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I would seed if people ever used me. I only have so much space, and everytime I try to seed, there’s either nobody downloading, or theirs a hundred other seeders.
Is it possible to obtain stats what seed ratio you need to get to on average for a torrent not to die?
It really depends on the tracker in use. I tend to stick to private trackers, so I feel relatively safe stopping seeding at a ratio of 2-3. For public trackers, your ratio would have to be pretty dang high because most people stop seeding on those.
god i even hate pausing seeding for even an hour cause i’m like BUT WHAT IF SOMEONE WANTS IT???
I seed EVERYTHING until i run out of space. Qbitorrent doesn’t like me having .torrent files in more than one drive, so i’m limited to my 14TB. But i have dozens of torrents that i’m only one of 2 or 3 people seeding it, so those help me upload hundreds of GB’s with my terrible connection.
Also i’m on a private tracker, so leaving them seeding helps your ratio, even if you don’t actually upload anything. They just try to encourage new people to seed and that is awesome.
Unfortunately my VPN provider doesn’t support Port Forwarding (they’re great in everything else, but suck on this) so if I just start seeding from scratch no peers will ever manage to connect to my machine. The only way I can contribute back to the community is when a Download session ends and starts seeding (basically all those peers that my machine checked during the download stage get recorded in the VPN’s Router NAT as associated with my machine so if they try to connect to my machine later, for example to download a block, they get through), so my torrents are just left to seed after downloading (if I stop it and start seeding later, it might not work anymore depending on how long has passed).
Fortunatelly I have a fast internet connection and torrenting is done in a server machine, so I just leave it setup to a 2:1 seeding ratio for as long as it takes to get there and pretty much all torrents I download reach that seeding ratio (it pretty much only fails to reach that on really obscure torrents with very small swarms).
I’ve been sailing the high seas for over 3 decades and long ago saw the importance of doing my bit to keep the whole ecosystem alive.
So I might not be seeding everything I have (and as it’s been 3 decades, I do have some stuff which is now very obscure), but everything I get from the community I seed 2x as much so that others can get it too.
I’ve been trying to understand port forwarding since I keep seeing that I need to set it up for my torrent client to work reliably. But I read that it sends your traffic “outside” of your VPN encryption. Doesn’t it kind of defeat the purpose or am I understanding it wrong?
In a VPN your own machine sits behind a Router from the VPN provider in a NAT configuration (meaning that during VPN tunnel initialization that router gives your machine an IP address from one of the so-called “internal” IP address range - most commonly one in the 192.168.x.x range - which are NOT valid to have visible in the Internet) and which multiple machines all over the world sitting behind other routers can use at the same time (for example: even though it only has 254 valid addresses, there are probably millions of machines running right now with an IP address in the 192.168.1.x range, which is by far the most popular range of internal IP addresses).
The IP address which is visible on the actual Internet has to be one which is not from an internal range or other kinds of special ones, and that’s the one that the VPN provider Router shows to the outside. (There are a few “tell me my IP address” websites out there which will let you know what that address is).
This is also how home routers work in providing multiple machines in your home access to the internet even though its on a single ISP connection which has only one IP address valid for the Internet.
To make all this work, such routers do something called NAT-Translation: connection requests from the INSIDE to the OUTSIDE go to the router, which changes ip:port information of those requests from the internal ip and a port in that machine to be the router external ip and a port the router has available, and then forwards the request the outside. The router also records this association between the external machine, the port the router used for it and the internal machine and the port on it the connection came from, on an internal table so that when the OUTSIDE machine connects to the router on that specific port, the router treats that inbound connection request as associated to the earlier outbound request and does the reverse translation - it forwards that inbound request to the internal machine and port of the original outbound connection.
However - all this only works when your machine first connects from the inside to an machine on the outside, because that’s when the router translates the IP address and Port and memorizes that association. If however you gave the IP address in some other way to that remote machine other than connecting to it via the router (for example, you have registered a Domain Name pointing to it, or you just gave the IP address and port number to a friend and told them “this is my Jellyfin machine”), any connection coming from the outside will not be routed by the router to your machine, because the router never had an original outbound connection to make the association for any return inbound connections: from its point of view some random machine is trying to connect to one if its ports and it simply doesn’t know which internal machine and on which port on it is supposed to get this connection from that unknown external machine.
Also all this is dynamic - after a while of one such association not being used, the router will remove it from memory.
Port Forwarding is a static way to explicitly configure in a router that all connections arriving at a specific port of the router are ALWAYS to be forwarded to a specific internal machine and a specific port on that machine.
Given that the association is static, you can give the outside world in any way you like without involving the router (for example, listing in some kind of shared list, which is what the Torrent protocol does), the IP of the router + the forwarded router port, as the address for a “service” that’s running on your internal machine, and any request coming from the outside on that port even if your machine never connected to that remote machine, ever gets forwarded to the internal machine and the port you configured there.
With port forwarding you can for example host your own website behind a VPN or in a home machine that’s not directly connected to the internet because any requests coming into a specific port on the router that does have a direct connection to the internet always get forward to that machine and the port on it you configured.
In the old days Port Forwarding had to be manually configured on the Router (for example, via a web-interface), but nowadays there is a protocol called uPNP that lets programs running on your machine automatically request that the router sets up a Port Forwarding for them so this is often done transparently, which how most networked applications sitting on a machine at home behind a home routers, work just fine since those routers always support port forwarding.
PS: All this shit is actually one enormous hack, that only exists because IPv4 doesn’t have sufficient IP addresses for all Internet connected machines in the World. The newer IPv6 does have more than enough, so it’s theoretically possible that all your machines get a valid Internet IPv6 address and are thus directly reachable without any NAT on the router and associated problems. However I’m not sure if VPN provides which do support IPv6 actually have things set-up to just give client machines a direct, valid on the Internet IP address, plus a lot of protocols and applications out there still only work with IPv4 (byte . byte . byte . byte) addresses.
Thank you for taking the time writing all this up for me. That makes me glad I asked because most info I was finding with google-foo was telling me to set up port forwarding the old way with my router and not really doing a good job of laying out how and why it works to begin with. After having switched from Tribbler to a client that has uPNP, now I think I understand why I’m struggling with it less. I’m unsure if my Soulseek is connected and sending data right but this gives me some better ideas of how to find out.
I used to seed everything religiously. Then I joined some private trackers, and suddenly I felt like I needed to conserve all that upload bandwidth for torrents on private trackers. Humans kinda suck. I still seed plenty, tho:
I just throttled it to 10mbps.
Private get unlimited (1gbps)
Sorry guys but I’m living out of a 500GB hard drive. Anything that I’m not using regularly gets purged.
Personally I enjoy seeing the numbers go up. Looking at the current top ten by ratio according to my torrent client most of them are obscure things that I’m probably the only one seeding — but the number one spot, at a ratio of 565, goes to “Shrek (2001) [1080p]”.
Eh, mine’s
linuxmint-20-cinnamon-64bitMine is a odd Xbox torrent with like a 39 ratio. Everything else is like a 2.5 or 3 ratio max.
Damn, I am only at a ratio of like 10 from some season packs of Chuck and The Mentalist. 565 is crazy!
I love seeding.
All my torrents seed for a bit but then remain in “queue” forever.
I suffer with seeding unpopular torrents and rarely see my ratio even each 1.0
I mostly seed stuff that’s on the verge of being lost media and my ratio is often insane because there just aren’t other seeds. Ironically for many old/unpopular films the Internet Archive is a better than any torrents.
The comment on this internet archive review in particular had me laughing.
internet archive is amazing; i found a 100gb woodstock 94 bootleg vhs collection of the 3 day ppv recording and it took like 2 days to download despite only having 1-2 seeders
just had a silly idea: stopping your torrent right as it starts to seed (to avoid ISP letters) is like pulling out as a form of birth control
Coitus interruptus
One of the few latin expression I memorized, because that’s how the Catholic Church calls it since that’s their recommended “contraception” method, all of which I find hilarious.
Yeah, but you still seed while you download
Digital pre-cum.
How do I delete someone else’s comment?
Meta’s legal defense was that they limited seeding to a minimal value as a precaution when they pirated terabytes of books. Of course, I don’t expect the same ruling would be granted to an individual… Shit is fucked.
JFC people, use protection
you mean a VPN ?
yes
Has the law in any jurisdiction determined that sharing some small fraction of bits is equivalent to sharing an entire series of bits? And how do they determine that? Like I’m sending 1s and 0s right now. Is that a violation?
I mean, at that point everything is legal if we pretend to just send “random” 0s and 1s
But there must be some kind of burden of proof, right? If I leech 0.001% of a file, have I really pirated that file? If yes, then how small does the amount go? If no, then how large does it go? Or if they have to prove intent, well then that can go to trial…
The law is whatever the judge says it is. You could have undeniable proof of your innocence and still get convicted.
In the piratebay trial, just announcing the hashes was bad enough for a conviction
I mean, that’s kind of what encrypted traffic looks like to anyone without the private key
You guys go out and talk to girls? Disgusting, they have cooties.
Ones with pp are peak
People should learn how to seed. If you don’t want to seed, just pay for Usenet.
It’s a shame Usenet has become fully paid. It’s what ultimately pushed me into torrents. And the fact that small communities don’t have all the content out there for you to download via Usenet.
Downloading large files from Usenet was paid pretty early on. If the core functionality of Usenet is now paid, this is news to me.
There weren open test servers though and sites with limited trials but no data limit.
That’s what I used back in the day. Sadly all these trial offers are gone now and demand credit card information upfront.
Is that Matt & Marisha?
We wish. It’d give torrenting and sharing content a pretty good PR check.
