TV-Vault News

Don't include junk in your torrents

Gentle users, a swift perusal of the forums will reveal that there have been problems reseeding some shows because of extraneous files in the torrents which potential reseeders no longer have. This is unfortunate and, more to the point. unnecessary. We therefore ask (nay, demand) that you leave the annoying junk out of your torrents.

What constitutes 'annoying junk', you may ask.

Well, to start with…
• Screenshots, covers, or other images. There's no need for them to be included inside the torrent; that's what torrent descriptions are for.
• 'downloaded from x' files. Fascinating though it is to know that a file came from demonoid or BigAssTorrents, a credit in the torrent description is quite enough.
• Thumbnails: .tbn files, thumbs.db, etc. I don't know what they are, but you Windows and "media center" users seem fierce fond of them.
• Samples. We don't need another copy of part of one of the episodes.

DVD and other extras are more than welcome, of course, though we would prefer they be in a separate torrent, so that people who aren't interested in them don't have to grab them.

Subtitles and proper NFOs are also welcome.

Now, I know what you're going to say. "With the image sites going down left and right, surely the screenshots are a good thing?" It's a valid point. However, consider this: if an image site goes down, it's easy to fix the description. Even if the uploader doesn't have the screenshots, anyone who's grabbed the show can make new ones and post them in the appropriate thread. If a torrent only has a few snatches, we're relying on a small pool having the entire torrent contents in order to reseed. bittorrent doesn't divide its chunks by file; it does it by size. This means that if you're unable to reseed a text file or jpeg, you're almost certainly going to be unable to reseed all of the episodes to completion; you're going to be missing the first or last chunk once it's finished rehashing.

And on that point: are you really saving that much disk space/bandwidth by not downloading the NFO or other files? All you're doing is making the torrent appear unnecessarily in other users' Seeds Wanted list, making it less likely that others will be believe a reseed is necessary when someone else genuinely wants a download. It also means that, should it be removed from your client, you'll be unable to reseed even the episodes for reasons mentioned above.

To summarize, then: don't include screenshots and other junk in your torrent. And please download the whole torrent if at all possible.