New Torrent Guide-Increase Ratio at Private Torrent Sites

Many new torrent users are hesitant to join private torrent sites that require them to maintain a certain ratio of upload and download amounts. This guide is intended to relive those fears by offering easy ways increase your ratio on many of the popular private torrent sites. This guide will focus on general ways to increase and maintain your ratio. For examples of various bonus point systems and ratio building periods offered by many private torrent sites refer to my guide on public and private torrent trackers f you are not yet a member of a private torrent site, or finding it hard to get invited to a quality private torrent tracker, you may find the information on ways you can use IRC to join new torrent sites.

If you are a member at most of the top private torrent sites, you are probably downloading mostly official scene group releases.  Any official scene release is required to be in a certain format, with certain sized RAR files depending on the content.  This results in most television and movie files consisting of 10’s or 100’s of individual RAR files.  New torrent users may initially find these RAR files annoying and unnecessary; but once you see how vital they can become in increasing your ratio (sometimes referred to as “share rating”) you will never want to use a site that doesn’t require them.

If you are having a hard time maintaining an adequate ratio, simply download one or two rar files from any new torrent that is added to the tracker.  If you can grab those two pieces first, you will then be able to share them with anyone else who wants to download them later on.  Doing this on the more popular television shows and movies will quickly increase your ratio.  The typical one hour television show is about 360MB or 1.06GB for a 720p release.  By scene group requirements they need to be packaged into roughly 14.5MB or 48MB pieces for xvid and HD formats respectively.  This means you download an insignificant amount of information, then upload, or “seed” it back multiple times over.  This method can be used as much as needed, and makes it possible to upload at your maximum speed until your ratio is where you want it to be.

Of course the method mentioned above only works when torrent sites require RAR packs; so what if they unpack scene releases before uploading them? BitMeTV.org and Bit-Hdtv.com are two examples of relatively popular torrent sites that forbid RAR files in the majority of uploads. In the case of BitMeTV.org, it doesn’t even offer bonus points or any major system of ratio boosting, and it is one of the hardest sites for frequent downloaders to increase their ratio. There are still a number of ways we can increase our ratios effectively at sites like these.

• Download from another source then seed back at the site where your ratio is in need of boosting.
  

Most times of the year there are multiple primetime television releases that 100's of people download every night. You can download these immediately after they appear on a different private tracker, or even just grab an official group release from a public site like isohunt.com. Once the download completes simply download the .torrent file from the site where you want to improve your ratio (you must download the new .torrent file, it has tracker specific information), open the .torrent file in your torrent client and tell it to download to the destination where it is already 100% complete. You should now begin uploading to that tracker as long as the two releases were identical... which they should be if you check for the official -groupname tag at the end of the file name.

• Add content from other trackers that are not yet added to your private torrent site

This is similar to the above, but in this case you are not looking for new torrents of popular tv shows every night. Instead you are looking for older or less common scene releases that were either never added to the tracker, or are no longer seeded by the torrent sites tracker. Good examples of things you should look for are: Documentaries, reality shows, previous seasons of popular shows, HD versions of something already uploaded in normal quality, and older PC games.                              --You need to read your torrent sites forums in order to know exactly what content you can upload on their tracker, and may even have to apply to be able to upload new torrent content at all. Every site has specific rules so don't assume what is allowed on one torrent sites tracker will be acceptable under a different sites rules.

I am just going to briefly cover how to add a new torrent, I am going to use uTorrent as the client in this description.  Every site and each client will be slightly different, but the basics will stay the same.  Find a good directory for the file you are going to add, you won't be able to move it once you begin seeding.  Make sure you RAR it to the torrent sites specifications, then open up uTorrent, select file, then "create new torrent". 

Now you will need to select the box that says private torrent, then in the trackers box you need to copy and paste the torrent sites tracker code.  You can find this my logging into your sites website, then selecting the upload tab.  Usually your specific code will be in a box on the torrent sites upload page, copy and paste that to uTorrent.  uTorrent will save this code so you won't have to find it each time. Now tell uTorrent where the file data is stored, and select "create and save as".  Once the green bar reaches 100% you will be asked where you want to save the .torrent file to. 

After choosing a destination for the .torrent file open your torrent sites upload page.  You should "Torrent File" above or near a blank box with a browse button next to it.  Browse to the destination where you saved the .torrent file you created in uTorrent and put that in the "Torrent File" field.  Now you simply enter in whatever other information the specific torrent site asks for, and select finish.

Most torrent sites now recreate a tracker specific .torrent file which even the uploader has to use to seed his data to the public.  Simply download the small .torrent file just as you normally would, you will still be seeding your information it is just a slightly altered .torrent file.

See how easy it is to improve your share rating? If your ratio is low there is really no reason you should ever not be uploading data. You don't have to wait for something you actually want to watch and only upload back that information. Once your ratio is at an acceptable level you don't need to worry about these above boosting methods; having too high a ratio is not good for the torrent sites community either.

Now what excuse do you have to not join a private torrent tracker, go enjoy the world of torrents.

If you have any questions about using torrents, how to set up your torrent client, or for ideas on safe and reliable new torrent sites to join, please read through my torrent guide archive at my blog.