@MrMazda said in Torrent did disappear:
@dargard-0 The torrent contained padding files, which are not allowed, as they artificially inflate the size of the torrent.
Padding files are a structural feature for hashing/alignment, they're strictly theoretical and should be excluded from size calculations and file listings.
They only exist in the metadata as zero-byte alignment entries and are never downloaded, uploaded, or stored. The total data exchanged between peers always equals the size of the real files only. Any larger “total size” you see comes from how the tracker handles the file list, not from actual network usage.
There is no ratio gain or advantage for the uploader and, if anything, it's a disadvantage.
A useful comparison with BitTorrent v1:
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v1 (no padding): Files share pieces. If you select only some files, you are still required to transfer parts of unwanted files. This is real bandwidth usage and counts toward the user's ratio.
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v2/hybrid (with padding): Files are aligned. You download exactly the files you select, no useless byte transfers that harm your ratio.
Take as example a 200 GB torrent with many small files. In v1, partial downloads can easily add hundreds of MB (or more) of unavoidable extra data due to piece overlap, harming the user's ratio. In v2/hybrid, the "total size" reported by the tracker can be ~%5 bigger, only because the tracker is summing up real files and padding files together, which is incorrect and doesn't reflect how the client will handle the torrent. The actual transferred data can never exceed 200 GB, and partial downloads remain exact, sparing member's ratio and bandwidth.
Only thing the site needs to do is to ignore padding files, don't count them towards the total file size and not show them in the file list.
And below, an example of a real cheating scenario that you cannot detect:
Make a torrent with hundreds or thousands of small files and use a massive piece size like 128MB. If a member tries to download one single 1MB file, they will be forced to download at least 128MB.