Independence notice. Panthera Project is an independent publication. We are not the Shareaza developers and have no access to their infrastructure. The official Shareaza site is shareaza.sourceforge.net. This page exists because thousands of old links point to this domain and deserve an accurate destination.
What Shareaza was
Shareaza is a free, open-source peer-to-peer file-sharing client for Windows. It was unusual because one program could connect to several networks at once: Gnutella, Gnutella2 (G2), eDonkey (ed2k) and BitTorrent, plus plain HTTP, HTTPS and FTP sources. A single download could pull pieces from all of them. This technique is called multi-source “swarming”.
From its earliest versions it also offered rich file metadata, a managed media library, and automatic hashing of shared files. Those hashes let it tell identical files apart from impostors, a feature that matters again in the malware section of this archive.
Timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2002 | Michael Stokes releases Shareaza as a Gnutella client. |
| Late 2002 | Stokes introduces Gnutella2, a reworked protocol, and adds it to Shareaza. See Gnutella2. |
| 1 June 2004 | Shareaza 2.0 is released with its source code under the GNU GPL (GPL-2.0-or-later). The community takes over development. |
| 19 Dec 2007 | The project domain shareaza.com is redirected to an unrelated site promoting a different client branded “Shareaza V4”. See Fake Shareaza sites. |
| 3 Jan 2008 | Version 2.3.1.0 ships, removing dependence on shareaza.com for update checks. It is the last stable release supporting Windows 9x. |
| Aug 2008 | The developers announce “Project Panthera”, a planned successor brand. See Panthera Project history. |
| 1 Oct 2008 | Shareaza 2.4.0.0, the first stable release with IRC chat; Windows 98/ME support dropped. See the 2.4 changelog page. |
| Nov 2008 | Shareaza is SourceForge’s Project of the Month. |
| 31 Oct 2009 | Shareaza 2.5.0.0. The 2.5 series continues until 2.5.5.0 (29 May 2011). |
| 3 Jun 2012 | Shareaza 2.6.0.0 adds BitTorrent Mainline DHT and UDP tracker support. |
| 31 Aug 2013 | Shareaza 2.7.0.0. |
| 18 Sep 2017 | Shareaza 2.7.10.2, the latest stable release listed by Wikipedia at the time of writing. |
Why this domain linked to Shareaza
After shareaza.com was lost, the team moved its official home to SourceForge and advertised shareaza.sourceforge.net as the permanent address. That address could then redirect users anywhere the team chose. In early 2009 that redirect pointed to pantheraproject.net, which hosted the site, wiki, forums and help. Editors discussed this on the Wikipedia talk page in March 2009.
By June 2009, community members reported that pages on pantheraproject.net had been damaged, and they tried to rescue wiki content from search-engine caches. The official resources have lived on SourceForge since then. This domain later changed hands several times, and the current Panthera Project has no connection to any earlier operator.
Where to find official Shareaza resources today
- Website and downloads: shareaza.sourceforge.net and the SourceForge project page
- Wiki: shareaza.sourceforge.net/mediawiki
- Support: see our support pointer page
Archive sections
- Features tour: what the client could do
- Add-ons, skins and plugins
- Legacy downloads: why we don’t host installers
- Wiki archive: rewritten guides for old wiki URLs
- News timeline