port issue...

[johnrd]

i am pretty sure my ports are not forwarded correctly ( red status light at bottom, port checker says so, crawling download rate)

however i cant change this, as my father has control over that. i end up getting between 2 and 10 peers ( out of a swarm of 600) and my father believes if there are any peers then the ports must be fine

so my question is what can i tell him to convince him that the ports are not correctly forwarded (a.k.a if the ports are not right why i can still have a small handful of peers) ?

[Switeck]

Imagine a world of cellphones where people only turn them on to make a phonecall...and then turn them off when they're done. There's no way to call them because either their phone is busy or not on! You wouldn't say there's something "broken" with those cellphones, but rather misused/misconfigured if you wanted to receive incoming calls on them. They still WORK in that they can make phonecalls, but there's a whole lot of people that cannot be connected because of this.

That's what it's like to be firewalled. Nobody can receive incoming connections that is firewalled. They can "call out", but then they can only connect to someone who isn't firewalled (someone who always leaves their phone on)...which naturally is a LOT fewer in number than the total. Even where it is almost critical to be unfirewalled such as file-sharing, firewalled rates run anywhere from 40% to 80+%, meaning people are probably just as likely to 5 times as likely to be firewalled as not.

On the particular torrent you're on, probably 80% are either firewalled or offline (no longer running that torrent). Were you unfirewalled, you'd be able to connect to probably at least double your max (of 10 peers) and potentially 10x (100) as many.

[johnrd]

thank you very much