anyone wants to participate? rewriting some of the help & FAQ topics, i mean, experienced users telling inexperienced ones what to do?
or maybe do like a 'faq in-process' section in forum? or maybe there are new questions that can go into faq?
for example (and please, feel free to add to the answers, or add questions, or whatever else ideas):
question. torrent has no seeds.. what do i do?
answer 1. check last active time, if it's as recent as a few weeks, start download, and wait a few hours or maybe a day or two. some users don't seed everything they have due to bandwidth waste, scraping all inactive torrents and looking for downloaders, scrapes usually happen once in a few hours, so it might take a white before clients start your torrent to be seeded, but it's a big chance it'll happen. if nothing changed after several hours - refer to answer 2. if last active time counts as several months or years - refer to answer 2.
answer 2. request a re-seed, find link in middle of the page, click it, reason, submit. start download.
question: what is "connectable"?
answer. "connectable" usually refers to your torrent clients (thus - you, because you're the one who set that client up) and means other torrent clients can connect to you by initiating that connection from their side, i.e. they can get through your Firewall to your torrent client and tell it something, for example, request some data or offer it (actual download and upload first has to be negotiated by the clients), or initiate a handshake (in the very beginning of the "negotiation")...
question: what's good in being "connectable"? what's bad in being "not-connectable"?
answer. the difference being connectable and not-connectable boils down to one simple fact: when starting a new torrent, you (or your client) can only start getting data (downloading) from peers that are connectable. not-connectable peers will not know about your download unless they ask the tracker if there are any new downloaders... download speeds are fast these days and clients are instructed to update their peer info with tracker every 1-1.5 hours. so the chances are you'll finish download long before the time the not-connectable peers even decide to ask about you... this situation is completely reversible, i.e. when seeding something while being connectable will allow new downloaders start getting data from you right away, or at least get in line and wait for their turn to download from you (queues aka wait-lines are managed by the torrent clients). if you are a not-connectable seeder, - new downloaders will only be able to get data from you, if you "offer" it to them, and that is only in case they are connectable, so that you can connect to them to make that offer... to finally answer the question, being "connectable" means always being on top of things, always being ready to offer data to new downloaders, thus connectable users usually have good Share Ratio. while being "not-connectable" means always being late to the data exchange, sometimes luckily getting in on it, and even then only being able to offer little amounts of data, because requesting (downloading) client will prefer getting data from connectable clients.. thus not-connectable users usually suffer from low Share Ratio, slow download speeds, downloads get interrupted, because clients usually (or at least used to) try and reconnect after every rather significant data exchange, thus not-connectable clients end up transferring just a few packets of data and waiting to reconnect, while connectable clients keep transferring and transferring...
question: who checks/decides if i am "connectable" or not?
answer. when your client first addresses the tracker with info on this new upload or download (peer) that you're trying to start, tracker initiates a test connection to your peer (client) according to the info provided info, and if it cannot connect to you within a reasonable 2-3 second time period, it assumes your peer is not-connectable. so it is possible to have simultaneously connectable and not-connectable peers, because some times something maybe wrong, some connections time out, etc. for these cases we have tools to "fix your peers" right here, i.e. if the majority of your peers are good (connectable), then we assume not-connectable (we also say bad or poor peers) were due to some faulty circumstances in the moment of the initial check, and simply change their status with the tracker from "bad" to "good".
question: does tracker treat connectable peers somehow selectively better then not-connectable ones?
answer. No. tracker doesn't care who is what. when new torrent download comes in and asks for peers (data sources), the tracker provides up to 20 of those, not regarding if they are bad or good, simply letting your client figure out the rest. that is done to make sure all possible ways to download are attempted by your client, plus some peers sometimes change into connectable mode after been "bad" for days... and otherwise there're no other ways your good or poor peers could be treated by the tracker. so generally speaking, "connectability" is your own "responsibility"... being connectable will help you download things faster and upload at full speed, maximize your input and output.
question: how to become "connectable" (and stay that way)?
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