The Case of the Vanishing Seeders

[farangheit911]

Just curious if anyone has seen this before, because it's new to me:

I was recently downloading three torrents, all of which were popular and had plenty of seeders (thank you!). In each case, when the torrents reached 95%+ completion, the seeders vanished -- and my download rate dropped to zero.

There are still leechers online and I'm able to upload what I have of these torrents, but I figured I had done something to ruin the downloading process for myself. Clues:

1) I ran Diskcleanup (on WinXP) once, while downloading was in progress. I've done this before without incident, but...

2) After the seeders "disappeared," each of the three download tasks reported "Tracker response error: unregistered torrent." Checking other forum posts, I un-checked "Enable reporting LAN to IP tracker" and "Enable IP filter file" under IP Rules in Preferences, however this did not change the error message.

My guess is that I'll have to re-download these torrents, but I just wondered if anyone knew what caused this kind of problem so that I can avoid screwing up in the future. :-) By the way, I'm using client 0.70.

Thanks.

[kluelos]

Some of us strongly suspect that there are "spoiler" torrents being put out on the net, which will never complete, and are intented to frustrate P2P users.

If the torrents are no longer registered with the site, it means they were deliberately taken down -- perhaps by the site itself after some complaint, perhaps by the seeder who innocently discovered a problem that needed to be fixed, perhaps by someone who had no intention of ever completing the seed. Usually no way to tell. But there have been many of these recently.

I emphasize that not all of these are malicious. I know of one recent torrent that was removed because the sound was out of synch, so the uploader fixed it, killed the old torrent, and started a new one. Check the site where you got the torrent, always read the comments if any are available, and generally stay in touch with what's going on about the torrent.

[farangheit911]

Thanks, Kluelos -- good advice.