What is the best site to search for torrents?

averageshade@lemm.ee to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 63 points –
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I’ve sometimes found that 1337x torrents show bigger seed leech numbers but don’t really match up when downloading (May be it’s something to do with my vpn setup). I’ve found magnetdl to be more accurate with seed leech numbers

If you don't have port forwarding and the seeder doesn't then you won't see them.

A lot of casual torrent users won't know about this so it's a common issue on public trackers.

Did you mean if there is no port forwarding at my end and also at seeder’s end ?

Yes, to communicate at least one peer needs to be port forwarded.

Could you elaborate? Never heard of this aspect

If you forward a port on your network (or VPN) and point your torrent software towards that port, you are now an "active" node. You can communicate with anyone else, forwarded or not.

If you leave it closed (passive node), you can only communicate with active nodes. With large torrents, this isn't an issue because there's more than enough active nodes to send the data.

Port forwarded: talk to anyone, even closed
Port closed: only talk to port forwarded people and hope that small torrents have someone with a forwarded port.

Thank you. Does this create any considerable vulnerabilities?

Not typically but it can vary depending on which protocol and which provider you use. Best to check yourself using something like ipleak.net and see if there's any identifying info on there while you're connected.

That’s great. I’ll do some more research on the hardware I have also

if you have TCP only and decentralized peers/peer exchange/local peers turned off in qbittorrent (a good security idea if you're using a VPN to torrent already), you'll get added security at the cost of less peers. Not to say that's for sure what's going on for you, but if you have sane settings for security, it could well be the cause of the discrepancy.

Thanks for the advice. It looks like I already have those settings turned on. Would you recommend I turn them off? I know it's gonna result in even fewer peers, and I haven't had any security issues over the past couple of years while it's been running, but is it something that needs to be done on servers like mine? (I have windscribe that I turn on along with qbittorrent, and when I turn it off, I turn them both off at the same time)

I think it's because 1337x updates the seeds count periodically, and sometimes it doesn't get updated for a while

A lot of torrent sites do not regularly update the seed/peer count on torrents listed there. Or they only do it on some sort of daily/weekly schedule. In other words the older the torrent is the more likely the seed count is going to be wrong.

I'm not sure about 1337x specifically but you could probably tell by comparing numbers for new torrents vs old torrents listed there.