You may find yourself in a situation where you’re unable to download *.torrent files onto the PC that you’re using. Perhaps you’re sitting in an Internet Café, public Library or other place that blocks the actual downloading (or opening) of torrent files to the computer. I know that some Universities do this, as do many non-commercial ISPs & corporate firewalls (proxies) at the workplace.

Many firewalls and security measures will block P2P traffic, filesharing programs (and any new installations of such), or disallow new ports from being added to the “allow” list. These are somewhat difficult to override, depending on the situation (not to mention risky to attempt at work). But if you are able to install, use and launch a BitTorrent client, but not download *.torrent files for it, then this tip may work well. (You may still be able to run µTorrent through a USB stick in situations where new software installations/P2P programs are not allowed).

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This is a great tip to increase your ratio on private trackers. It allows you to seed a torrent through your private BitTorrent account that’s already been downloaded from a public site (or another private one). Thus, only the upload stats will be counted towards your ratio, without incurring any downloading against it.

I’ve seen this tutorial posted elsewhere, but I’ve cleaned it up and redone it as a complete, easy-to-follow walkthrough. Credits go out to all who’ve done it before.

NOTE: This hack is not considered a dirty trick, and it likely won’t lead to you being warned or banned by your private site.

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Most people assume that RSS feeds are the best method to stay up-to-date with the latest torrents on a private tracker. This is a fallacy. With RSS, your computer/browser must request an update from the feed - typically this is set to every 15 minutes (with the shortest pull-time being 5 minutes). And that’s even if the site supports RSS - not all do.

Now, you can try running through all of the site’s torrent categories to try to keep up with the latest content, or sit in one category and constantly hit the browser’s ‘Refresh’ button like an idiot. Both of these methods work to beat out the RSS feed.

Or, you can join the private tracker’s IRC (pre) channel and watch the latest torrents being announced on-the-fly, and simply click the links as they appear. Most modern private sites use an IRC “pre-chan” to announce the torrents before (as) they get published on the site. This is beneficial in two ways:

— You’ll get instant access to the most recent torrents, typically in advance of most other site members who aren’t in the IRC channel. Unless, of course, they’re forever reloading the pages…

— This is also a great tactic for getting into the uploading swarm as early as possible. If you get in a torrent very early, everyone else jumping on it after you will use your completed parts, thus your upload rate will be higher for longer.

IRC is also a great way to gain credits or other site ‘currency’ just for being in the channel.

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