@frostycab I agree, but probably a new bug, generated by the original fix. I'm fairly sure these are the same torrents that were initially uploaded without images, so got the place holder note (actually "should get", as those torrents all got "No image"). That note doesn't seem to be being replaced with one of the images, once they've been approved.

It also isn't being replaced with an "Image awaiting approval", so it still isn't possible to see whether that torrent doesn't have a pic full stop, or whether it does now have one that just hasn't been approved yet.

@idumy This gets really complicated. I "nearly" had an answer and was going to post an "info guide", then I discovered a whole other layer which has made me pause and rethink.

In simple terms, at least one person in a swarm has to be contactable to start the torrent "conversation". This translates to having their port-forwarding enabled and correctly set up in the client. Most of us hide behind a VPN. Most VPNs don't support port forwarding.

The amount of seeders and leechers in a swarm is, in theory, irrelevant, except that the more there are, the more likely one has the port forwarding capability needed for everything to start working. The only solutions I've found so far is to switch to a VPN provider who does have a port forwarding feature, or to risk running a torrent client without that protection, exposing your real IP to the world.

I've recently tried this with another member. I'd been theoretically seeding several torrents for ages yet, even though there had also been one leecher connected for ages, nothing ever transferred. I installed a totally separate client to ensure clear separation and turned off my main client, then turned off my VPN and added four of the problem torrents to it - three I was seeding and one I was leeching but had been stuck on for weeks. The three I was seeding immediately began transferring and ran through to completion, and the other member confirmed he'd successfully grabbed them. Unfortunately this didn't solve my own leeching requirement. Having completed this test, I reverted everything back to normal.

A day or two later, suddenly around twenty similarly stuck torrents came to life, including the one I was trying to leech. On checking, I learned that the other member had tried temporarily switching to another VPN - Proton - who DO support port forwarding.

This explanation is also supported by something else I couldn't previously explain. When I upload new torrents, they can often take two, three, or even more hours before they actually start seeding. These are fairly niche torrents - Asian BL - so only a small amount of takers. The time taken is more to do with the number of leechers. There often needs to be four or five before it starts. Once it does, it's full speed ahead. Sometimes, for no apparent explanation until now, the new torrent starts pretty much as soon as there's one leecher. I can only conclude that one leecher does have port forwarding enabled and working.

Sorry that the above is so detailed! This issue has been bugging me for an awful long time, and I don't think it's something many are aware of, so I thought it information worth sharing. Unfortunately, I've now learned that it's not "the" answer I've been seeking, as there are a couple of other factors to consider. I've currently paused in my search for understanding, as I was a little worried my head would explode!

Please understand that I'm NOT suggesting just turning your VPN off for everything. We use them for a reason, and torrenting without this privacy shield is extremely risky. But, if there's something you're desperate for and you're notionally exposing yourself ( ) to only one or two seeders, you may consider it a risk worth taking in that instance. I do, though, recommend doing this one or two torrents at a time, and using a different client dedicated to solely that purpose, to minimise the risk of accidentally torrenting as usual while you're naked for all the world to see!

@apollonius Glad you've moved a step or two closer. The language barrier certainly adds a whole other level of difficulty!

Is this a "stand alone" scene or a full length video? If the latter, many have the "DVD cover" shown at the start. Or perhaps there was a cover image along with the video file where you got it from?

If you can grab an image of that, and zoom in, at the bottom of the spine, or sometimes in the blurb that would be "on the back", they give a reference number in English. (Well, not English, but in Western script. I temporarily forget the correct term for this!)

If you can find that - often with COAT it starts COCO___ or, easier, COAT1234 - that site is good at listing all the performers in that title, and the other references it's also known by. For some reason, most Japanese AV producers seem to think it's necessary for the same scene to have half-a-dozen different references!

@eonflux You can do this using something called "symbolic links". At least, they're called that in Linux. I think the MS and Mac names are siimilar but not the same.

They're basically pointers you can put in your seeding folder that point to where the real files are. Those real files can be scattered in different folders and even different drives. They can also have different names. The seeding folder matches the torrent, so that's happy. But they're 'physically' where you want, so you're happy.

Here's an example of one I'm using. In the left-hand pane are the real files. In the right, the symbolic link files. (1) and (2) show the different directory locations. I choose to have the directory names the same as each other, but they don't have to be.

If you look at the sizes of the files on the right, you'll see they're relatively tiny, so it's far more efficient than keeping two full copies of each, one how you prefer, the other for seeding.

I've written a fairly detailed guide of how it works and how to implement it, if it's of interest. It's written for Linux, but the principles and process apply to Windows no differently.

@sidneejmas I strongly encourage anyone who can afford it to donate at least once, regardless of having a ratio problem or not. It costs money to keep the site running, so I'm sure every penny helps.

I'm assuming ratio problems most likely affect newcomers, who are learning how things work, so consequently their up and down figures are relatively low. The more you use the site, the higher those numbers, and the less impact donating has. I'm currently on about 36TB up and 16TB down, so the donation would need to be significant to move the needle even a little.

Of course, at the moment donations are worth seven times the upload credit they usually are, so if you're thinking about donating, now is an extremely good time to do so.

It depends what you mean by "thumbnails". I suspect different people have different definitions, but I definitely agree about the uselessness of micro-pictures, especially where these are a single shot from each of many different files.

On the other hand, the type of thumbnails that show multiple snapshots from within a single movie convey much more readily the full contents of a particular scene without the need of a long text description.

Here's a typical thumbnail I'd upload for each file contained in a torrent:

It's created with Video Thumbnail Maker. A free version is available, or it's only about £20 (if I recall correctly) to get a licence. I see many people here use the free version, which embeds the software's logo and info in one of the screenshots. What many people don't seem to be aware of, or at least utilise, is the ability to have multiple sized frames within the same image. This means you can show both a couple of reasonably sized shots with the performers more clearly visible, and the 'story arc' of the whole scene. If there are only a handful of files, thumbnails don't need to be included in the torrent but can be added as part of the torrent's description. Indeed, I'd argue this is a better way to do it because it makes seeding / reseeding much easier without forcing a downloader to also keep unwanted images.

For larger torrents, including the images makes sense. They can be downloaded first and then be used to judge which particular files you might want. I would, though, add a plea for these images to be in a separate folder to the main files. If a torrent contains fifty movie files with a thumbnail for each, that's great, but if you have to go through the file individually selecting or deselecting just to get an initial thumbs only download to select from.

I'm sure it's hardly worth mentioning that when you upload a torrent, the rules do stipulate "GOOD QUALITY" images. I don't personally feel that images that are 300px by 150px, for example, meet that requirement.

@eonflux Ah, gotcha. Yeah, this works great before the event, but isn't much use after... other than for compiling a multi-file directory to reseed a torrent without having to copy or move all the files back into a single folder once you've found those files.

I'm on Linux too, and I now have a script attached to my toolbar in Double Commander. I simply have the "From" folder open one side and the "To" on the other, click that button, then rename the symlinks to the original torrent names, if that's necessary.

I only use it for multiple file torrents that I intend to seed long term though. It's quick and easy, but not easy enough to justify it for everything.

@sidneejmas Apologies. My sarcasm was obviously too subtle for you to detect.

You get upload credit for what YOU upload. You don't get upload credit for what others upload. If a torrent has 100GB traffic, and you have 4GB credit (on an original 2GB torrent) it means YOU have seeded the original 2G to get the torrent started, then a further 2GB in total. Others, as they have finished leeching - not necessarily from YOU - have uploaded 96GB between them.

Do you seriously think you should be given the upload credit for what these others have uploaded? Would you be happy if you seeded 50GB of data, yet received credit for none of it because that was given to the torrent originator? If you thought you would, or think you should, then maybe @ianfontinell 's original comment was not that wide of the mark.

The total amount of traffic is completely irrelevant. What counts is how much YOU have uploaded. Obviously you CAN upload, otherwise the torrent could not have been grabbed by others, but once another person also has even a part of your original upload, they can also be seeding other leechers.

The "decision tree" behind who seeds to who and when is a level or two deeper than I can explain to myself, let alone others, but there is one.

If you're convinced there's an error somewhere, it's fairly simple to test/check. Both uTorrent and qBittorrent have columns to display the total amount uploaded. Simply take a look at that. That is the number that should have been credited to you.

I've only really cared in the past about its misuse - specifically the member who so dislikes Asian BL shows that he gave every single one a one star rating, often before a torrent had even finished downloading for the first time. I suspect the introduction of the "Report voting spam" button has made this a thing of the past by its mere existence, without the need to ever actually use it.

"What am I rating?" is a very good question. How enjoyable the actual content is, is largely subjective. Of course, the quality is less so. To genuinely rate how good (or bad) you feel the contents are, you obviously need to have first watched it. So you have to find the torrent again once you have so you can rate it. I like to think of myself as fairly 'community minded', but that's seldom something I've felt motivated enough to do. Especially given that I'm sure I'm not the only one who might not actually look at something I've downloaded until weeks, or even months, after having done so, which makes finding the original source torrent something of a project.

So voting would to me seem more suitable for rating the quality of the torrent itself. Are there a suitable amount of decent images in the description? Is there even a useful description, or does that just repeat exactly the same words as in the title? Is the folder structure so unnecessarily complicated you need a map and compass before daring to venture in? Do the files have meaningful names, or do they look like someone's knocked over a scrabble board, ... etc., etc.

That's a lot to try to cram into a single rating facility, but maybe a link to a page of short guiding notes. Actually, it'd be the same notes for both rating a torrent and a helpful "Best Practice" for creating the torrent in the first place.

Of course, it's likely that only the two extremes will galvanise people into actually voting. Many will only do so if they think something is really, really good or really, really bad.

But it would be a really good way of encouraging best practice in torrent uploading. I'm betting many who upload poorly created torrents (yeah, I know, even that is a little subjective) have no idea others might feel that way and would happily follow a more user friendly standard if they knew what that was. And it would be a good way of telling the creator "This could be better" without making it look like a "You're a monster" personal attack!

@frostycab It worked for me just now. Could your browser simply be suffering a case of Friday fatigue?

Have you tried closing it entirely and restarting it? Or clearing your browser's cache for this site?

@ianfontinell Once you have, I'll upvote it!

Yeah, the simple ambiguity of what it is that people could be rating makes the answer somewhat meaningless. I've always basically ignored ratings for my "download or not" decision, and have only really rated myself to counter the antisocial "I hate BL" voter's spiteful one-star rating.

Maybe it needs two: "Rate the presentation" and "Rate the content", with having first downloaded the torrent only applicable to the latter.

And/or a link to an explanatory guide telling members what it is that they should be rating, and giving some guidance: "Presentation is brilliant" = 5*; "Presentation is awful" = 1*.

Perhaps it should even be a link to a more detailed rating feature, where you can rate individual elements, like those in my last post, and those are averaged to present an overall final score. That would be quite a lot of work to set up, I appreciate, but it would give a torrent creator better feedback on how it could be better next time. It might be brilliant in every respect, spoiled only by some files being unnecessarily buried in sub-sub-sub-sub-directories. (Although, being a fan of using sub-directories myself, sometimes that's exactly how it should sensibly be!)

To be honest, I personally feel that at the moment this feature adds no value, and is hardly worth the (tiny little bit of) real estate it takes up on the page.

@eonflux Just a thought, but according to my AI friend, if you feed the Windows script into ChatGPT, it would very likely be able to convert it into a Linux one. Even the free version should be able to do it easily, especially with a relatively short script.

The challenge is going to be to find a replacement for the proprietary Windows search engine. Wine might work, if you use it, or I guess you could hunt for a native Linux app with the same functionality.

Guess it all depends on how badly you want it, and how much time you can spare to do what needs to be done. I've lost count of how many hours I've spent going down rabbit holes where I've initially thought "this will be easy"!

@MrMazda said:

... as well as the ability to search categories together (ie the torrent has to fall in both categories to appear) ...

Is it an "AND" search? It seems to be "OR" to me, from a quick test. I set 'Category' to "Comics" and "Middle East", and these are two of the results:

It lists anything that falls into both, of course, but also things that fall into only one category or the other. I couldn't see a toggle to specify whether a search should be "AND" or "OR". Given the already complex nature of the search, I wonder if an AND|OR toggle could even be incorporated. @Joker? Although, to be honest, it's pretty great as it is, and probably not worth that extra refinement unless it truly is dead easy!

Edit: Having thought about it for a minute, it must be "OR". You can expand 'Category', untick just a couple, and the new results won't include anything in those unticked categories. If it was "AND", it should give no results. At least, I'm pretty sure no torrent is assigned to every single one of the categories I have ticked!

@rentboy Yup, me too. For the last several hours I've been unable to access the site (timeout error) and I've just noticed that six out of six torrents I was seeding have errored with the message "Host not found (authoritative)".