JA
08-27-2007, 07:42 AM
So after countless threads about OiNK and how to seed and blah blah, lets collate all the possible information into 1 thread.
This thread has 2 Purposes.
#1 Allow everyone to share their ideas of ratio boosting etc..
#2 Allow everyone to show decent torrent boosting torrents...
First of all, having more bandwidth than everyone else helps...a lot. But more importantly, the reason I upload well is that I am incredibly, almost obsessively, vigilant about being on good torrents first. I spend a lot of time just refreshing the browse page to see what new things get posted. The window for profitability can be as short as 5 minutes on a lot of torrents depending on uploader speed, so get on them as soon as they are posted.
If you see something thats 1 seed and 50 leechers, it can be good, but when you open it in your torrent program, you have to look at the peers list. If you see that everyone has 95% of it, you can be pretty sure that you're too late. If you see that they are all at 5%, it's a good bet. If you have the most bandwidth, the tracker knows, and you will get pieces first and send them to everyone else rather than waiting to get them from the swarm. Take advantage of your speed when you can, and realize when you can't. Once a 100MB torrent has more than 2 seeds, it's not going to be profitable.
For how to identify good torrents, first time postings of anything from 2007 are good to consider. Search for band names in the torrent search to see historically how well their stuff does and check for the same stuff having already been uploaded in different formats. If you leave the field blank and click the Requests search button, you can see all requested albums. Sort by # of requests, and memorize the top 50. If they get posted, get them. Sorting the browse page by leechers works well if you follow the previous paragraph.
And I'm sure you've read it everywhere, but seeding forever works really well too. Especially if you can out upload the other seeds and get a good fraction of the upload for every new leecher.
Now a bit of economics. The reason you want a good ratio is to build a buffer allowing you to download what you actually want without having to worry about how it will affect your ratio. So margins are an important part of the game. Getting a 30 ratio on a 5MB torrent is great, but that's still only 350MB, and even if you only care about maintaining a .5 ratio to not be on ratio watch, that only gets you 700MB of download credit or about 10 albums. In my mind, it is much better to get a ratio of 3 on a 1GB torrent, and maintaing the same .5 torrent, you can now leech 6GB, or about 90 albums.
Sorry to be a buzzkill on this one, but it needs to be here. One thing you might have to do is accept the fact that you made a bad investment. Some torrents just don't do as well as you hope. Even if you've downloaded 100MB already, sometimes the best thing to do is just to jump off before you lose even more. Granted, if you are going to be able to leave it seeding indefinitely, you will probably be able to seed every new music torrent to at least 1-1, but if you jump on something you expect to be popular and after 20 minutes you're 50% done and there's only one other person leeching, it might be time to cut your losses. Swallowing a 100MB is tough, but it's a lot better than swallowing 300MB. However, once you've finished something, there's no reason to stop seeding it. At that point, it's all profit.
Due to the fact that Oink gets things faster than most of the other sites, this idea is probably less useful here than on other sites, but it bears mentioning. Since it is easier to maintain a ratio on sites that deal in movies and other larger files, it's worth building up a ratio on sites like Demonoid and Torrentleech and then use use your credit there to download things to seed here. Vista iso's are particularly good for this strategy since they are 3GB and seem to trickle for a long time here . Unless you get lucky, you probably won't be able to upload torrents this way (though you might), but if you sit on things for a long time, you'll do well. And even if you don't get much, it let's you seed here without leeching.
CREDITS:achifari.
As for now just post good torrents to jump on :D
This thread has 2 Purposes.
#1 Allow everyone to share their ideas of ratio boosting etc..
#2 Allow everyone to show decent torrent boosting torrents...
First of all, having more bandwidth than everyone else helps...a lot. But more importantly, the reason I upload well is that I am incredibly, almost obsessively, vigilant about being on good torrents first. I spend a lot of time just refreshing the browse page to see what new things get posted. The window for profitability can be as short as 5 minutes on a lot of torrents depending on uploader speed, so get on them as soon as they are posted.
If you see something thats 1 seed and 50 leechers, it can be good, but when you open it in your torrent program, you have to look at the peers list. If you see that everyone has 95% of it, you can be pretty sure that you're too late. If you see that they are all at 5%, it's a good bet. If you have the most bandwidth, the tracker knows, and you will get pieces first and send them to everyone else rather than waiting to get them from the swarm. Take advantage of your speed when you can, and realize when you can't. Once a 100MB torrent has more than 2 seeds, it's not going to be profitable.
For how to identify good torrents, first time postings of anything from 2007 are good to consider. Search for band names in the torrent search to see historically how well their stuff does and check for the same stuff having already been uploaded in different formats. If you leave the field blank and click the Requests search button, you can see all requested albums. Sort by # of requests, and memorize the top 50. If they get posted, get them. Sorting the browse page by leechers works well if you follow the previous paragraph.
And I'm sure you've read it everywhere, but seeding forever works really well too. Especially if you can out upload the other seeds and get a good fraction of the upload for every new leecher.
Now a bit of economics. The reason you want a good ratio is to build a buffer allowing you to download what you actually want without having to worry about how it will affect your ratio. So margins are an important part of the game. Getting a 30 ratio on a 5MB torrent is great, but that's still only 350MB, and even if you only care about maintaining a .5 ratio to not be on ratio watch, that only gets you 700MB of download credit or about 10 albums. In my mind, it is much better to get a ratio of 3 on a 1GB torrent, and maintaing the same .5 torrent, you can now leech 6GB, or about 90 albums.
Sorry to be a buzzkill on this one, but it needs to be here. One thing you might have to do is accept the fact that you made a bad investment. Some torrents just don't do as well as you hope. Even if you've downloaded 100MB already, sometimes the best thing to do is just to jump off before you lose even more. Granted, if you are going to be able to leave it seeding indefinitely, you will probably be able to seed every new music torrent to at least 1-1, but if you jump on something you expect to be popular and after 20 minutes you're 50% done and there's only one other person leeching, it might be time to cut your losses. Swallowing a 100MB is tough, but it's a lot better than swallowing 300MB. However, once you've finished something, there's no reason to stop seeding it. At that point, it's all profit.
Due to the fact that Oink gets things faster than most of the other sites, this idea is probably less useful here than on other sites, but it bears mentioning. Since it is easier to maintain a ratio on sites that deal in movies and other larger files, it's worth building up a ratio on sites like Demonoid and Torrentleech and then use use your credit there to download things to seed here. Vista iso's are particularly good for this strategy since they are 3GB and seem to trickle for a long time here . Unless you get lucky, you probably won't be able to upload torrents this way (though you might), but if you sit on things for a long time, you'll do well. And even if you don't get much, it let's you seed here without leeching.
CREDITS:achifari.
As for now just post good torrents to jump on :D