I've found the best way to do private trackers is to seed everything you download, all the time. If you seed enough of the long tail of things, ratio becomes easier. This also helps people get into a show that peaked a few years ago (after most of the seeders have moved on), which can be harder on public trackers.

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danpalmer 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That's a good idea, seeding the long tail in time rather than in popularity in a sense. This would probably be the best way for me to do it, but even then it requires a different sort of investment – more storage, and more constantly online storage.

My setup is optimised for being quiet and low power, and part of that means bulk HDD storage that is mostly spun down. Seeding a large long tail of data would probably mean a lot more disk activity.

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cowlevel 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Downloading activity is much lower than you think on private trackers since they have relatively few members, but yes, if you do this, every now and then your HDD will start making noise.

	▲	danpalmer 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fair point. I've been burnt by some private trackers before, and their seeming expectation of time investment, but I'll give one a go with this strategy at some point if I see one open for registration.