This might be caused by your I/O reaching the limits while doing random reads. Reducing the amount of peers you connect to may fix the problem.

Tell me something, what’s the state of those torrents?

Transmission :P

If you’re having issues with Transmission most likely the problem is in another thing… like an hard drive or some other piece of software.

The current censorship of media companies and stream services is a much bigger threat to the preservation of media than digital decaying could ever be.

Seeding will work without port forwarding however you’ll miss seeding opportunities. If you don’t have port forwarding you’ll only be able to seed to other people who have it working.

Whenever you torrent from public torrent trackers it’s easy for anyone to see what torrents your IP is currently downloading / seeding. There’s even a website for that https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/

ISPs and govts may track your torrent downloads on the same way that website does. It essentially boils down to indexing the torrents from those public trackers by listening to the DHT network / PEX exchanges. When you’re on a decent private tracker (and there are some free) they will disable DHT/PEX for their torrents making it so nobody can’t index and they won’t show up on websites like the one above.

Setting your torrent client to require encryption to all connections it will create an extra protection layer because then the ISP / govt won’t be able to peek into your bittorrent traffic, they’ll only see an encrypted TLS connection like the ones made to any SSL capable website. You may also add a blacklist of known entities that go after pirates so your torrent client won’t ever connect to those.

If you live outside the US/Canada/AUS you most likely don’t even need those measures, let alone a VPN. That entire thing about sending letters to people saying they’re downloading torrents is mostly a US thing because in other countries ISPs can’t even legally do it.

Do you really need a VPN? What’s your country / context?

Are you aware that if you use a good private tracker (one that keeps their torrents private and has a good reputation) and configure your client to require encryption for all connections you may not need a VPN?

Piracy isn’t purely about getting things for free, it’s about convince and preserving digital media too.

I agree with you when when it comes to preservation and sometimes even quality. But when it comes to convince nothing beats Netflix.

Nope, not a child. I just don’t care specially when it comes to certain topics, or my English is actually bad.

But seriously, why would we pay for piracy by financing greedy VPN companies when you can get 98% of the security for free by using a good private tracker + requiring encryption?

The thing is that private tracker aren’t visible on that link.

You’re not paying for the content, you’re paying for the server upkeep.

This is a very, very questionable statement, we all know that people do profit from selling access to piracy.

That’s exactly what I said it’s for “to check and make sure your configuration is correct”.

What you said was: “Private tracker torrents are still visible to the public” and this isn’t true.

I do have an argument: https://lemmy.world/comment/7648533

Any free private tracker worth your time has DHT/PEX disabled thus making their torrents invisible for your typical govt / private entity searching for pirates. If those torrents aren’t public and can’t be searched indexed via DHT then the ISP or whatever knows you’re using the bittorrent protocol but they don’t know for what content. This particularly correct if you use sane settings in your torrent clients such as a blocklist + requiring encryption for all connections.

If you do those simple things and a use a private tracker you trust then your ISP/Govt can’t point fingers at you, they’ve no way of knowing what you’re downloading.

https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/ – Plug your IP into that. Private tracker torrents are still visible to the public.

What you’re saying isn’t correct, at least for properly configured private trackers and clients.

I did try that website and that’s the thing, the only torrents that show up are public ones. Torrents from private trackers like iptorrents are not showing on that list as expected. They don’t show, because they can’t access them, just read their about page and you’ll understand why:

Our system collects torrent files in two ways: parsing torrent sites and listening DHT network

Any private tracker worth your time has DHT/PEX disabled for their torrents because if they didn’t then the torrents were essentially public.

Are you 12?

But man, paying for pirated content? Even if you ignore everything else, it’s over the line.

C’mon you’ve plenty of private trackers you can join with an invite from someone else and nobody will easily track you like they can do in public torrents.

If “feds decide to do something about piracy” I’m sure as shit your cheapo VPN isn’t going to protect you against them. People bought into all the marketing from VPN providers, that’s what’s really going on.

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I won’t pay for piracy and that includes a pointless piece of shit VPN that won’t protect you anyways if things get serious.