Tips for seeding

If you torrent shit you should seed your shit.

Don't leave your computer on

Ok maybe if it's cold, but really you should heavily consider a low power computer on the network with some local storage to do your seeding.

It's a raspberry pi. Use a raspberry pi. Ideally with ZFS if you got a 4 and wanna go down that hole, but if you always leave your shit seeding then your torrent client should at least go "oh shit this bit rotted" and try to redownload it. Qbittorrent has a web interface, which behaves exactly like the local GUI interface, for this exact reason.

Feel free to create a fuckoff huge storage array that can also maintain a tiny torrent client over in the corner too if you want.

Get a seedbox

This is for our friends who suffer at the hands of data caps. Get a seedbox so you only tank the bandwidth for a download once, and if you're REALLY desperate you can grab that over SFTP or SCP from public wifi. A good excuse to hang out in the library for a few hours. These tend to also have really good peering as a ton of other people ALSO download from seedboxes.

You may just be able to fire up an EC2 instance for this now, no clue. Don't yell at me if you get dinged.

Use symlinks?

Honestly I haven't sorted this out yet but I hate organizing things as I download them; don't like the filenames people use sometimes etc etc. The solution to this would be a gigantic webwork of symlinks to turn

Formula.1.1986.Complete.Season.Races.VHSRip.x264.English-LiGHTSPEED/formula.one.1986.race.16.adelaide.pdtv.x264-lightspeed.mkv

into F1/1986/Round 16 - Australia.mkv.

Would that work on windows (see: SMB)? Fuck if I know. You all call these "shortcuts".

Use a private tracker

Where people are forced to care about seeding in the first place. It may seem barbaric nowadays but "If you don't seed we'll just ban you" is a great way to get people to care about maintaining their data and making it available.