First of all no "pro courier" is going to be on HN bragging about his "weapons of choice." Second of all FXP was the protocol of choice back in the day(the time period the parent post was referring to). Thirdly, I remember when telix and minicom where "the weapons of choice."
Autotrading with pftp was a great way to get banned when I came up in the scene. ssh + standard unix ftp and a screen rotation of ~5-10 sites were the usual trading setup. It's much nicer than FXP, particularly as most top sites only allowed a few logins. You simultaneously mget different files from all affil sites and mput to the rest of your rotation. Chaining with FXP just isn't fast enough.
Autotrading will still get you banned. But yeah what you describe sounds like it's from back in the day. Nowadays there are three modes with the standard pftp: autotrade, autotrade only while at computer (redundant, I know), and manual trade.
But chaining with FXP is just fine now (virtually all courier groups do it with the exception of 0day). When I was a courier our pftp coordinated with the other ones in the group and chained them via country, ranking, and by 3-4 other factors I can get into if you'd like.
Are the site rankings published anywhere? When I came up we had e-zines like the Netmonkey Weekly Report. Damn they were cool! :)
FWIW: I traded 0sec to places like: Falsehood, Hades, VDRLake, Firesite, Enigma, Etirnity (whose dutch admins couldn't spell, but their site owned anyway :p) and, my favourite, Stairway to Heaven.
