Hi, let me know if this is obviously stupid and won't work. I'm an old pirate but obviously still pretty uneducated. I've got a dead torrent that's a collection of roms. 4 seeders, 800 abandoned peers (ungrateful basterds). Seeders are rarely online or can't provide more than 8% after a week. The roms are pretty mainstream and it's strange for this torrent to have been abandoned.

If I can find find the exact releases of as many roms as possible in the collection from other singular sources, can I resurrect this torrent by just copy+overwrite into the unfinished folder? is it that simple or is this hubris? am I too old to be this stupid?

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[–] sad_detective_man@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

you're right. I just tried setting up the socks5 credentials which were the whole reason I even bought this VPN in the first place and they're not working anyway. so screw it, time to start looking again.

Wait socks5 isn't a kind of port forwarding is it? is what you just told me something I should have also tried using port 1080 but in my router settings as well?

[–] antipiratgruppen@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 weeks ago

Re-reading my previous comment, I think I gave you some incorrect information. Let me try again.

If you want to use a VPN and stay/become connectable to peers in P2P apps such as torrent clients, you need one of the few VPNs that support port forwarding. So far, so good.

However, I think I was wrong about the configuration. It's correct that you need to define a port number in your torrent client's settings, but when using a VPN, your router's port forwarding configuration is irrelevant, opposing to what I previously said. Instead, somewhere in your VPN's settings or when logged in on the VPN provider's website, you should set the same port number as in your torrent client. If the provider already assigned some port number to you, copy that to your torrent client config instead. Also look into how to bind your torrent client to your VPN so no traffic escapes if the VPN disconnects.

The router admin dashboard is only relevant for traffic that doesn't go through the VPN, so probably irrelevant for your torrenting, and you can only forward ports if you have your own public IP, rather than a shared one (CGNAT). I don't know which you have or if you'll ever need one. Ask your ISP if you need a public IP for something on your network that doesn't go through the VPN, e.g. some game server. While some ISPs give every customer a public IP, others sell it as an add-on for a small monthly fee if the technology (e.g. fiber) allows it, but only some technologies do. But as I said, the router port config doesn't matter when torrenting through the VPN.

Regarding SOCKS5, I found this description of it by in this blog post by ExpressVPN:

A SOCKS proxy acts as an intermediary between your device and the internet. Instead of your network packets being sent directly to their destination, they are first routed through the proxy server. The proxy then forwards those requests on your behalf, replacing your IP address with its own.

So no, it's not. From some quick searches, it seems possible use a SOCKS proxy from your VPN provider for your torrent client in order to hide your real IP from other peers, but since I can't find any proof of port forwarding being possible through such a proxy, this probably wont make you connectable...