> There will be changes in v5 to prevent downloading before release, which will help in most cases, but ultimately poor quality indexers result in these sorts of issues.
> We do not have plans to add file level blocking within downloads, like is being done with blocking at the the client level. There are just too complications for Sonarr to do it in every supported client. Blocking at the client level introduces a different issue and prevents Sonarr from processing the download at all, which is why you see recommendations to use Cleaneruparr or similar tools. Sonarr can address malicious files, but only does so after downloading when processing the download and that does not extend to .iso files, at least at this time.
Tell your downloader (in my case qbittorrent) to not download .exe, .scr, .zip, etc, etc, etc. It’s been this way for years. You do have to clean out qbittorrent every few days so that sonarr will search again, so that’s a pain. But hey, I’m pirating media. Someone trying to scam me at the same time is expected.
Plenty of my iso's intentionally contain those names though. Really, sonarr / radarr should have implemented this a long time ago since they're the ones doing the searching, downloading, and inspecting of files: https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/pull/8775
Using settings on the indexer isn't great since with Prowlarr the user doesn't actually interact with the indexer portion of Sonarr.
Doing it in release profiles by bumping down their score is a cute workaround but then the torrents will just stop saying ".exe" in their title.
Really it's a thing Sonarr have to do, as evidenced by the multiple PRs they have to try and finally do it.
I've been getting it on low tier private trackers too recently. Sonarr moves faster than the moderation on many sites.
Quality profiles don't block these because they don't inspect the file list, just the torrent name, and the attackers aren't polite enough to mention the exe in the name.
The actual solution is to enable the "Fail Downloads" advanced setting on indexers.
Join how, exactly, and for what benefit? The private trackers I've heard of are not open or you have to pay to join (lol!). From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene. I bet theres a leaderboard somewhere with weektop and sitetop numbers. I'm too old for that shit.
You can get into some not paying. You're just required to either have a minimum ratio or share several days, whatever's reached sooner (so you don't get stuck sharing something nobody wants for eternity).
In practice, it's just adding an API key, setting a rule in the app to remove after x and then you can go back to ignoring it.
> The private trackers I've heard of are not open… From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene
TBF this isn’t a revival of some 90s thing, this is just how private trackers have been. What was the same in the aughts, for instance.
> The private trackers I've heard of are not open…
That's why they called private? Nice thing about private trackers is that you can just download without VPN (with DHT off...). Downside of private trackers, you get banned for weirdest thing, like my seed box was offline while I was out of country on vacation, I didn't download or seed anything for two weeks and got banned. Newsgroups are much better.
If you are basic, then Torrentleech will cover 99.999% of your needs. It costs a few $ to join (a one time fee, and you get 1 month of free VPN), or just sign up for r/opensignups, and wait until they are open for registrations (typically once per year).
If you are too old for trackers, then just sign up for usenet. You will have to pay for it though.
For 99% of users who want to download TV shows/music/movies, The Pirate Bay is enough. I don't understand why you'd ever pay for a private tracker or Usenet unless you're looking for obscure/old stuff.
i bet youd pay for the top trackers if you actually knew how good they are. cool thing is, if you put in the time and effort, even the top trackers are free.
For torrent, you need to have a VPN, at which point you can also use Usenet, which, at least in my jurisdiction, you can effectively safely use without.
This can get stupid sometimes like when they're expecting everybody to keep over 1.0 when there are people with 10.0; but usually when they're doing that it's because it's a scammy tracker (all private trackers that you have to pay to join are scammy no exceptions) and they're trying to extort people who fall below 1.0 to give them money.
But expecting people to upload is part of the deal. That's not about being old, that's about being selfish. Non-scammy private trackers make it very easy, and some just concentrate on gatekeeping and don't worry about ratios at all.
Your basic point is very true, though. The way many private trackers have lasted is to stop letting people in almost entirely. To get into a non-scammy tracker you have to know somebody irl who is on and active, and they still might not be able to get you in. Or they will pretend like they can't - inviters sometimes get punished for the quality of the people they invite, and you think sharing back is something children do.
Seedpool has regular open registrations, no fee, lots of freeleech content. You can pay $10 for a VPS that gives you a TL membership and get 5 TB upload credit with a couple hours of effort. All you have to do is seed and sign in like once a month to show you are still active.
I used private torrents for the best part of 10 years but life got in the way, and when I tried to go back after my last Pvt torrent closed (Morethan..) I realized the bar was much higher than before. I only managed to get into MAM and perhaps and some point that would open more doors and so on, but it's anything but trivial lol (unless you never lost access to Pvt torrents or maybe if your friends do)
MaM actually has one of the higher bars, but they have the most regular signups and the community to support it. That’s a good point of reference from 10 years ago, though.
There are zero good private trackers that you can pay for to enter. Buying invites will get you banned, and paying the site directly is only possible on scummy trackers.
There is a lot of good information here [0]. Most notably RED is open via interviews conducted on IRC, and has a big invite forum to join other trackers. But yes, they do force you to contribute through maintaining a ratio.
Ok, I have not indulged in the new paradigm of work your way to the interesting stuff. I just did occasionally dabbling back in the day, but I wonder: I fully understand the intent of making a prospective good citizen demonstrate commitment and the level of service-side management effort to make this social network paradigm work.
But isn't this sort of structure just completely transparent to [Nation|Narco]/State Actors? Feel free to widen the set of economically interested actors.
How do you scale video interviews?
I think I am missing something about this scene. I really want to dive in tho.
for quality control, amount of seeders, internal encoders. heaps of stuff to avoid issues like this as well. as someone has said TorrentLeech will cover 99% of people's use cases with buying seedbox as entry only. you only want to get to cabal trackers when you really need top quality remuxes which I don't think you'll get invited without any efforts as well
idk if there are fellow Ukrainians reading it, but I remember getting an account somewhere in exchange for an AFU donation. just a screenshot from your bank app confirming that the payment is within a few days of sending a registration application, and you are in. that tracker also had decent English originals somewhere, and a friend who's there tells that experience is great, but for foreigners he'd advise to turn on Google Translate or whatever.
the point is, some trackers don't even take these one-time payments for themselves and still provide service on the level as if you pay tenfold of that, monthly, to them.
They're not especially closed and minimum ratio really isn't all that hard to maintain (if it's even required). There are usually mechanisms by which ratio isn't zero sum.
I'm not too lazy to join a private tracker, I'm too lazy to maintain the presence necessary to use one. You're really signing up to be a part of a community. Mostly that's enforced through ratios, but those ratios are often set in such a way that you have to be uploading, or you have to be optimising what you choose to share in a way that gets you to those ratios. If the content you want is popular enough you just can't build ratio on it.
I've found the best way to do private trackers is to seed everything you download, all the time. If you seed enough of the long tail of things, ratio becomes easier. This also helps people get into a show that peaked a few years ago (after most of the seeders have moved on), which can be harder on public trackers.
That's a good idea, seeding the long tail in time rather than in popularity in a sense. This would probably be the best way for me to do it, but even then it requires a different sort of investment – more storage, and more constantly online storage.
My setup is optimised for being quiet and low power, and part of that means bulk HDD storage that is mostly spun down. Seeding a large long tail of data would probably mean a lot more disk activity.
Downloading activity is much lower than you think on private trackers since they have relatively few members, but yes, if you do this, every now and then your HDD will start making noise.
It sounds like you are more interested in complaining and arguing online, rather than solving your problems.
Meanwhile, I joined my first private tracker 3 years ago, and now I am in all of them (ptp, btn, etc). I do not have to worry about the ratios (cross-seed is set and forget), and after awhile you have more "upload" and "ratio" then you need for a lifetime. I barely have to seed anymore. I log in once in a while, but otherwise do not have to participate in the communities, and the selection is awesome (they basically have everything, even Mexican B movies from the 1940s, whatever floats your boat). They saturate my fiber when I download too.
But do keep complaining and arguing, you will feel better.
My experience is the same as GP's. Any time I joined a private tracker I was eventually kicked for not enough activity or low seed ratio. I tried to seed the stuff I downloaded, but usually no one seemed to want to leech from me.
It's complicated because there will always be multiple seedboxes seeding a torrent, which is excellent for keeping torrents alive, but then a normal user barely gets any chance to upload the torrent and maintain ratio.
You provide an anecdote without any data, and proceed to complain and argue for three paragraphs. Even if you were right, you'd still be worse than GP.
It's by far the most common on public torrent trackers, but I occasionally see it on usenet too. Never bothered to check which indexers they tend to come from.
Sonarr has an advanced setting in "Settings > Indexers > [Your indexer] > Fail Downloads" which you should add "Executables" to. Then these kinds of downloads get automatically marked as failed/blacklisted and a new search and new download is attempted without you needing to manually intervene. You may also have to tweak some conflicting settings on qbit.
That'll be good for new installs down the line, but I don't think it's something to "wait on" right now. I have around 30 indexers configured in Prowlarr, but going into Sonarr/Radarr and just changing the no-executables setting for each indexer that's actually active only takes a minute or so and never gets reverted.
As we've seen in the past, the app doesn't have to be illegal. It just requires evil corpos with unlimited funding to allege that it is. Then the open-source developer is put in the position of spending money they don't have on lawyers or closing up shop.
Cleanuparr uses the built-in Sonarr/Radarr blacklist feature, so if you encounter something where there's nothing to import, it will backlist the torrent. You can set it to cover stuck torrents too if you want, so it blacklists the "dead" torrents and will make Sonarr/Radarr move on and search again.
The blacklist feature of Sonarr/Radarr can be hooked into Prowlarr pretty easily so that the torrents get blacklisted all the way back there.
You should definitely add wildcard blocks to your torrent client too though for *.exe and similar so you don't even download them in the first place rather than throwing them away only after downloading.
You might want to combine this with something like Packarr too, unless you just want to blanket blacklist all archives (zip, rar, etc). Packarr will try to (semi-securely) unpack archives after download. If they fail to unpack (e.g. requires a password you haven't supplied, badly formatted, etc), the Cleanuparr will end up marking them as failed import and they'll get blacklisted and removed from disk.
Also, you should generally manually blacklist things in Sonarr/Radarr if you discover it's bad, rather than just deleting it from disk. That will also prevent the same thing from re-downloading.
As someone who still pays for usenet, the benefit of torrents is anything older than a couple of days, since stuff gets pulled from usenet servers almost as soon as it's posted. Of course, if you have everything pre-configured to find and grab everything you're interested in, you won't even notice, but sometimes I just get an itch to watch something older off the cuff, and that's where torrents shine.
> But you put the address in the malware anyway so what's the point for fetching from Gist and YouTube????
The ability to change it, dude. Have you never written a malware before?
Often a primary concern is the security response, so you want redundancy and the ability to work around enforcement action, such as website takedowns.
> And to whoever made this: you probably spent weeks or shit ton of tokens on ChaCha20, AES-CTR, runtime API hashing, anti sandbox scoring, Chrome app bound encryption bypasses, just to make a shitty skid malware.
People have been making infostealers that support hundreds or thousands of different apps and corners of your computer for decades. Plenty of vendors pride themselves on it.
Welcome to piracy, you must be new here. This has been occurring for some time, I've seen it for years to occasionally find a media named exe to delete and manually redownload.
Everything got flooded with those exes, not just South Park. All most seeded TV episodes on most public trackers were (are?) those EXEs. It will be interesting to know who launched the attack.
Started running bitmagnet a few weeks ago after getting fed up with BTDigg dying and other DHT crawlers actually complying with DMCA notices for some reason (???). Pretty much everything even slightly popular that I search for has one of these EXEs lying around. Sometimes multiple.
Bitmagnet has some good filtering to remove garbage like that but not great examples lying around ready to use. I bet an LLM can be pointed at the schema/docs and get you something useful setup though.
Meh, I don't keep Tor running all the time, so the startup delay just to get to BTDigg would be a turn-off. Besides, getting bitmagnet running in a container let me put both it and Deluge behind a VPN, so I don't have to enable a system-wide VPN to torrent, or stop my torrents to turn the VPN off!
How is the *arr stack so fracking complicated? Once upon a time, all you needed was a browser, a torrent client, and VLC. Maybe your torrent client had an RSS feed built in.
Now you need 9 different pieces of software that end in *arr, all of which implement parts of the solution that you want and parts that you don't, and none of them is even a torrent client!
And they don't even work with torrent sites reliably, so people then spend money on a Usenet subscription like it's 1990 again.
You don't need any of the *arr stack, they just make media management easier for us hoarders with huge libraries. I couldn't imagine maintaining a collection of thousands of TV shows and movies without them. Every single arr program is a progressive enhancement over the "once upon a time" stack you mention.
Not that your old stack doesn't still work exactly how you'd expect it to, nothing's changed there.
I tried this but it did a ton of things wrong, and wanted me to wire up a bunch of stuff that I didn't specify. It also forgot cleanuparr and flaresolverararr or whatever its called. I'm sure I could get it there eventually with the vibes, but I gave up in disgust just like last time I tried.
Maybe if I made a VM dedicated just to this behind a VPN gateway, then let Codex go wild in that VM with no guardrails it could eventually get something working.
Or you could put in the work and end up with a system that will let a non-technical family member type the name of a show that comes out next week and it will automatically search, download, tag, and add every episode on release to a Jellyfin instance for them to watch.
Feels kind of weird that Windows Defender doesn't have something that catches this kind of behaviour? I mean if you have the Defender settings jacked up you're not going to be able to run executables anyway without a bunch of mucking around which should at least stop accidental running, but feels like some heuristics to stop these kinds of stealers should be a high priority for the Defender team. Not sure how you'd go about it though?
You don’t block it in qbittorrent, you let it download and then get sonarr to block the torrent when it detects an exe.
And also, stop posting claudeslop. We know it’s claudeslop. You tried really hard to modify it and conceal it, but you can’t fool a sloprunner. So please, just write your own fucking article. It’s like 4 paragraphs long.
Weird, I didn’t feel as though it attempted to hide that it was AI written at all. In fact, it is so cliche-ly Claude written it comes off as a parody.
I got sick of this shit a few weeks ago, so now as soon as the torrent client starts downloading an executable it removes the torrent. Definitely seems to be an increase recently.
Joining private trackers is hard only if you are trying to join the niche ones which is totally unnecessary if you are trying to watch relatively recent and popular movies.
Just get into a decent general tracker and you'll literally never have this issue again (along with getting torrents with more seeders and better tagged content so your "4k" download will never be 480p again)
But won't you still need a decent private indexer with usenet or are paid indexers with open registration good enough these days? I've been using an invite-only indexer and haven't tried any other indexers in a while.
Not sure, I haven’t used Usenet myself but some friends do. From how quickly they were up and running it seemed to be less effort than getting into good private trackers.
Private trackers have this bad habit still in 2026 of being super strict about ratio. You have a hard time uploading because as soon as someone uploads something, 20 seedboxes are already saturating the 3 other people downloading.
You're left with just paying for upload credits. Makes no sense.
I miss demonoid from the 2005 era something fierce. It was private but also super chill, the way it's supposed to be.
I'm a member of two fairly private trackers but haven't downloaded anything from them in a long time. It's not really worth the hassle. :(
On first reading I took it to mean exchanging BP for upload, a common site feature with no real money cost. Perhaps they meant that seeding is pay to win and you need a seedbox, though (not my experience, FWIW).
I think the seeding requirement is not bad, but bytes uploaded is a bad metric when there's just not that much traffic.
Since bittorrent prioritizes peers with better bandwidth and so many people use servers with 10G connections, you won't get much upload off your home network. On some trackers I've been seeding 24/7 since I joined and uploaded only a few gigabytes. Fortunately many of them are generous with other ways to get credit for uploads so I've never had a problem.
It takes a small effort up front to pick out some freeleech content and/or set up autobrr, then you pretty much never have to worry about ratio ever again.
There was always people trying to make $$ with piracy (I mean, didn't the tpb owner basically all became millionaire thanks to it ?), but I feel like in recent years it had become worse. It's likely because since the 2010' many countries (mostly “western” country tbf, but also Japan and now Korea) have become way more aggressive with hunting and prosecuting piracy services operator. So in a way, like with drugs, higher risk means that a lot of “in it for the love of the game” kind of people left the scene and only more, errrmmm "money focused" people stays.
A few PT are getting much more lenient towards ratio, seeding time and other requirements (some used to ask you to meet certain upload "goals" in a quarter), seeing the trend and what's coming for them -- there is just less overall activity, including fewer torrents and less seeding/downloading.
Yet a few stick with all the existing, stringent rules they have, as if they are irreplaceable. I haven't touched them for a while. Let them die.
Pay 10/mo for a seedbox, it derisks your life and is extremely handy. On most sites, you can download batch torrents freeleech and then get your ratio up by leaving those seeding for a while. I use this box for a bunch of stuff so I don't feel like I'm paying just for torrents
I pay for usenet and nzb crawling. I won't play that hand wrangling over ratio anymore, it's a relic of days gone by where fewer people had internet and slower speeds. Not nagging against you btw just in general you know
You can also just run Bitmagmet for a few weeks and then you have your own tracker. (I think "tracker" might be technically incorrect jargon but it solves the same problem).
If anybody ask, it's not me who said it, but you can also easily use Shodan to find a lot of open Bitmagnet instances. Many people who self-host do not seem to be aware of the “questionable” decision of docker to always listen on 0.0.0.0 by default and make a firewall rule to expose your service to the entire web (you can also find instances of jackett and some *arr stack, but most of them are at least password protected).
202 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 7.6 ms ] thread> There will be changes in v5 to prevent downloading before release, which will help in most cases, but ultimately poor quality indexers result in these sorts of issues.
> We do not have plans to add file level blocking within downloads, like is being done with blocking at the the client level. There are just too complications for Sonarr to do it in every supported client. Blocking at the client level introduces a different issue and prevents Sonarr from processing the download at all, which is why you see recommendations to use Cleaneruparr or similar tools. Sonarr can address malicious files, but only does so after downloading when processing the download and that does not extend to .iso files, at least at this time.
Related:
AI-Built Torrent Site [TorrentClaw] Looks Inside Downloads to Catch Fakes and Malware - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052217 - October 2026
Using settings on the indexer isn't great since with Prowlarr the user doesn't actually interact with the indexer portion of Sonarr.
Doing it in release profiles by bumping down their score is a cute workaround but then the torrents will just stop saying ".exe" in their title.
Really it's a thing Sonarr have to do, as evidenced by the multiple PRs they have to try and finally do it.
This is literally one of the advice points at the end of the article. Did you get that far?
https://trash-guides.info/
Quality profiles don't block these because they don't inspect the file list, just the torrent name, and the attackers aren't polite enough to mention the exe in the name.
The actual solution is to enable the "Fail Downloads" advanced setting on indexers.
In practice, it's just adding an API key, setting a rule in the app to remove after x and then you can go back to ignoring it.
TBF this isn’t a revival of some 90s thing, this is just how private trackers have been. What was the same in the aughts, for instance.
That's why they called private? Nice thing about private trackers is that you can just download without VPN (with DHT off...). Downside of private trackers, you get banned for weirdest thing, like my seed box was offline while I was out of country on vacation, I didn't download or seed anything for two weeks and got banned. Newsgroups are much better.
If you are too old for trackers, then just sign up for usenet. You will have to pay for it though.
This can get stupid sometimes like when they're expecting everybody to keep over 1.0 when there are people with 10.0; but usually when they're doing that it's because it's a scammy tracker (all private trackers that you have to pay to join are scammy no exceptions) and they're trying to extort people who fall below 1.0 to give them money.
But expecting people to upload is part of the deal. That's not about being old, that's about being selfish. Non-scammy private trackers make it very easy, and some just concentrate on gatekeeping and don't worry about ratios at all.
Your basic point is very true, though. The way many private trackers have lasted is to stop letting people in almost entirely. To get into a non-scammy tracker you have to know somebody irl who is on and active, and they still might not be able to get you in. Or they will pretend like they can't - inviters sometimes get punished for the quality of the people they invite, and you think sharing back is something children do.
Why lol? Still better value than paying the IP holder what they want. And maintaining well curated torrent platforms costs money.
There are zero good private trackers that you can pay for to enter. Buying invites will get you banned, and paying the site directly is only possible on scummy trackers.
There is a lot of good information here [0]. Most notably RED is open via interviews conducted on IRC, and has a big invite forum to join other trackers. But yes, they do force you to contribute through maintaining a ratio.
[0] https://igwiki.lyci.de/wiki/Private_trackers
But isn't this sort of structure just completely transparent to [Nation|Narco]/State Actors? Feel free to widen the set of economically interested actors.
How do you scale video interviews?
I think I am missing something about this scene. I really want to dive in tho.
the point is, some trackers don't even take these one-time payments for themselves and still provide service on the level as if you pay tenfold of that, monthly, to them.
My setup is optimised for being quiet and low power, and part of that means bulk HDD storage that is mostly spun down. Seeding a large long tail of data would probably mean a lot more disk activity.
Meanwhile, I joined my first private tracker 3 years ago, and now I am in all of them (ptp, btn, etc). I do not have to worry about the ratios (cross-seed is set and forget), and after awhile you have more "upload" and "ratio" then you need for a lifetime. I barely have to seed anymore. I log in once in a while, but otherwise do not have to participate in the communities, and the selection is awesome (they basically have everything, even Mexican B movies from the 1940s, whatever floats your boat). They saturate my fiber when I download too.
But do keep complaining and arguing, you will feel better.
I’m as upset as OP, get a job skid.
The whole sticky notes next to monitor is not a joke. I bet you could grab some crypto recovery keys this way
Are many of them highly specialized? Just lots of redundancy?
Cleanuparr uses the built-in Sonarr/Radarr blacklist feature, so if you encounter something where there's nothing to import, it will backlist the torrent. You can set it to cover stuck torrents too if you want, so it blacklists the "dead" torrents and will make Sonarr/Radarr move on and search again.
The blacklist feature of Sonarr/Radarr can be hooked into Prowlarr pretty easily so that the torrents get blacklisted all the way back there.
You should definitely add wildcard blocks to your torrent client too though for *.exe and similar so you don't even download them in the first place rather than throwing them away only after downloading.
You might want to combine this with something like Packarr too, unless you just want to blanket blacklist all archives (zip, rar, etc). Packarr will try to (semi-securely) unpack archives after download. If they fail to unpack (e.g. requires a password you haven't supplied, badly formatted, etc), the Cleanuparr will end up marking them as failed import and they'll get blacklisted and removed from disk.
Also, you should generally manually blacklist things in Sonarr/Radarr if you discover it's bad, rather than just deleting it from disk. That will also prevent the same thing from re-downloading.
The ability to change it, dude. Have you never written a malware before?
Often a primary concern is the security response, so you want redundancy and the ability to work around enforcement action, such as website takedowns.
> And to whoever made this: you probably spent weeks or shit ton of tokens on ChaCha20, AES-CTR, runtime API hashing, anti sandbox scoring, Chrome app bound encryption bypasses, just to make a shitty skid malware.
People have been making infostealers that support hundreds or thousands of different apps and corners of your computer for decades. Plenty of vendors pride themselves on it.
Scammers always have a new trick up their sleeve.
Now you need 9 different pieces of software that end in *arr, all of which implement parts of the solution that you want and parts that you don't, and none of them is even a torrent client!
And they don't even work with torrent sites reliably, so people then spend money on a Usenet subscription like it's 1990 again.
You can also automate 99% of it with the *arr stack and completely forget about it.
What is the issue? There is more choice now?
Not that your old stack doesn't still work exactly how you'd expect it to, nothing's changed there.
Or, I don't know, make some application that combines all of them like https://github.com/rivenmedia/riven-ts
Maybe if I made a VM dedicated just to this behind a VPN gateway, then let Codex go wild in that VM with no guardrails it could eventually get something working.
Or you could put in the work and end up with a system that will let a non-technical family member type the name of a show that comes out next week and it will automatically search, download, tag, and add every episode on release to a Jellyfin instance for them to watch.
I find it funny that great minds think alike because I was just thinking of analysing these EXE files this week and doing a quick writeup at medium:
https://lazherrera.medium.com/analyzing-that-exe-file-youre-...
And also, stop posting claudeslop. We know it’s claudeslop. You tried really hard to modify it and conceal it, but you can’t fool a sloprunner. So please, just write your own fucking article. It’s like 4 paragraphs long.
> you let it download
Sounds like a terrible strategy to me
Just get into a decent general tracker and you'll literally never have this issue again (along with getting torrents with more seeders and better tagged content so your "4k" download will never be 480p again)
You're left with just paying for upload credits. Makes no sense.
I miss demonoid from the 2005 era something fierce. It was private but also super chill, the way it's supposed to be.
I'm a member of two fairly private trackers but haven't downloaded anything from them in a long time. It's not really worth the hassle. :(
I wouldn't consider a requirement that people to upload as much as they download a "bad habit" it's called not being a leech.
Since bittorrent prioritizes peers with better bandwidth and so many people use servers with 10G connections, you won't get much upload off your home network. On some trackers I've been seeding 24/7 since I joined and uploaded only a few gigabytes. Fortunately many of them are generous with other ways to get credit for uploads so I've never had a problem.
Yet a few stick with all the existing, stringent rules they have, as if they are irreplaceable. I haven't touched them for a while. Let them die.
https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo
No, that's to exhaust sandboxing without being able to trust sleep() or time API calls by the only way you can: generating heat.