[dancin_carrot]

I have recently begun converting all of my SHN shows to FLAC (thanks to Five's excellent tutorial) and tagging them with foobar2000. I notice many torrents on this site with "disclaimers" that say something to the effect of "if you want to trade this show, keep it as it is." Now I realize the thought behind this, if lots of people convert shows to other formats and trade them (without keeping track of the fingerprints/checksums) the trading pool is polluted.

However, the benefits of the FLAC format over SHN has been widely touted, especially on this site. As far as I can tell, you guys (the admins) have a rule that requires shntool md5s on all SHN seeds, but it is rarely enforced because people can't get shntool to work. Shntool md5s would, I believe you say, make format completely unimportant, as the audio-only checksum would be consistent no matter whether the show is SHN, FLAC, or anything else they come up with in the future.

Basically what I want to know is, what are people's opinions on converting shows and trading them? Does it really pollute the trading pool or not? Keep in mind I am talking about responsible conversion (keeping the original SHN md5s, bitcomparing with foobar, updating lineage in the text file, etc). I am truly interested in hearing people's opinions.