I’ve never done any manual port forwarding for torrenting and everything seems to download and seed correctly. Does the client automatically do it? Is it only required for private trackers? Once again a genuine question because I only know just enough about all of this to avoid the letters from my ISP.
Torrenting only works if the peers can connect to each other. If you dont have a port forwarded, then you can only connect to other peers that have a forwarded port. At least one of the 2 parties connecting to each other needs an open port for the connection to happen.
If you are on a public tracker it can happen that a torrent is shown to have multiple seeders, but if you try downloading it without having an open port it won’t work unless at least one of those seeders has their port open. This is mostly a problem on public trackers, since many private trackers enforce their members to have working port forwarding.
So it is technically possible to download torrents without working port forwarding, but only if enough other other peers have port forwarding set up on their end and your tracker doesn’t (rightly) ban you for it.
Does the client automatically do it?
If you aren’t using a VPN then most torrent clients will automatically set up port forwarding on your router using Upnp. Unless Upnp is disabled in your routers settings. If you are using a VPN you usually need to set up port forwarding manually, but there are some vpn clients that do it automatically
Oh my god this explains so much! I always wondered why sites would show torrents having +200 seeders and I would be lucky to get maybe 10 when downloading. I’ll have to get my port forwarding set up. Thank you so much!
Now I just need to switch VPN providers but I’ve been planning on doing that for a while anyways.
You need port forwarding for peer-to-peer protocols like Bittorrent
I’ve never done any manual port forwarding for torrenting and everything seems to download and seed correctly. Does the client automatically do it? Is it only required for private trackers? Once again a genuine question because I only know just enough about all of this to avoid the letters from my ISP.
Torrenting only works if the peers can connect to each other. If you dont have a port forwarded, then you can only connect to other peers that have a forwarded port. At least one of the 2 parties connecting to each other needs an open port for the connection to happen.
If you are on a public tracker it can happen that a torrent is shown to have multiple seeders, but if you try downloading it without having an open port it won’t work unless at least one of those seeders has their port open. This is mostly a problem on public trackers, since many private trackers enforce their members to have working port forwarding.
So it is technically possible to download torrents without working port forwarding, but only if enough other other peers have port forwarding set up on their end and your tracker doesn’t (rightly) ban you for it.
If you aren’t using a VPN then most torrent clients will automatically set up port forwarding on your router using Upnp. Unless Upnp is disabled in your routers settings. If you are using a VPN you usually need to set up port forwarding manually, but there are some vpn clients that do it automatically
Edit: this article explains it better than me: https://protonvpn.com/blog/port-forwarding/
Oh my god this explains so much! I always wondered why sites would show torrents having +200 seeders and I would be lucky to get maybe 10 when downloading. I’ll have to get my port forwarding set up. Thank you so much!
Now I just need to switch VPN providers but I’ve been planning on doing that for a while anyways.