So that's why you have seeded torrents that you have downloaded to some extent, and why you've been able to upload new torrents of your own. You may have noticed with a new torrent you've uploaded, that sometimes there's inititally no movement, even though two or three people are trying to leech. Then 'inexplicably', another leecher joins and suddenly it's full speed ahead. That's most likely because that one new leecher has port forwarding.

It's perfectly possible to leech, seed and add new torrents from behind a VPN without port forwarding. I've done so here for ages, and maintained a 1:2ish ratio. It does take a little managing - e.g. grabbing freeleech torrents, especially when they're newly freeleeched, and trying to grab normal torrents when they're new, so you get to be a seeder early on, but it's easily doable.

However, port forwarding makes things soooo much easier. Since I got it a few months ago, I'm uploading at pretty near my full capacity most of the time. I can also grab a lot of the "orphaned" torrents that say they have one or two seeders, but that just wouldn't work before.

That's not optimal, but it does the trick for torrents with high demand. If you want to learn more about why this connectivity limitation occurs and why port-forwarding is so important for torrenting, you can read this topic I made: https://community.gaytor.rent/topic/69993/tutorial-how-to-check-if-you-re-able-to-port-forward

I can say in advance that yes, using a VPN without port-forwarding will put you in the situation described in that topic.

Hmm, but since I've uploaded some of my own files and seeded that, it has been downloaded by others . So wouldn't that mean that they were able to connect to my client?

Total traffic on that torrent was 6.5GB, but I only got the upload score from the initial upload, nothing from the seeding.

Is there a set up guide for the port forwarding? I looked at my qbittorrent settings and "Use UPnP/NAT-PMP port forwarding from my router" is enabled already.
I guess the VPN im using is the main issue?

If you use the site mainly to download older torrents, or things that you're actively searching for, as opposed to brand new torrents, your ratio you naturally plummet.

Because this is a simple offer/demand situation, when you download q torrent that has no leechers, it means you won't have anyone downloading the files from you.

So overall to keep a good ratio, you must focus on downloading torrents that have more demand. That is, brand new torrents, the sooner you get a new torrent the more likely you are to seed it enough. And the other option already mentioned is freeleech torrents, as downloading those won't ever decrease your ratio but any byte uploaded will be credited normally.

I guess im just not able use this site currently.

Thanks though!

I am also seeing that there aren't any leechers currently on any of the torrents in your profile, which is likely not helping the situation. I would recommend downloading some freeleech torrents, as these do not count towards your download totals, but absolutely DO count towards your upload totals, and they generally have far more leechers than other torrents.

It should also be worth noting that I noticed that you're using a VPN. It is fine to use a VPN, but you should be aware that when using a VPN, you need to make sure that your VPN provider supports port forwarding, and that the port your torrent client uses is forwarded through your VPN to your computer, both in TCP and UDP. This is a necessary step for getting proper upload traffic with our system.