What about seedboxes?

[redMonster]

I have been reading about the misdemeanours (did I spell it right) of seedbox users in the Elite forum of what.cd for a few days. Many people hate seedboxers.

Seedboxers drop the torrents as soon as they stop getting upload on them, so they tend to seed for a lesser time.
They pay for seedboxes, defying the free filesharing idea. The money they spent on seedboxes could have been donated to the trackers.
Content downloaded by seedboxes are mostly for buffering accounts. They download all sorts of torrents but don't actually use them. It is these users who have buffered accounts who later hit and run on torrents.
It gives low speed users with less scope to upload and thus they end up having bad ratio. Of course this is not always the case if they seed for a crazy amount of time, because as time passes, no. of seeders decreases. After that, only those users help with seeding who are seeding from home connections.

Now the advantages:

Crazy swarm speed. Fast distribution of data
Unpopular stuff also gets snatched (those who use RSS or autodownloaders). This is so much useful on a tracker like What.CD where there is lot of content
Only one seeder can max out your connection
Those who have very low upload speed can have a better ratio

So what do you think. Is it just to use seedboxes on private trackers. Is it really required to have a seedbox. I personally think that it is useful only in two kinds of cases. One, for uploaders. Second, for users with really low speed (by low I mean something like 10 KB/s). You can easily get a good ratio with 50 KB/s speed.

[Lovestoned]

Well, there are always pros and cons to everything in life.

Seedboxes can aid the first bunch of the torrent's swarm to become seeders at a faster rate.

If you don't have the money nor the speeds (third world countries) then go for the alternatives.

1. Usenet
2. File hosts

Most scene stuffs get uploaded onto them too so no worries about not being able to find them.

[Swift]

if you don't have speeds you can use public trackers :D

[maddoxro]

For those users with low internet speed, have come to help them the trackers with no ratio.There are lots of them out there,some with rare invites, and others quite easy to find.So, if you are a user with a low connection speed, with a little search over the web, you get access to these trackers.
But, like you said, even with a low connection , you can mantain a good ratio on most trackers , not all, but most of them. `Cause it's pure stupid to join a tracker like SCC , who has insane pretimes & speed from uploaders & users because they use seedboxes, and you are a user with a internet connection like 100 KB.
In that momment, with a low connection, you don't need a tracker with fast pretime. You need one where you can mantain a good ratio with that connection, because if you join a fast tracker, you will still be like the last one who finnish that torrent downloading :D

Anyway, i don't like seedboxes, i`ve never used one and i will never use one ( as a user).

[Fibo]

I cant help but love the seed-boxes. DLing 40GB torrents that are 2+ yrs old, at relatively good speeds i might add, would take a lot longer to download.

Sure I work hard to keep my ratio up on sites like waffles, but as stated above there are pros and cons to everything, however in this situation i think the pros out weigh the cons. This comming from a guy with a 10KB/s up speed.

My 2 cents.

[Squizzle]

Put it this way - I'd rather be in a swarm with a couple of boxes than without.

Seedboxes are so common now that it's changing the way we approach torrenting. Not so long ago it was all about the ratios, now people are thinking in terms of seeding time, sites are going freeleech etc.

It'd be ridiculous to say that seedboxes are a bad thing because homeline users find it harder to keep ratio; that'd be clinging onto an outdated seeding model.

In the end sites just need to work out how to best accomodate all users, seedboxes or not.

It's the sites that need to adapt to boxes, not vice versa. Some sites have done this very well, others are less suited.

[deathking81]

I personally hate lots of seedboxes because it forces other users to get them just to maintain a decent ratio on a websites. But for uploaders seedboxes are a must.

[Enzo]

i build some good ratios in the past when there was not a lot of users with seedbox.. So i don't use it.

[sez]

What squizzle said.on pedros for example anything past 1.5 on a torrent is easily equivalent to a ban...

[puckface]

I saw it put best in a tracker forum:

Seedboxes are for original speed and quicker distribution to a larger number of people most efficiently and home connections keep the torrent alive for months and months. (optimally)

[ghurka]

One of the basic problems with seedboxes is that the users tend to come off the torrent very quickly. It then seems that the responsibility falls on the other users to keep the torrent alive.Just imagine a tracker where all or most of the users had seedboxes....would be utter chaos.

Whilst a small number of seedbox users on a tracker will be good for the overall swarm I feel too many users on a tracker will bring that tracker down.

Personally I think there are too many with seedboxes that are either (a) not there to help the tracker but simply want a larger e-penis or (b) look to get their ratio/upload up to a point where they can get invites to trade.

I wonder if there may even come a time when trackers restrict the number of seedbox users allowed there.

[1000possibleclaws]

What puckface says, except one huge problem.


I would assume most if not all seedbox user's that are not also uploaders use their seedboxes to farm ratio off of FL packs. They create a huge influx of bandwidth traffic for absolutely no reason, because they are farming ratio and not downloading out of interest. This creates ridiculous buffers, and some of these users will use those buffers to download their regular everyday material without sharing back (They will have ditched their seedbox because with a huge buffer there is no mroe need for one).

[puckface]

What puckface says, except one huge problem.


I would assume most if not all seedbox user's that are not also uploaders use their seedboxes to farm ratio off of FL packs. They create a huge influx of bandwidth traffic for absolutely no reason, because they are farming ratio and not downloading out of interest. This creates ridiculous buffers, and some of these users will use those buffers to download their regular everyday material without sharing back (They will have ditched their seedbox because with a huge buffer there is no mroe need for one).


To be fair, I did see this on a forum of a site that has no free-leech packs and very rare free leech anything. So I guess you are right since the response there was obviously targeted towards that specific tracker.

[1000possibleclaws]

It was just my general observation; I haven't read any threads about this on trackers. I'm not saying I'm against seedboxes, but in my opinion that is the only (or most important) negative aspect of them.

All in all I'm pro-seedboxes because on good sites there are generally some users that use them for the community, and seed those big packs over prolonged periods, and they will more than make up for the rest of them. Just sucks for the users that abuse it, cause they end up making (in my opinion) "fake" upload by downloading 100s of gigs of fl off of each others boxes and then leech the actual 0day/ older material that "good" users have kept seeding for ages.


An example is on SCC awhile back when they started to put 0day music into 'packs'. Regular users liked the individual torrents better because they search for what they want and the dl without having to sort through the torrent file itself. The ratio farmers (even including a mod) justified keeping the packs "because we got more upload off of them" I was so shocked that a staff member would be naive enough to see it from that perspective. Either way they stopped making the packs, but only because it was too much work for the uploaders.

Another example of abuse is SceneLife, where packs lose their seeds real fast. This might be because the only way to maintain ratio is to seed stuff for ages until it becomes freeleech and hope someone will make a snatch when it does, which isn't very practical. The easy way (if you've got spare cash) is to seedbox packs for ratio, and since they don't even want the content user's normally drop off them pretty fast. Just seems like a huge waste of resources that does little for anybody in this case.