In/out connections: clarification #4445

1. In Help -> Debug Window (which is the main window in -nowallet mode), on the Information tab, the "Number of connections" list incoming connections as "Out" (the nodes which you download blocks from) and outgoing ones as "In" (the ones you provide with blockchain info). Excuse me if I got it twisted, but I think it should be the other way around.
2. Same window, Network Traffic tab: the naming is proper here, but I propose assigning color red to "In" and green to "Out". This follows the logic of: "In" - "leeching" - "bad" - red, "Out" - "seeding" - "good" - green; subtly implying that it is important to keep a full node running and helping the network with data over longer time, instead of just hit-n-running. Lots of "red" will communicate this to the user, and lots of "green" will give a sense of satisfaction and inspiration to keep the node running (however corny sounding it is in words).

1. This is network terminology; "in" means that an external node connects to you, "out" means that your node connects to another node. There will only be incoming connections if your node listens and the listen port is reachable. The number of outgoing connections will never exceed 8. It has nothing to do with who requests blocks from who, bitcoin P2P connections are bidirectional in that regard.
2. Sure, the colors could be swapped, I have nothing against that. Or maybe using red and green is not a good idea at all as people ascribe good/bad meaning to them (and some colorblind can't distinguish them - at my last employer this was informally called "the christmas tree effect").

1. Thanks for the explanation, I didn't know that, just naively supposed it's all form the viewpoint of the node one runs. This still induces some conflict with those who don't know the terminology and try to reconcile data on these two tabs. I don't know, maybe "in" and "out" should have different names on the Network Traffic tab (like "uploaded"/"downloaded" or something else).
2. Yeah, the logic was very reduced and generalized here ("good", "bad", etc), to make it commonly understood. You could use different colors, but without colors I don't know how to effectively distinguish them - using different line strokes may be an option but seems inadequate.

1. Agreed. As I remember, in master (which will be 0.10.x) the in/out in the bandwidth chart window has already been changed to received/sent.

2. I'm all for using colors, but I'm open to using more neutral ones which are easier to distinguish for color blind people. But I don't really mind here, the chart is just for fun and is not essential to using the program.

Closing this, as this has been clarified and is not really an issue. Feel free to make improvements to the UI, of course.