Ratio/seeding problems anyone?

Apart from the usual standard suggestions on private tracker sites, here is a tip for getting up and running on trackers where seeding is difficult. The dance around the golden calf of ratio leads to an excessive over-supply of seeding capacity on many private trackers, so for those who live in countries/areas with an inferior infrastructure and low bandwidth, the following might be worth trying out.

If you cannot get or afford a seedbox because you live in a third world country or in the province, outbacks or the like, use the tracker as an announcement board rather than sucking it dry from the very beginning. In other words, look which software, music, games and movies are being published (preferably not compressed, i.e. the .iso instead of multi-part .rar/.zip archives) and then search for them on public trackers or file sharing hosts. After having seeded them back there -- which is far easier and quicker -- to a ratio of 100% (1.00), cut them off from public trackers, because many private trackers cannot distinguish between uploads to them and to other trackers; if you upload to them and the public at the same time, they often interpret that as 'ratio cheating', although the ideal and idea of 'sharing' is being upheld.

Now download the torrent file from the private tracker, but do not start it yet. Copy the previously downloaded files into the temporary download directory and force a re-check on them. Your BitTorrent client will realize that you already have most of the content, except for the nonsense text files à la «this was downloaded from NitwitTor.duh». Subsequently, start the torrent to get those few missing .nfo files from the private tracker, which will then start seeding. This way, your ratio will be positive even if you can only upload/seed a few MegaBytes before the guys with the big seedbox guns dish out the warez with shovels.

It is somewhat ironic that the concept of ratio is nowadays hindering instead of fostering the free interchange of information on private trackers, but until administrators finally wake up and come to the obvious conclusion that upload capacity is not a bottleneck any longer, seeding/ratio problems will continue to make up 80% of all cries for help in the respective user fora -- which of course is a nice argument for administrators to 'encourage' members to pay, pardon, 'donate' to the site.

People in places with a good IT infrastructure will probably not need to go through this kind of hoops, and people who live in countries where software piracy is watched with a vulture's eye by the authorities might want to steer clear of public trackers, but for others, this can be a life saver until you built up a buffer that allows you to download from the private tracker directly.

Good luck in your new community and take care.