This guide was originally one of the helpful posts from ScottyHamish in our forums. Be sure to send him a cigar if this guide has helped you. Since the “How do I fix my ratio” question seems to crop up again and again I decided to edit it and turn it into a beginners guide to improving your ratio on our site. Most of the tips in this guide are also covered in our FAQ, but they're presented here in a more bitesize form.

The first thing you can do to help yourself improve your ratio is to GET CONNECTABLE. Users who are not connectable won't be able to connect to eachother which results in slow download and upload speeds. Read our guide to becoming connectable to learn how to do this. This guide is a bit technical, but if you follow the instructions you'll be connectable in no time.

Secondly, manage your downloads. If you've just signed up and you feel like a kid in a candy store, don't keep eating until you get sick. That will get you banned by the system pretty quickly, so be careful. If there's something you are dying for and it's just 700MB or so, go ahead, but generally you need patience. There's plenty of time to get most of the really cool stuff here. You don't want to get greedy and download all the really obscure stuff that has been on here a while and has no action. The best you can do is try to stay under 5GB until you can build up a bit of a buffer of upload credit (at least 1.5 times as much as you have downloaded helps, more is better). You will need to download some torrents that you might have no interest in. Search for whatever has the most leechers and if it has a bonus coin then download it (Don't jump on the collections right away, though. There's time for those later). It will seed as you leech it and you will only get charged for a percentage of the download while getting a bonus for the upload.

Also, to get the most bang for your buck check out the featured torrents on the first page. Every two days these featured torrents get updated. Set an alarm or something to remind yourself to jump on the new featured torrents as quickly as possible. You'll only get charged 50% of your download and gain 150% for your upload. You might have to do this a few times until you can get some decent upload credit. It helps to grab them the first hour but users will leech from you all day.

Downloading collections is also a good way to build ratio, but you have to be really careful with them. While collections might show a lot of leechers, many of those might actually be seeders who only downloaded a portion of the collection and aren't going to be leeching from you at all. If you download from a collection it's good practice to only choose a few items at a time. Most bittorrent clients will allow you to select which files to download in a collection torrent. Over a few days you will notice they will get leeched from you, and thanks to the bonus your ratio will build exponentially. You can then download more in the collection as you can “afford” it. When downloading collections with a high number of seeders you might get great download speeds. While this is great when you have a good ratio already it can be potentially devastating to your account when you're still struggling, because you often download much faster than you can upload. A measure you can take against this is to limit your download speed in your torrent client. In most torrent clients you can limit either your global download speed or your download speed per torrent. Just right click on the torrent in your client and select its properties. You will be able to set the max download speed from there.

Another thing is that you earn credits for participating in the site. Uploads, seeding, posting in the forums, cigar gifts, etc. will get you credits. Some of them are “earned” and will be next to your name and will give you rankpoints as well. Ranks are basically meaningless except for the fun of it. They show that you are an active member. You also have spendable credits. These you can spend on several things such as upload GB credit. You can also give out cigars to those that do favors or upload torrents you especially like. The folks here are exceedingly generous and friendly.

Another easy way to get credits and at the same time safeguard your account from being defective is to donate money. Each £1 you donate earns you 12 credits and if you donate £10 your defective account will be promoted back to user status and you will get a nifty star next to your name.

The absolute best thing you can do to improve your own ratio is to upload something yourself. This helps you and the community as a whole, which will help you earn credits. The more people snatch your uploads, the more credits your earn. If you upload something popular someone might even send you a cigar. Be sure to thank them. Manners are always appreciated. So dive into your movie collection and get uploading. But before you do make sure you understand our rules and read the sticky threads in our Customs and Excise forum.

And finally, seed what you download for as long as you can.

I hope this guide has been informative to you and I thank you for reading.