TOPIC: BITTORRENT INC.
Removing advertisements from uTorrent
12th July 2014BitTorrent may have got some bad press due to its use for downloading copyrighted material such as music and movies, but it does have its legitimate uses too. In my case, many a Linux distro has been downloaded in this way, and it does take the weight off servers by distributing the load across users instead.
Speaking of Linux, my general choice of client has been Transmission and there are others. In the Windows world, there is a selection that includes BitTorrent, Inc. themselves. However, many favour uTorrent (or μTorrent) so that's the one that I tried and there are free and subscription-based options. To me, the latter feels like overkill when an eternal licence could be made available as an easy way to dispatch the advertisements on display in the free version.
As much as I appreciate the need for ads to provide revenue to a provider of otherwise free software, they do need to be tasteful and those in uTorrent often were for dating websites that had no scruples about exposing folk to images that were unsuitable for a work setting. Those for gaming websites were more tolerable in comparison. With the non-availability of an eternal licence option, I was left pondering alternatives like qBittorrent instead. That is Free Software too, so it does have that added advantage.
However, I uncovered an article on Lifehacker that sorted my problem with uTorrent. The trick is to go into Options > Preferences via the menus and then go to the Advanced section in the dialogue box that appears. In there, go looking for each of the following options and set each one to false in turn:
offers.left_rail_offer_enabled/left_rail_offergui.show_plus_upselloffers.sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled/sponsored_torrent_offer_enabledbt.enable_pulsegui.show_notorrents_nodeoffers.content_offer_autoexec
In practice, I found some of the above already set to false and another missing, though setting those that remained from true to false cleaned up the interface, so I hope never to glimpse those unsuitable ads again. The maker of uTorrent needs to look at the issue or revenue could get lost, and prospective users could see the operation as being cheapened by what is displayed. As for me, I am happy to have gained something in the way of control.