> Friends in other private trackers, including RED, inform me that actually maintaining ratio isn't that hard! I'm not sure why this would be the case, so I don't really believe them.

I don't know how public the data would be, but it sounds like it'd be interesting to check! Looking at myanonamouse they demand a global seed ratio of 1 [0]. Naively that seems like it'd be logically impossible to maintain. What if some altruist with a powerful connection decides to make a habit of maintaining a ratio of 2? They're going to crowd someone out to a ratio of lower than 1 by the pidgeonhole principle; the aggregate number of downloads should match the number of uploads.

So either everyone has to hit a ratio of 1 which seems like it'd be hard to coordinate, or there have to be free riders.

[0] https://www.myanonamouse.net/rules.php

For MAM specifically, FTA:

> Also they give you credit for seeding as long as you keep the file available, which is very generous. (Most other places count seeding the standard way, which means your upload number only goes up when someone else actually grabs file pieces from you. This can make it difficult to maintain "ratio" - for your uploads to be equivalent or higher than your downloads.)

In practice, my "real" ratio (the actual uploaded bytes / downloaded bytes) is 0.2, but after my credits it is 7.0 (far above the recommended 2.0). It's basically impossible to not meet the ratio requirement for MAM if you're putting a small amount of thought into it.

Other trackers have different rules. On TorrentLeech for instance, every torrent above 10 GB in size is "FreeLeech" (doesn't count as a download). Since that site is intended for movies, TV, and games (which are usually always above 10 GB in size anyway) it basically means you never have to worry about ratio.

I am not on RED but I imagine most people use automation software like autobrr to "race" (to download a new torrent as quickly as possible after creation so everyone else has to download from you).

Almost every private tracker has a bonus point system: you are awarded bonus points for seeding (usually non-linearly, where the longer you seed the more points you earn for that torrent per hour) and can exchange them for upload credit.

There's also often various situations where downloading a file costs less for you than the upload credit it gives to others. Most commonly this is via freeleech where a download is not credited (but the corresponding upload credit still is awarded).

I would say that maintaining ratio is not actually a big deal these days in the world of private trackers writ large. These days bandwidth is cheap, storage is (or used to be) cheap, the communities are older and more long term oriented. On many of the best trackers the ratio system is essentially symbolic. RED (from the OP) is a notable exception and one of the only notable trackers where maintaining a ratio actually requires some work--their ratio system is much closer to zero sum.

In practice this is less of a concern for a few reasons:

- They often designate items as "freeleech," which means that downloading does not cost you ratio, but uploading still credits you.

- They often provide free credits at various times, especially for new members.

- They tend to have a soft cap, so the automated warning systems don't even start until users dip below 0.9-0.95.

- As much as these sites have, there is always something they don't have, and providing it will get you a relatively high share of the total upload.

Bear in mind that the primary driver for the site is ensuring access to everything that is available.

It depends on the "ratio economy" of the tracker.

Some are very hard: Bibliotik offers very few opportunities to build ratio. Very few people download any given random book, and there is no source of free credit. The economy is very feudal with no real inflation.

Some are easy: the ratio requirement on btn is nominal, and the real requirement is that you seed single shows for at least a day and seasons for a week. The system especially penalizes 'Hit and Run' downloads (i.e., not seeding for the required amount of time) rather than overall ratio. This acknowledges the ephemeral interest of a given TV show, and that each new show release is effectively a 'holiday' event.

It isn't hard to work out that it's impossible for a forum to maintain a true 1:1 ratio based solely on reported byte counts. First, you have the obvious bootstrapping problem, which is that on day 1, no matter what is uploaded, nobody has any right to download anything because everyone has only uploaded zero bytes.

So you may think "ah, I'll start with an allowance". Just count everyone as having uploaded, let's say for concreteness, 1GB. The next problem is that each file transfer means moving that around like it's money; 1000 bytes downloaded for me is exactly 1000 bytes uploaded by you. But then, again for concreteness, let's say someone puts up a popular torrent and everybody downloads their 1GB directly from this guy. (Imagine they do it in sequence and then don't seed themselves or whatever.) The person with the popular torrent now has all the credit in the system. Then they walk away. Everyone who leaves the system and never comes back, or is just generally unavailable, is taking credit out of the system with them. This is the ongoing problem with the system.

So you must have some sort of mechanism for acquiring "ratio" other than actually uploading something. Fortunately, simply rewarding people for seeding is pretty good. It incentivizes people to seed things that otherwise would be left behind. Even better is to give even more reward for things others aren't seeding. This tends to turn your tracker into a persistent library, with even old things still available, rather than a competition to beat everyone to the popular torrents so that we can download things before everyone else so hopefully we can upload more than we downloaded. I'm sure this isn't perfect but it's a lot better than a rigid ratio system. You just have to deal with people who think it's not "fair" to give out ratio for just hosting things that nobody downloads.

In Hungary the biggest private tracker, which is a vocation to use here, solved this by abolishing the ratio system. When you download something you have to seed it for a net 48 hours inside 1 month OR until you seed it back to 1.0 ratio. In each month you can download 10 torrents w/o following this rule. There is no regular ratio system, no freelech torrents etc.

385k users, 750k torrents, 2,6 petabyte of data, 8.6m seeders out of 9.1m connections. Simple as that. https://files.catbox.moe/ogcrpl.png

Some trackers solve this by having certain torrents not count towards your download, only towards upload. Usually older torrents, or those in need of being seeded.

This, coupled with other rules, such as that you need to seed a torrent at least X amount of time after finishing it, helps to maintain a healthy site.

You can buy upload credit with seeding bonus on some trackers, and there are nearly always freeleech downloads that don’t count against your downloads, but do count for uploads. It’s usually quite easy to maintain a ratio.

Due to how BitTorrent tracker (the actual tracker part, as defined in BEP-3) works, you can cheat your reported upload. There is way to detect obvious cheater (if you claimed that you uploaded 1Tb on Torrent XYZ but the cumulative download on XYZ on the same period doesn't add up, that's sus), but due to the self-report nature of stats and potential loss and inaccuracy in the stats tracking (a legit client can report more upload than upload due to packet loss on the receiving end, how when the client stops counting, for example if a process was killed before sending the stats to the tracker). And due to the fact that it's p2p, you usually need to track and analyze behavior over several torrents to be sure. If torrent XYZ has 300Go download reported over a day, but over the same day seeder1 report 200Go uploaded and seeder2 report 150Go, you know it's likely that one of them is lying, but you don't know each one.

Here is an open secret : A lot of private tracker operator are not dev. Some of them just know how to host a phpBB and one of the open-source tracker and administer it, and that's it. Many private trackers have little to no custom dev done to them. So most of them don't have elaborate cheating detection.

Cheating will get you ban, but if you are subtle about it and don't try to claim enormous amount over little time, you can get away with it.

MAM credits you with points that can be used to buy upload credit or to make downloading a given torrent not count against your total bytes downloaded (freeleech)

Torrentleech has a point system as well and also automatically makes torrents above a certain size freeleech.

For both, the accumulation of points is so generous that you'll really only run into ratio issues if you go looking for them. Hell, MAM has so many people that are perpetually sitting with the maximum amount of points available and fantastic ratios that they have lotteries where users with more points than they could ever spend can spend them gambling on upload credit, but with the ability to spend more on a ticket to increase the prize (but not increase the odds of them winning). The practical upshot of this is that users who don't increase the prize get a much higher expected value for an entry than users that do, and those users i talked about that have more points than they can spend essentially use those points to buy other users download credits.

You're absolutely right that the base torrenting system is one where someone has to upload every byte that's downloaded and vice versa but these trackers are designed to ensure that basically anyone who makes a good

I know from using myanonamouse that you only need to seed for about 3 weeks after downloading to satisfy their rules, I think they artificially grant you an upload amount of whatever you downloaded.