The following clients are currently banned:

• µTorrent 1.1-1.3
• BitComet 0.5x, 0.6x and derivatives (BitLord)
• BitSpirit
• TorrentStorm
• BitBuddy
• BitSpirit
• Shareaza
• XBT
• TurboBT

Recommended clients are listed in the Links.

If for some reason (e.g. pc crash, or frozen client) your client exits improperly and you restart it, it will have a new peer_id, so it will show as a new torrent. Since your client never told the tracker you stopped the old torrent, it will be listed in your profile until the next time your client announces. Just ignore it, it will eventually go away.

Some clients, notably TorrentStorm and Nova Torrent, do not report properly to the tracker when canceling or finishing a torrent. In that case the tracker will keep waiting for some message - and thus listing the torrent as seeding or leeching - until some timeout occurs. Ignore it, it will eventually go away.

When a torrent is first started, the tracker uses the IP to identify the user. Therefore the torrent will become associated with the user who last accessed the site from that IP. If you share your IP in some way (you are behind NAT/ICS, or using a proxy), and some of the persons you share it with are also users, you may occasionally see their torrents listed in your profile. (If they start a torrent session from that IP and you were the last one to visit the site the torrent will be associated with you). Note that now torrents listed in your profile will always count towards your total stats.

To make sure your torrents show up in your profile you should visit the site immediately before starting a session.

(The only way to completely stop foreign torrents from showing in profiles is to forbid users without an individual IP from accessing the site. Yes, that means you. Complain at your own risk.)

There may be three reasons for this:

• The torrent may have been in violation of the site rules.
• The uploader may have deleted it. You can check the Site Log to see if it has been deleted within the past 31 days.
• There was no activity on it for over 72 hours and it was automatically deleted.

Open the .torrent file. When your client asks you for a location, choose the location of the existing file(s) and it will resume/reseed the torrent.

The more pieces you have, the harder it becomes to find peers who have pieces you are missing. That is why downloads sometimes slow down or even stall when there are just a few percent remaining. Just be patient and you will, sooner or later, get the remaining pieces.

The tracker has determined that you are firewalled or NATed and cannot accept incoming connections. This means that while you will be able to connect to other peers in the swarm, they will be unable to connect to you; so, if two peers are unconnectable, neither of them can accept the connection and they will not be able to connect to one another at all. This has obviously a detrimental effect on the overall speed of the torrent.
The way to solve the problem involves opening the ports used for incoming connections (which should be defined in your client) on your software or hardware firewall. Check your router's documentation and/or support forum.
You will also find lots of information on the subject, as well as guides for most models of routers, at PortForward.

The download speed mostly depends on the seeder-to-leecher ratio (SLR). Poor download speed is mainly a problem with new and very popular torrents where the SLR is low, or with very old torrents which the seeders have dropped off. Since we have only a little over 3 peers per torrent thanks to how comparatively new we are, the main cause of poor download speeds is simply that we don't have enough users - the best way to ensure good download speeds in future is keep your account active and tell all your friends to tell all their friends to signup; and of course, seed all you can so that you're not being part of the problem yourself.

There are a couple of things that you can try on your end to improve your speed:

• Do not immediately jump on new torrents
  • In particular, do not do it if you have a slow connection. The best speeds will be found around the half-life of a torrent, when the SLR will be at its highest. (The downside is that you will not be able to seed so much. It's up to you to balance the pros and cons of this.)

• Make yourself connectable
  • See the Why am I listed as not connectable? section.

• Limit your upload speed
  • The upload speed affects the download speed in essentially two ways:
  • Bittorrent peers tend to favour those other peers that upload to them. This means that if A and B are leeching the same torrent and A is sending data to B at high speed then B will try to reciprocate. So due to this effect high upload speeds lead to high download speeds.
  • Due to the way TCP works, when A is downloading something from B it has to keep telling B that it received the data sent to him. (These are called acknowledgements - ACKs -, a sort of “got it!” messages). If A fails to do this then B will stop sending data and wait. If A is uploading at full speed there may be no bandwidth left for the ACKs and they will be delayed. So due to this effect excessively high upload speeds lead to low download speeds.
  • The full effect is a combination of the two. The upload should be kept as high as possible while allowing the ACKs to get through without delay. A good thumb rule is keeping the upload at about 80% of the theoretical upload speed. You will have to fine tune yours to find out what works best for you. (Remember that keeping the upload high has the additional benefit of helping with your ratio.)
  • If you are running more than one instance of a client it is the overall upload speed that you must take into account. Some clients (e.g. Azureus) limit global upload speed, others (e.g. Shad0w's) do it on a per torrent basis. Know your client. The same applies if you are using your connection for anything else (e.g. browsing or ftp), always think of the overall upload speed.

• Limit the number of simultaneous connections
  • Some operating systems (like Windows 9x) do not deal well with a large number of connections, and may even crash. Also some home routers (particularly when running NAT and/or firewall with stateful inspection services) tend to become slow or crash when having to deal with too many connections. There are no fixed values for this, you may try 60 or 100 and experiment with the value. Note that these numbers are additive, if you have two instances of a client running the numbers add up.

• Limit the number of simultaneous uploads
  • Isn't this the same as above? No. Connections limit the number of peers your client is talking to and/or downloading from. Uploads limit the number of peers your client is actually uploading to. The ideal number is typically much lower than the number of connections, and highly dependent on your (physical) connection.

• Just give it some time
  • As explained above peers favour other peers that upload to them. When you start leeching a new torrent you have nothing to offer to other peers and they will tend to ignore you. This makes the starts slow, in particular if, by change, the peers you are connected to include few or no seeders. The download speed should increase as soon as you have some pieces to share.

The most important thing to remember is virus scanners (especially lesser-used ones) can sometimes throw up false positives, so check the number of people who've downloaded the file; if lots of people have grabbed it and there are no comments to the effect of there being a virus, it's safe enough to ignore it. If very few people have downloaded it, post a comment in the torrent or on the forums to see if anyone else has found anything similar. In the event that a torrent is found to contain some kind of malware, it will be removed and appropriate action taken against the uploader.

Simply re-download/re-open the .torrent file. When your client asks you for a location, choose the location of the existing file(s) and it will resume/reseed the torrent.

Internet connectivity comes in various mediums, speeds, and duplexes. But the majority of internet users have a download:upload bandwidth ratio of 10:1. Effectively, this means that you will always be able to download up to ten times faster than you can upload. Users new to the torrent community can sometimes be caught off guard by this simple fact, and their ratios can be permanently (sometimes terminally) crippled.

Don't be one of those users: catch the problem before it starts, and have the self-discipline to limit your overall number of downloads or your download bandwidth in order to keep your ratio reasonable. For tips on successfully uploading, check the New Users' Guide.

Bittorrent clients check the data they receive for integrity. When a piece fails this check it is automatically re-downloaded. Occasional hash fails are a common occurrence, and you shouldn't worry.

Some clients have an (advanced) option/preference to 'kick/ban clients that send you bad data' or similar. It should be turned on, since it makes sure that if a peer repeatedly sends you pieces that fail the hash check it will be ignored in the future.

See above. If your client receives bad data it will have to redownload it, therefore you may download more data than the total torrent size. If your client has the facility to ban peers who consistently send bad data, make sure it is switched on.

Your client is reporting to the tracker that it uses one of the default bittorrent ports (6881-6889) or any other common p2p port for incoming connections.

TorrentBits trackers do not allow clients to use ports commonly associated with p2p protocols. The reason for this is that it is a common practice for ISPs to throttle those ports (that is, limit the bandwidth, hence the speed).

The blocked ports list includes, but is not neccessarily limited to, the following:

In order to use use our tracker you must configure your client to use any port range that does not contain those ports (a range within the region 49152 through 65535 is preferable, cf. IANA). Notice that some clients, like Azureus 2.0.7.0 or higher, use a single port for all torrents, while most others use one port per open torrent. The size of the range you choose should take this into account (typically less than 10 ports wide. There is no benefit whatsoever in choosing a wide range, and there are possible security implications).

These ports are used for connections between peers, not client to tracker. Therefore this change will not interfere with your ability to use other trackers (in fact it should increase your speed with torrents from any tracker, not just ours). Your client will also still be able to connect to peers that are using the standard ports. If your client does not allow custom ports to be used, you will have to switch to one that does.

Do not ask us, or in the forums, which ports you should choose. The more random the choice is the harder it will be for ISPs to catch on to us and start limiting speeds on the ports we use. If we simply define another range ISPs will start throttling that range also.

Finally, remember to forward the chosen ports in your router and/or open them in your firewall, should you have them. See the Why am I listed as not connectable? section and links therein for more information on this.

The reason for this is that your client and the tracker use different methods of determining whether or not you're seeding; your client knows which files you've specified to not download and as such when you've downloaded everything you want from a torrent, it will tick over to “Seeding” status. Unfortunately the tracker has no way of knowing which files you plan on downloading and as such will only count you as properly “Seeding” the torrent if you have 100% of it, so if you've only downloaded certain files from a torrent, the tracker will still class you as downloading it.

Be aware that if you do breach this download limit, any torrents you're partially seeding will remain connected to peers and transferring data to them, but any data transferred will not count towards your total upload figure, as the tracker will reject your client's connection attempt for these torrents. Furthermore, you will not be properly credited for any completed torrents started after you have breached this limit – you must first take restorative action, and then either restart as many torrents as you are allowed, or wait for the tracker's cleanup script to run (approximately every 30 minutes).

See above.

If you just want to fix it reboot your computer, it should solve the problem. Otherwise read on.

IOError means Input-Output Error, and that is a file system error, not a tracker one. It shows up when your client is for some reason unable to open the partially downloaded torrent files. The most common cause is two instances of the client to be running simultaneously: the last time the client was closed it somehow didn't really close but kept running in the background, and is therefore still locking the files, making it impossible for the new instance to open them.

A more uncommon occurrence is a corrupted FAT. A crash may result in corruption that makes the partially downloaded files unreadable, and the error ensues. Running scandisk should solve the problem. (Note that this may happen only if you're running Windows 9x - which only support FAT - or NT/2000/XP with FAT formatted hard drives. NTFS is much more robust and should never permit this problem.)

Most common reasons for stats not updating:

• The user is cheating. (a.k.a. “Summary Ban”)
• The server is overloaded and unresponsive. If you wait until the server comes back up, the next time it accepts an announce it will update with any data you have sent or received since it went down. (Flooding the server with consecutive manual updates is not recommended.)
• Your client has a bug related to stat reporting. Most clients with these bugs are known - if you are using one of these, or an old or beta version of any client, you do it at your own risk.

To avoid/fix problems of this nature:

• If a torrent you are currently leeching/seeding is not listed on your profile, just wait or force a manual update.
• Make sure you exit your client properly, so that the tracker receives “event=completed”.
• If the tracker is down, do not stop seeding. As long as the tracker comes back up before you exit the client, your stats will update properly.