Hi, I was wondering how they do this and if there is a way to “cheat” the amount of data you are downloading or seeding.

  • Yote.zip@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    You have a unique “passkey” in the torrent that you download, and the tracker won’t let you connect without it. I wouldn’t try to cheat it, or you’ll likely end up banned. Trackers have scripts to detect tampering.

        • heartlessevil@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Additionally magnet links. The torrent files and magnet links (which are equivalent) need to have your user key in them not only to track your ratio but just to make sure you’re a member of the tracker.

          In other contexts this kind of user tracking is called a session key and using someone else’s torrent file is called a replay attack or a session hijack.

    • Lazz45@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Not to mention its not a huge scene. If you get black-listed, you might have a hell of a time getting back in to decent trackers if the admins share info on known blacklisters

  • neo (he/him)@lemmy.comfysnug.space
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    1 year ago

    Your tracker url in your downloaded torrent files has a unique passkey in it that allows access and associates activity with your account.

    This is why you cannot share .torrent files. The contents of the .torrent files are usually fair game to make another torrent of though!

  • onescomplement@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    There’s no point in cheating. Any good private tracker will let maintain a sizeable buffer assuming you seed with things like bonus points/free leech.

    If it’s difficult to maintain a buffer, plan to move to a different tracker that will.

    Plus, the big private trackers communicate with one another. Get caught in one, you’ll be found out in others.

    • azerial@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      And a lot of private trackers have some type of points system to fix your ratio if it gets out of whack. They award points for seeding.

  • Teknikal@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s possible but eventually you will get banned I remember a torrent client that let me multiply my seeding by 100 I did use it back when file list was a thing.

    That said I can’t ever remember seeing anything similar since.

    • heartlessevil@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      There is no reason that this should be possible on a private tracker. Public trackers, yes. Private ones need user authentication to let you download anything so it’s trivial to track the ratio at the same time.

      • Teknikal@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Filelist org while it no longer exists was a private tracker and I can absolutely say the cheating ratio client completely worked.

        While I’m not proud of keeping myself ratio balanced that way (I had a very tiny upload compared to download) I can absolutely say a hacked uttorrent client kept me well above ratio at the time.

        It worked well although I kinda glad I haven’t seen similar mods sinxe

  • AphoticDev@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    If you don’t want to go to the effort to maintain a ratio, just use Usenet and never worry about seeding or leeching again.

  • chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Just setup a seedbox, man…why you gotta cheat?

    If you don’t want to do that, switch to usenet or public trackers with a VPN. Private trackers are small and require seeders to keep torrents alive. That’s why they incentivize it.