Transfering torrents and Good Manners?

Hi, I am new to the world of Bit Torrents (and utorrent). I tried Bit Comet, and had trouble configuring it properly, whereas utorrent was painless.

Now that I'm up and running, I'm trying to stay out of trouble. I'm going to be banned at one site because of my poor ratio performance. (I like how utorrent has an in-your face ratio per torrent). This low ratio was unintended because apparently I was in a "not connected" mode when I thought I was. -It seems odd that I could download and see files upload and still be not "connectable". But I could not set it straight with BitComet.

My question(s)

I admit I am not a quick study on this. I have read postings and FAQ's and I'm ether not understanding it (most likely) or not seeing the mechanics of how to transfer previous completed torrents to utorrent. I need to keep seeding to make amends to the site I leached from. When I tried to do this (transfer) to utorrent, my selected torrents began downloading again (they are at 100%) and I just want to seed the files I previously downloaded, not leach again.

Any thoughts? Please dumb down advice. I will not be insulted....in fact it's the only way I'll understand it...

Also, utorrent (upon installation) decided that based on my upload speed (384kbs) that I should not have more than 3 active torrents at any given time. (I assume active means leaching or seeding).

So, my second question is how long to seed after reaching a ratio of one is good manners? I'm going to be fairly limited with only 3 active torrents, but I want to seed as much as can.

Sorry to be long winded-Thanks, and I look forward to being part of this community. -G

"Connectable" refers to peers being able to make incoming connections to your BitTorrent client. "Not connected" means there is no open TCP port to your client, either because a firewall is blocking it or because the IP address of your computer is different than the IP address of your Internet connection as seen by peers. µTorrent has a network status indicator in the middle of the status bar at the bottom of its window, if that becomes green you are connectable.

To seed a torrent downloaded with another client reload the torrent but do not start seeding until you point the torrent (set download location) to wherever you have the files stored.

It is considered "good manners" to seed at least as much as you have downloaded (1.0 or 100% ratio) but you can seed as long as you want. The default seeding goal in µTorrent is 150%, the ETA column will attempt to tell you how long it will take for you to reach that goal when you are seeding.

To prevent this "start downloading from 0%" do the following:

start µT

press CTRL+D [that's open torrent but no default save]

the question where to save the file you "show" him where you first downloaded the file.

NOW THE IMPORTENT PART!

Do NOT(!) start the torrentrunningprocess at that point.

µT can not know at this point that you already have parts of the content. That's why he tries to start at 0% again and mindlessly (it's just a computer!) overwrites the old content.

So on the filenameline in µT 1.6 click with the right mouse button. in the upcomming menu click "Force Re-Check".

Now you will see in the General Tab in the section below how the red graph will slowly rise from 0% to a blue 100 % (or how much you already have of the file at that point).

If it stays red, than you made an error in the privious step where you told µT where the content is you want to "RE-check". In that case choose then "Advanced" -> "Set download location" and do the pointing again till you found the old file(s)

Now when the checking is done and µT is aware that you have the content already you can press the startbutton and µT will seed the content instead of downloads it again.

HTH

A million thanks! I'll try this out.