Question on promoted torrents

Let's say a torrent has only one or two seeders. I try to download it, but it just stands there stalled for days, tracker status always indicates there's someone seeding, but it never downloads a single byte.

And once a mod promotes that same torrent suddenly there are dozens of seeders in a matter of hours, how does that work?

MrMazda

@ianfontinell A lot of the time it has to do with port forwarding. If your port forwarding is not setup correctly on your end, it makes it really hard for another passive node to be able to establish a connection with you to transfer the content.

Usually, when torrents are freeleeched, this encourages other users to join the swarm, and by having their port forwarding established, there's a roundabout way that they can make the seeder establish the connection with them to start transferring the torrent. Since their port forwarding is setup correctly, this enables them to download from a passive seeder and simultaneously re-share the content with other users in the swarm, even if their port forwarding settings are not in order.

@MrMazda I get it. So if I'm a torrent has a single seeder and I manage to connect to them, but it downloads at some crazy low speed like 10kb/s, in this case if I freeleech this it'll actually have the opposite effect, right?

john32123666

Any number of seeders can be considered good depending on the upload speed you're getting from them.
The more seeds mean that you can download files much faster since you have more sources to concurrently download from.
With peers, it's the opposite. More peers mean that there are more people who are competing for the bandwidth provided by all the seeders.
A torrent with 30 seeders and 70 leechers (30% seeders) will go faster than one with 10 seeders and 90 leechers (10% seeders).
If someone is seeding, then you can download from them. If they stop seeding, they're removed from the list of seeders on the torrent site ...