Dealing with dead trackers on your uploads

[sharingiscaring2023]

First of all I am not sure where to open this thread, please move it to a more appropriate place if this is not it.


I've noticed that most of the the 10+ trackers I have added to my torrents are not reacheable anymore. How should I procede? If I add trackers to the current uploads in the client will it break the swarm? How will people be able to get the torrent when/if none of the base trackers will not be working anymore? Also how should I take care of trackers in the future, like where should I grab the best ones and how often should I check them?

[the_munitor]

First of all I am not sure where to open this thread, please move it to a more appropriate place if this is not it.


I've noticed that most of the the 10+ trackers I have added to my torrents are not reacheable anymore. How should I procede? If I add trackers to the current uploads in the client will it break the swarm? How will people be able to get the torrent when/if none of the base trackers will not be working anymore? Also how should I take care of trackers in the future, like where should I grab the best ones and how often should I check them?

i mostly use trackers from here https://github.com/ngosang/trackerslist (trackers_all)
there is no perfect trackers list however, at some point they all die/vanish and there's no harm in leaving them there, and its purely optional if you want to update your trackers but the people that are seeding will also need to. otherwise they'll be using the old tracker list that is outdated and won't do much difference. occasionally they are brought back to life or ressurect out of nowhere but i wouldn't rely on it.

i'd say it's a quantity-over-quality scenario when it comes to trackers, the more you have the better. if twenty die over time, you have another forty to back it up. the real deal is when a huge amount of them vanish unexpectedly and no one is able to connect to each other in the torrents, it's unlikely and i've seen it very few times but has happened.

if by golly every tracker dies, which again that can only happen if you have very few trackers or just plain unlucky, then it's impossible to download the torrent properly

EDIT: the best moment to apply a trackerlist is when you are about to make the torrent, already existing torrents all seeders need to use the same tracker list as well for more effectiveness. if im not mistaken.

[sharingiscaring2023]

First of all I am not sure where to open this thread, please move it to a more appropriate place if this is not it.


I've noticed that most of the the 10+ trackers I have added to my torrents are not reacheable anymore. How should I procede? If I add trackers to the current uploads in the client will it break the swarm? How will people be able to get the torrent when/if none of the base trackers will not be working anymore? Also how should I take care of trackers in the future, like where should I grab the best ones and how often should I check them?

i mostly use trackers from here https://github.com/ngosang/trackerslist (trackers_all)
there is no perfect trackers list however, at some point they all die/vanish and there's no harm in leaving them there, and its purely optional if you want to update your trackers but the people that are seeding will also need to. otherwise they'll be using the old tracker list that is outdated and won't do much difference. occasionally they are brought back to life or ressurect out of nowhere but i wouldn't rely on it.

i'd say it's a quantity-over-quality scenario when it comes to trackers, the more you have the better. if twenty die over time, you have another forty to back it up. the real deal is when a huge amount of them vanish unexpectedly and no one is able to connect to each other in the torrents, it's unlikely and i've seen it very few times but has happened.

if by golly every tracker dies, which again that can only happen if you have very few trackers or just plain unlucky, then it's impossible to download the torrent properly

EDIT: the best moment to apply a trackerlist is when you are about to make the torrent, already existing torrents all seeders need to use the same tracker list as well for more effectiveness. if im not mistaken.

thank you for your answer.
I think I have used that very github page to pick the trackers.
I am not sure about a few of the points you make. You said that "at some point they all die" and that "if every tracker dies it's impossible to download the torrent". So eventually old magnets/torrents are always unusable? 
I tried to add a torrent from more than 10 years ago to test it. It has a similar amount of trackers of mines, 10+, only a few are working, for exemple opentrackr and torrenteu. Were those two already up 10 years ago?

What really concerns me is that I have uploaded those torrents (and picked a tracker list) just a few months ago, and now the majority of them are already unreachable.
I thought that too many trackers would slow down the whole thing. Should I really go for 40+ trackers? And if all the trackers in the original indexed torrent die what should I do, upgrade every single old torrent? Is that even a thing?

Also is DHT able to work in this kind of scenario? People adding a magnet link and all the trackers being dead etc

Sorry for all these questions, it is a bit confusing for me!

[maskaw]

TPB and other torrent sites may overwrite the trackers you set with their own. Trackers were important back in the days DHT wasn't popular. Today not so anymore.

Ensure DHT is enabled, and other peers will find you - sometimes after some time, but in the end they will.

[ill88eagle]

Or just grab the recent tracker list from your tpb upload pageand add it to the torrent you wanna seed maybe?

DHT remains a black box for the privileged, while trackers are still semi transparrent. Just saying

[the_munitor]

First of all I am not sure where to open this thread, please move it to a more appropriate place if this is not it.


I've noticed that most of the the 10+ trackers I have added to my torrents are not reacheable anymore. How should I procede? If I add trackers to the current uploads in the client will it break the swarm? How will people be able to get the torrent when/if none of the base trackers will not be working anymore? Also how should I take care of trackers in the future, like where should I grab the best ones and how often should I check them?

i mostly use trackers from here https://github.com/ngosang/trackerslist (trackers_all)
there is no perfect trackers list however, at some point they all die/vanish and there's no harm in leaving them there, and its purely optional if you want to update your trackers but the people that are seeding will also need to. otherwise they'll be using the old tracker list that is outdated and won't do much difference. occasionally they are brought back to life or ressurect out of nowhere but i wouldn't rely on it.

i'd say it's a quantity-over-quality scenario when it comes to trackers, the more you have the better. if twenty die over time, you have another forty to back it up. the real deal is when a huge amount of them vanish unexpectedly and no one is able to connect to each other in the torrents, it's unlikely and i've seen it very few times but has happened.

if by golly every tracker dies, which again that can only happen if you have very few trackers or just plain unlucky, then it's impossible to download the torrent properly

EDIT: the best moment to apply a trackerlist is when you are about to make the torrent, already existing torrents all seeders need to use the same tracker list as well for more effectiveness. if im not mistaken.

thank you for your answer.
I think I have used that very github page to pick the trackers.
I am not sure about a few of the points you make. You said that "at some point they all die" and that "if every tracker dies it's impossible to download the torrent". So eventually old magnets/torrents are always unusable? 
I tried to add a torrent from more than 10 years ago to test it. It has a similar amount of trackers of mines, 10+, only a few are working, for exemple opentrackr and torrenteu. Were those two already up 10 years ago?

What really concerns me is that I have uploaded those torrents (and picked a tracker list) just a few months ago, and now the majority of them are already unreachable.
I thought that too many trackers would slow down the whole thing. Should I really go for 40+ trackers? And if all the trackers in the original indexed torrent die what should I do, upgrade every single old torrent? Is that even a thing?

Also is DHT able to work in this kind of scenario? People adding a magnet link and all the trackers being dead etc

Sorry for all these questions, it is a bit confusing for me!

imho yes i've seen many torrents that i used to download back in the day, but nowadays they are all gone due to no seeders or OG uploader stopped seeding completely, their trackers are also all dead/the guy didn't bother to add more trackers to ensure people would connect easier.

50-100 trackers is good enough in my experience but i recommend researching about it, and no you can't really upgrade a old torrent sadly. at the end of the day don't rely on trackers that much, its a good idea to make sure they work well but DHT is a thing (not perfect but it's there you know), TPB and other sites have their own premade trackers as well but i also wouldn't rely on them that much

[ill88eagle]

50-100 trackers is overkill. Just grab the recent TPB tracker list from any torrent and update your own. I have explained how to do this extensively before so i wont bother again

[the_munitor]

i can't really disagree on that, but atleast the guy from github left his "best picks" separated, so that would be a nice start

[sharingiscaring2023]

i can't really disagree on that, but atleast the guy from github left his "best picks" separated, so that would be a nice start

that's what I have picked, and most are now dead, so I felt very concerned.

s
imho yes i've seen many torrents that i used to download back in the day, but nowadays they are all gone due to no seeders or OG uploader stopped seeding completely, their trackers are also all dead/the guy didn't bother to add more trackers to ensure people would connect easier.
50-100 trackers is good enough in my experience but i recommend researching about it, and no you can't really upgrade a old torrent sadly. at the end of the day don't rely on trackers that much, its a good idea to make sure they work well but DHT is a thing (not perfect but it's there you know), TPB and other sites have their own premade trackers as well but i also wouldn't rely on them that much

what are these premade trackers? I can't find them.
So when you are sayng "add more trackers" you mean on the client, since you are saying it is not possible to upgrade an old torrent mmm

Or just grab the recent tracker list from your tpb upload pageand add it to the torrent you wanna seed maybe?
DHT remains a black box for the privileged, while trackers are still semi transparrent. Just saying

I am sorry but I don't understand what you are saying. I should add new trackers to my client and leave the indexed torrents as is? With the old broken trackers?

TPB and other torrent sites may overwrite the trackers you set with their own. Trackers were important back in the days DHT wasn't popular. Today not so anymore.
Ensure DHT is enabled, and other peers will find you - sometimes after some time, but in the end they will.

to me it doesn't look like TPB is overwriting trackers.

[ill88eagle]

Yes. TPB overwrites trackers. So you should make sure you update to the current TPB tracker list every so often. Theres a trick whereby you add the magnet while the same torrent is active in your client, and the client will ask you if you want to update the trackerlist. In transmission at least. Theres anoher trick where you just add any random TPB torrent, open properties, copy trackerlist, open properties for the torrent you want to update, paste tracker list. Theres a third method where by you manually parse a magnet link for trackers. Pick your poison

EDIT:
The first torrents I uploaded used the now dead TPB tracker plus the now dead dennisstalker tracker plus the also dead demonoid tracker. That was back when TPB actually stored torrent files. TPB now uses an array of trackers that I cant for the life of me remember, but ok, for the sake of demonstration...

Here is the [shameless selfpromotion] best seeded torrent in my list: https://thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=7233317

It is 12 years old and back then it had entirely different trackers. I havent been seeding it for at least 10 years, yet there are now at least 12 seeds distributed on the current trackers TPB add to any magnet on their index

These are the trackers:

Code:

udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:6969/announce

udp://open.stealth.si:80/announce

udp://tracker.torrent.eu.org:451/announce

udp://tracker.bittor.pw:1337/announce

udp://public.popcorn-tracker.org:6969/announce

udp://tracker.dler.org:6969/announce

udp://exodus.desync.com:6969

udp://opentracker.i2p.rocks:6969/announce

Here is one way of easily getting the current list in three steps (on a raspberry pi running debian buster with transmission, but it shouldnt be hard to translate to microsoft or macos running any client):

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spoiler cause the image is big and contains an arrow that is definitely not a PENIS