What am I doing wrong?

[Rekrul]

I have the latest version of uTorrent, I've configured it according to the guides, I've told my firewall to allow all incoming and outgoing connections for uTorrent and the port forwarding test says the port is open. I also tried the test file of Open Office and it seemed to work fine.

The first real file I tried to download (meaning the first file I actually wanted) just kept giving me a message similar to "Leeching prohibited, you are only allowed to seed." Looking up Bittorrent terms, I see that a seed is a user with a full copy of the file and that a leech is what a peer is sometimes called. So if I understand the error message, only people with a full copy of the file are allowed and nobody is allowed to download from them. I must be missing something, because the only reason for a seed to exist is for others to download from them. In other words, without peers (leeches) there's no reason to have seeds!

Next I tried two large video files that were related. Surprisingly, both of these downloaded without incident.

I then tried another video file, getting the torrent from one of the various search sites (they all had the exact same torrent file). When I opened it with uTorrent, I kept getting the message "Invalid passkey" and the file wouldn't download. I finally got fed up and downloaded the same file from the eDonkey network where it worked perfectly, if quite a bit slower.

Lately I've been trying to download a small 4MB file. I only found the torrent on one site and when I open it, under seeds, it says "0 (1)", on the bottom it said something like "0 of 1 connected (1 in swarm)". I'd be more precise, but I just tried it again and now it's not listing any seeds. Since uTorrent doesn't come with any kind of help file and none of the guides bother to explain any of the technical details, I can only guess that this means there's one seed, but that I'm not connected to them. I left it running for about half an hour, but nothing ever downloaded and the bar stayed red.

So, so far I have a 40% success rate trying to download files from Bittorrent. What am I doing wrong?

[Robbbert]

The "Invalid passkey" and "Leeching prohibited" matters should be addressed on the forums of the trackers hosting those torrents. It is not a utorrent issue.

For the last file, it is an all-too-common problem of a torrent gone stale. That is, everyone who wanted the file has done so and "left the channel", so to speak. There is nobody left to seed to you.

[Rekrul]

The "Invalid passkey" and "Leeching prohibited" matters should be addressed on the forums of the trackers hosting those torrents. It is not a utorrent issue.

Ok, being new to Bittorrent, I have no idea how to find out that information, or even why it should be an issue. The first torrent I got through another web site that listed various files that were available on BT, and the second I got from several of the big BT search sites (I ran a compare on the torrents and they were all identical).

For the last file, it is an all-too-common problem of a torrent gone stale. That is, everyone who wanted the file has done so and "left the channel", so to speak. There is nobody left to seed to you.

Then why is the torrent file still showing up on at least one search site? Note, I just tried it again and under Seeds in the top display, it first said 0(1), now it says 0(0), but on the bottom, it still says "Seeds: 0 of 0 connected (1 in swarm). Whoops, for a few seconds it said 1(1) and 1 of 1 connected, I received a little data, but now it's gone back to a mostly red bar and says 0(1), 0 of 0 connected (1 in swarm). It would be nice if uTorrent came with some kind of docs to explain what the above means.

This is going to sound like a troll post, even though I don't mean it to be, but so far I'm pretty underwhelmed by BT. Many people claim that it's the greatest thing ever, but so far I've only been able to download 2 out of 5 files.

eMule, although much slower and plagued by long wait times, has worked on every file I've told it to download. The search only turns up files that are actually online at the time and you can see if there are any complete copies. You see something you want, eMule goes out and finds people who have, then downloads it.

I wanted to try BT because I'd heard that it has faster downloads and there are some things that show up in the BT search engines, but not on eMule. Unfortunately the faster speed is worthless when hardly anything I try to download actually works.

[DreadWingKnight]

For a reference test, try torrents from http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/

They should tell you if it's simply a problem with the torrents you're selecting.