By Thomas Mennecke
Just about everyone would love to see the first 8 digit population P2P network. Imagine 10 million plus users trading and sharing files. Every obscure piece of literature, software, music, movie, video, etc would be accessible. Of course this is just a fantasy, and so are eDonkey2000’s aspirations for reaching this goal - at least for now.

Yesterday, eDoneky2000 appeared close to achieving this. And it wasn’t just a few individuals noticing this. More and more people were reporting outrageous numbers on their eMule clients - 7.6 million, 8.5 million, 9.4 million. Even the venerable OCB Maurice statistics page was reporting insane numbers.

The explanation? A few people were confident it was just OverPeer bots flooding the network and artificially inflating eDonkey2000’s number. This is plausible, but let’s get that from the horses mouth.

So the first thing I did was ask Jed McCaleb, the head programmer at MetaMachine what the deal was. Unfortunately, he did not have an explanation and directed me to the “Lugdunum Master.” He did have an answer…

Apparently, a few server administrators wrote some code that gives an artificially high client number. He attributes this to “some stupid guys” (but perhaps clever), and specifically pointed out an ill-run donkey server.