this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Does it not impact downloading? I thought the lack of port forwarding on my VPN was what was causing me to not connect to seeders even though qBittorrent shows them
No.
My (possibly mistaken) understanding is that during the download phase your client is contacting seeds requesting parts. Although the data is going to be incoming it's still an outbound connection because your client initiated it, so you don't need to be connectable for that.
It's the seeding phase which is problematic because downloaders can't contact you to request parts. That said your client will still contact downloaders and offer parts, which again is an outbound connection so you don't need to be contactable.
In summary download speeds are uneffected, but seeding rates will be diminished. With most private trackers you can still satisfy seeding requirements just by keeping the torrent available for however long.
As an aside I use mullvad & wireguard. I've found wireguard dramatically easier to configure, particularly in a docker environment.
I’m not on any private trackers. I’d be interested, but not until I have a more dedicated setup; I’m still very much a casual torrenter.
It’s good news then if port forwarding won’t affect my downloads, because that was the only reason I wanted it, but I saw others online say that lacking that feature is what was causing me not to connect to peers shown in my torrent client. Any idea what’s up with that?
Not really. Either my explanation is wrong or theirs is. Honestly could be either.
There's so much misunderstanding and misinformation around torrenting.
All I know is that I've never had any problems downloading without being connectable. Never ever. It's just not an issue.
Additionally, the vast majority of people torrenting in 2023 are using a vpn and none (very few) of them will forward ports so it can't be a big deal.
Thirdly, there's a lot of piracy purists / elitists who just can't abide the idea that your set up may not have the best possible configuration for seeding. IMO, seeding on a residential connection is just a waste of time - download on a residential connection, seed on a VPS / seedbox.