Torrent Passkey Question

[VicViper573]

How is my traffic tracked?

BakaBT uses a passkey system to identify each user. Your passkey can be found on your settings page. When you announce, your passkey is used to identify you and to (very accurately) track your upload and download traffic, regardless of any IP changes. The passkey is automatically added to the announce URL of every torrent you download whilst logged in. YOU MUST NEVER, EVER GIVE OUT YOUR PASSKEY TO ANY OTHER PERSON. Doing so will result in undesirable outcomes. We will not help to fix any bad ratios caused by user's negligence of the security of their torrent passkey.

If someone wishes to seed a torrent from a different computer than the one they download the files onto originally, do they have to change their torrent passkey?

I remember reading that if you try to do the above, you get banned from the BakaBT tracker.

[Al_Sleeper]

No, you don't.
You will get banned if you try to seed the same torrent from two or more computers simultaneously or make it available to a wide audience.

[VicViper573]

No, you don't.
You will get banned if you try to seed the same torrent from two or more computers simultaneously.

Ok, I thought I had it wrong.  Thanks for clearing that up, though I swear I remember reading that passkey bit somewhere on BakaBT.

How is "Make available to a wide audience" defined?

[buchno]

How is "Make available to a wide audience" defined?

If it gets leaked.

[Al_Sleeper]

Giving a torrent to you friend is OK. Giving it to all your classmates is not.

[Bozobub]

Giving a torrent to you friend is OK. Giving it to all your classmates is not.

Er, wait, what?!

Giving a PUBLIC-key .torrent file to anyone you like is just fine, no matter how many times you do it.  You can post 'em on The Pirate Bay, for that matter, with no negative repercussions at all; in fact, it benefits registered users quite a bit, because the additional traffic will allow members to seriously boost their ratios.

Giving a PRIVATE-key .torrent file to anyone at all is a definite no-no, and WILL get you auto-banned by the tracker rather quickly. That is, unless you happen to never leech or seed that torrent while the other person(s) is/are using it.

[Freedom Kira]

No, it's fine, actually. I don't believe the tracker actually actively checks every torrent's IP addresses to ensure there's only ever one at a time.

You can definitely take a torrent you downloaded on one computer and redownload the data on another computer while it's still seeding on the first computer. Just remove it once it's done.

If you leave them both seeding on two machines, though, or if you redownload it more than a couple times, in the long run someone is bound to notice.

[Al_Sleeper]

Public torrents are available to a wide audience by default.

[Bozobub]

Private torrents, however, are not, and it has been directly stated by staff quite a few times that the same private-key torrent active on 2 PCs (different IP or not) is a BIG no-no, with occasional exceptions arranged via the IRC channel.  You can experiment if you like...

[Freedom Kira]

Explain to me, then, how some users who are reported for passkey sharing are able to get away with it until each torrent is downloaded a few hundred times? And even then, the users are still not auto-banned and end up being reported to the Report a Stat Hacker thread? They are uncommon because it's not really a frequent practice, but if you look back at the last ten pages or so, you should find at least a couple of them.

[Duki3003]

Same as with ratio hackers, some people will get insta-banned, others may not.

[Freedom Kira]

I've been wondering about it myself for a while, actually. Your answer seems to suggest that duplicate IPs on torrent keys don't seem to be actively detected by the tracker. Is that how it works? Or doesn't work, I guess.