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Cleaning Up Dead Trackers In A Torrent Prior To Upload


Ramalama1

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I am in the process of uploading a bunch of archived torrents to Demonoid and the current batch I have are all externally tracked. Some of them have a laundry list of trackers that are offline, bad ports, udp etc. When I reloaded them in my job list I simple cleaned up the trackers so that only working ones were listed. But if I am going to upload them to my tracker I would like to get this extra garbage out of the torrent. So here is the question. I can (carefully) edit them with notepad, or should I use the BEencode editor (thanks Ultima ;) )? I believe this is one of the things that helps keep down overhead?

I would much rather upload these existing .torrents rather than recreating them since I have discovered that babysitting 30 new .torrents [i.e. seeds (0)(1) ] is a bother.

So can I edit out this crap and the let em rip or should I leave it all in there and let the downloader clean it up (kinda chickensh!it way to operate). :/

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You'll probably damage them with notepad, use the wonderful editor we've all come to love :D. Go in the announce-list key, delete the ITEM key if they no longer have a tracker address in them, and if necessary edit the announce key so that it has a working tracker.

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http://www.dessent.net/btfaq/

BTChange 0.94a - For modifying tracker info in an existing .torrent file. Use this if the tracker changes, so that you don't have to recreate the file.

I take no responsibility for the utility since I've never used it before. I suggest backing up your .torrent files and testing on a small set of .torrent files first.

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Whoa! that looks scary...not so sure a batch process is what is called for. I need a scalpel, not TNT... I think I will save that program in case demoniod disappears again, and in the meantime, use GTHK's suggestion. Actually, I did alter one with notepad but it did not work after - go figure! But I don't think that was my fault. It may be because of the way demonoid assigns torrents to ports (not even sure if this is an accurate statement). I notice that my torrents prior to Nov. 2 2007 used a different port than the current port so I changed the port number in the torrent to the new number. I just don't know enough about this to even intelligently discuss it. So maybe I messed it up or maybe the technique does not work (notepad) so henceforth I will edit properly.

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I think the problem is notepad misinterprets some of the data, because it's meant for text. Torrent meta files include hash data. Also, double quotes are changed to singles (or so I've heard about notepad on Vista).

Additionally, in case you don't know (you seem to be learning :)), each ITEM is a tier, if you have multiple trackers in the same tier, only one of them will be announced to, as a form of load balancing. One tracker from each tier is announced to, that's why different trackers go in different items. As for the regular announce key, it's there for backwards compatibility, for clients that don't support multi-tracker lists (I've never seen one).

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? Are you asking if it's binary? Or just saying it is :|, either way, it's binary. String is just what you enter it as, you could enter it in binary if you really wanted too (and knew the binary for it). Data that's text comes up as a string by default, unicode not included :(.

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Hermanm that little program is great! Perfect for what I want.

Jewelisheaven, as usual it went whooosh over my head, but I love your comments!

But seriously, I know that I have to edit the .torrent itself to get rid of the extra tracker info. Getting them out of uT is easy. Been doing that for months. Twas the other thing that I was puzzled about.

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