Not finding peers and leechers

Windows specific questions, problems.
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cos

Not finding peers and leechers

Post by cos »

Hi,

I downloaded a torrent from [torrent site] which says there are 9 seeders and 4 leechers. qBittorrent has been sitting there now for hours not downloading anything and is only reporting 0(1) seeds.

I have also tried this out on uTorrent with similar results so it doesn't look like the clients are at fault???

How do websites such as [torrent site] determine the number of seeds and leechers? If they are checking trackers then how can I not see the same peers and download?

Is there anything I can do to improve this situation?

As far as I am aware there aren't any issues with the connection as I can download in uTorrent unless there are an additional setup steps in qBittorrent which I need to perform.

I am also using NordVPN, but I'm not sure that makes much difference???

Thanks
qB007

Re: Not finding peers and leechers

Post by qB007 »

Torrent indexers report the number of seeds/peers according to trackers. But The the number of seeds/peers you have seen on that website must be simply outdated.
In all cases what you need to improve the situation is:
1-Having your port forwarded correctly. This can be decisive when there is only one seeder, and his port is closed.
2-Adding multiple active public trackers to your torrent. I think it's not allowed to write their links here, but you can google "list free public torrent trackers 2022"
3-Leave DHT and Peer Exchange enabled.
4-Be patient, and open your torrent client daily as long as you can, until you get what you want. I remember once it took me about 3 months to finish a download!
5- When you are using a VPN, make sure you are connected to a BitTorrent friendly server.
cos

Re: Not finding peers and leechers

Post by cos »

Hi,

I guess some of the tracking data being misleading is a ploy to get more people to use the site as it looks popular. It did say that the seeders and leechers were updated up to a couple of hours ago but I guess this could say anything in order to look good!!

I've been looking at port forwarding and whilst I understand the concept, I cannot find any reliable data for when a VPN is used.
NordVPN do say that it doesn't port forward but it does have P2P servers. It doesn't matter which VPN is used, I'm still not sure how to set up port forwarding.
I have a fairly complicated setup, which I am not sure is the best. I am running NordVPN on a Virtual machine on my laptop which which uses NAT to connect via wifi to my router. So, I'm not really sure where the routers port forwarding interna port needs to point - I would assume to the laptop as the VM doesn't have it's own IP address. Not sure how or if NordVPN is effected by this?
Switeck

Re: Not finding peers and leechers

Post by Switeck »

If you're using a VPN or proxy, it's pointless to port forward your local router.

The port forwarding needs to be on the VPN's end, otherwise qBitTorrent or any BitTorrent client will be hopelessly firewalled.
So does NordVPN support port forwarding?
cos

Re: Not finding peers and leechers

Post by cos »

After some investigation, loesn't look like VPN allows port forwarding.

But I have realised I am paying for a VPN which does have port forwarding so will be switching over to that and seeing how I get on.
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