or anything else that changes from filename to filename among the tracks.

The track number must always be two digits. If you use only a single digit for the first nine tracks without a leading zero, downloaders’ computers will display the tracks in this order (using twenty-five tracks as an example) and they'll have to go to a lot of extra work for their CDs to burn right, because the file order will end up like this on their hard drives,

1 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2 20 21 22 23 24 25 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

whereas if you include the leading zeroes in the names of the first nine tracks, they'll come out in this order:

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

just as they should.

If there are more than one discful in the torrent, the disc number must be in each filename to the *left* of the track number, so that the files for each discful will sort together, disc by disc. Otherwise, the tracks for each disc are interspersed among those for the other disc(s) and it is hard to be sure of picking out the right ones for each disc when downloaders burn their copies. Alternatively and perhaps preferably, put each discful's files into a separate folder (and use digits to specify the disc number in the subfolder's name: some people properly use two digits to number the tracks of a disc but then call their subfolders "disc one," "disc two," "disc three," and "disc four," so that they come out four-one-three-two when they're sorted).

#tracknumbers

Date Format

It is also vital to state the date unambiguously. If you are European and you're used to writing dd/mm/yy, or if you're North American and you're used to writing mm/dd/yy, both are wrong here. DIME is an international forum with users worldwide. If you say that the date of a show was 02/04/05 (or worse, 2/4/05 or 2/4/5) or even 02/04/2005, nobody but you knows whether you're thinking of February 4, 2005 or of 2 April 2005. (For all we know, 02/04/05 could be a half-hearted attempt at international format and might mean April 5, 2002!) Being vague or coy about the date is contra bonos mores of live music trading.

Nor should you assume that everyone knows which date format you have in mind. For one thing, not everyone knows where you are located. For another, quite often Europeans use the North American format or vice versa out of a belief that it's the only way to be understood on the other side of the Atlantic. Third, unless you're the taper, it's possible that the date was misread and switched around upstream of you.

You can solve that by using the full or abbreviated name of the month and all four digits for the year. Alternatively, use ISO 8601 date format: yyyy-mm-dd., which is unambiguous and has the added benefit that dates sort chronologically.

So in the above example, if the true date is February 4, 2005, you'd write 2005-02-04. If the true date is 2 April 2005, you'd write 2005-04-02. And it's always important to use all four digits for the year, two for the month, and two for the day!

Dates must be stated according to the Gregorian calendar: additional listings by other calendars are optional and, if given, must specify which calendar system they reflect.

#dates or #date

Page Titles

The page title you select for your torrent is all that will show for it on Browse and Search displays, so it has to say enough to help users decide whether to come to the page and find out more. Your title must specify the artist (preferably not by just an abbreviation), and either the date in an unambiguous format or the boot name.

All ISO-8859-1 characters are permissible in the page title, but it has to be broken into words for the displays, so don't string too many characters together in a clump without a space. If you jam the words up against one another, or if you clamp each word to the next word with a hyphen or an underscore or a period, then you make too long a string with no space character to serve as a breakpoint. As a result, DIME's front page and Browse and Search displays are thrown off. As a rule of thumb, put spaces between words, and if you have to hyphenate or agglutinate, don't go for more than about twenty-five characters at the most without a space.

#pagetitle