Boosting Your Ratio on Private Torrent Trackers

Private torrent trackers are often the first sites to get access to files recently made available to the file sharing community. Private trackers also are often the only ones that are maintaining a healthy seeding community of files that are not in large demand. Because of these reasons, most serious members of the file sharing community will sooner or later became a member of a private torrent tracker site. Membership on such sites comes with certain expected standards of behavior (rules), including generally the maintaining of a positive ratio.

Ideally, if you are involved in the file sharing community, you should be maintaining a "fair ratio"; you should be uploading (seeding) as much as you are downloading (leeching). Unfortunately, not all members of the file sharing community do this, and many torrents become unhealthy or uncompleteable because of this behavior.

The private torrent sites typically have imposed a rule on their members requiring them to seed a certain percentage in order to keep their membership. While ideally, every member of a private tracker should be maintaining a fair ratio (1:1), seeding as much as they are leeching, most private sites only enforce a need to maintain a .9 ratio (you seed 90% of the amount that you have leeched). Furthermore, most private trackers have a stepped ratio requirement where the ratio you are required to maintain starts off low, and becomes higher as the amount of data you downloaded increases.

Even with a stepped ratio requirement, some inexperienced torrent site members struggle to figure out how to improve their ratio and get banned from the better private trackers. Often this is because they have picked up bad habits when using the public torrent trackers (such as Pirate Bay). For instance, there is no penalty for a "hit and run," shutting down a torrent as soon as it completes downloading, on the public trackers. Such behavior on the private trackers, besides being typically against the rules, will generally cost a person valuable ratio.

Know the Rules---Read Before You Start Downloading

One of the first mistakes an inexperienced file sharer often makes when joining a private torrent tracker is clicking the box that says, "I have read the rules and agree to abide by them" without actually doing so. This bad habit comes from the overwhelming amount of user agreements that are imposed upon computer users (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, iTunes, the list is endless); most of us just click "Agree" without actually reading a single line of the agreements. Most of the time, these user agreements can be safely ignored.

This is not true of the private torrent communities, which have computer programs in the background keeping track of how much you have leeched and seeded. Before you start to download any files of the torrents you find on a private tracker, you need to know what ratio and other behavior you need to abide by to maintain good standing in the community. This is especially true of communities with stepped ratio requirements.

A typical stepped ratio requirement starts off with you not needing a positive ratio; then as the amount you downloaded increases, the ratio you need to maintain also increases. The nice thing about a stepped ratio requirement is that it allows you time to obtain a positive ratio; after all, you need files to seed. The bad thing is that often you can find yourself crossing a ratio requirement threshold without being prepared to maintain that new level.

One of the keys to surviving these first stages of a membership is to know what ratio is required and when the ratio requirement goes into effect. This information is always listed somewhere in the rules for the site.

It is ok to sign up for a membership on a private torrent tracker site, checking the box that says you have read the rules, and verify your account before actually reading them. All experienced private tracker members have done so on occasion, typically when we discover a site that we have wanted to join for ages is having open signups. However, experienced torrent users always read the rules before they start to download a single torrent.

Know the Site---Check Out the Forums

While it is not necessary to post on the forums of the private torrent tracking sites, as a member who is interested in maintaining a positive ratio, you should periodically check them out. You can learn a lot from reading the discussions on a site's forum. For instance, news of torrent programs having bugs that do not properly report one's upload amount on a torrent generally shows up first on the forums of the private trackers. It is this type of information that helps one decide what program that they are going to use for torrents.

The forums are also places to learn of contests that a tracking site is running. Often, the prizes in these contests is upload credit. Some of these contests have a low number of entries; I once saw a contest where there were three prizes and only fourteen members entered (the bottom prize was five gigabytes of upload credit, which was not bad considering that the typical file size for the site was only two hundred megabytes). If you qualify to enter a contest, do so.

Taking Advantage of Free and Neutral Torrents

One of the things that you are looking for when you are reading the rules and forums of a tracking site is if they have free and neutral torrents, and what conditions are attached to such torrents. Free torrents are free to leech (the amount you download is not added to your overall download amount); neutral torrents do not count towards either your download or upload amount.

Outside of the couple of permanent (and very small) items, most free and neutral torrents have a time limit before they revert to being a regular torrent. Some sites have a Free Leech Weekend; others a Free Leech of the Week (FLOW). Learn if the tracker has free and/or neutral leech torrents; learn when they go "live" and when they revert to normal torrents.

Download as many of these free and neutral torrents as you can and continue to seed them as long as you can. This brings us to the next tip.

Invest in a Seed Box

A "seed box" is a hard drive that you use exclusively for storing the files that you downloading and are now seeding. The harsh reality of maintaining a positive ratio is that you must have files to seed. Often the torrents that will gain you the most upload credit are those that are not in high demand. If you are the only person that is seeding a torrent, and there is no better copy available, eventually someone will want it. And if you are seeding it when they decide to download it, you will end up with all the upload credit.

But maintaining a large number of files to seed require that you have space to store them, hence the need for a seed box. Fortunately, additional memory for computers is cheap. With patience and a seed box, anyone who runs their torrent program in seed mode on a regular basis will eventually gain a positive ratio; all it takes is time.

Seed, Seed, Seed

Ultimately, the best way to improve your ratio is to do exactly what the file sharing community wants you to do---seed the files of the torrents that you have. The tips that have been given here can help you prevent you from crashing though the floor and generating a negative ratio, and they can help you improve your ratio faster, but ultimately one needs to seed to keep a healthy ratio.

Given a decent internet connection, one can seed a reasonable amount every night when one is asleep and not using their computer. One of the bad habits that one might have picked up on the public torrent trackers is the habit of just leeching. This habit will destroy your ratio on the private trackers. As a member of the private trackers, one needs to spend more time seeding than leeching. Develop the habit of seeding whenever your computer and internet connection is idle and you will be well on your way to developing a positive ratio, one that will make you a valued member of the private file-sharing community.