Peer-to-Peer - Contributing
In the world of P2P, contribution(seeding) is very important. It often controls how much others are going to seed to you as well as whether or not certain sites ban/block/disallow you from using their search engine because you’re not giving back. Take advice from someone who knows, learn to seed because it’s the right thing to do.
Seeding
While for services/protocols such as Usenet, contributing/uploading aren’t done by a majority of the crowd, but in the P2P world that’s how all of it is done. In fact, it couldn’t work any other way because as we have already mentioned in the Introduction article, P2P files aren’t stored on some server, they are coming from other people just like you.
The first thing you need to know, to understand how contributing/uploading works, is this small portion of terminology:
A seed is a computer that has the full complete copy of a specific torrent. Seeding is the act of actually uploading to others. A seeder is someone who let’s their computer seed. A seeder can control what they seed, the duration of the seeding process, the bandwidth, and more.
Once you understand that, really there is practically nothing more to being able to contribute via seeding. While downloading, you’ll automatically be seeding what pieces of the file you do have. Each torrent client works in a different manner, so you’ll have to mess around with yours to figure out how to control what you want your max upload(seeding) speed to be.
Warning: There are many ways to monitor how much you are seeding. If you stop seeding all together, there is a good chance people will just stop seeding to you.
Seedbox
A seedbox is basically what it sounds like. It’s a box (computer/server) that seeds (and downloads for you). Why would you want that? Well, the cheap end seedboxes offer speeds of 100 MB/s up and down. Pay a bit more and you get 1 GB/s. Yeah… I can hear you thinking “holy shit”. And for good reason. If you’re looking to download something, your seedbox will download it practically as fast as the swarm (seeders) will allow. Then you just download from your seedbox. And if you’re wanting to upload, then obviously you just put the torrent (and data) up there and let it seed, which will definitely boost your ratio for private trackers.
Basically you put the torrent file on the box, and it will download/upload that torrent. At any time, you can remove/add as many as you want. Below is a few places I’ve seen that offer seedboxes, but I haven’t used any of them, so don’t just take my word for it. Research them a bit.
Before you run out and set up as seedbox though, you need to know one very important fact. Because the seedbox is downloading/uploading for you, it’s not using whatever proxy/vpn you’ve set up for security (assuming you have). Thus, you always have the chance of being caught by the logs on the seedbox. And as far as I know, it’s much easier for courts to get orders to get access to servers like that, than it is to get access to your personal home computer. For this reason, I currently don’t use seedboxes myself. But maybe BTGuard or someone similar will come up with a seedbox service that keeps no logs, is secure, etc.
Publishing a Torrent
The instructions below are for uTorrent specifically, but most torrent clients should be similar.
- Open uTorrent.
- Select “File” -> “Create new Torrent”.
- Select the files and/or directories you wish to publish.
- Paste at least one tracker into the “Trackers” section. (Below is a list of some popular trackers)
- http://open.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce
- http://www.torrent-downloads.to:2710/announce
- http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce
- udp://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce
- http://www.sumotracker.com/announce
- Do not tick the private torrent box unless you are planning to use a private tracker.
- Save the torrent and then upload it to one of your favorite torrent sites.