Dear Unconnectable Peers - Important Information!

[snivlle]

Howdy.

I hope you are taking the time to read this little blurb. We have an awesome sharing community here, but there are still those who don't contribute very much. In some cases, it is because people don't realize that they aren't giving back. They don't realize that the outside world cannot connect to the necessary network ports on their computer.

All too frequently a torrent will be listed as having 3 or more seeders sharing it, and when someone actually tries to connect, there is no data being transferred and it leaves the peer frustrated. As harsh as it may sound, you are absolutely useless to the rest of the community if you are not connectable. If you use a router which is not configured properly, no one can connect to you and that is a very large negative within the music sharing community. Remember the keyword is "sharing". I've no patience nor respect for those who simply want to grab what they can and then disallow others to connect to them. If you are one of those, then this short tutorial is not for you; a smuck up the side of the head is what you need ..now drop and give me 50, private! (Flayed attempt at humour).

If you don't know how to do some of these things that I'm about to mention, please LEARN! It isn't rocket science and the following links will make it fairly easy to learn.

If you use a network router, whatever computer (if you have more than one) that you are using to download torrents should be configured to use a static IP address. More Information is available here:
http://www.portforward.com/networking/static-xp.htm

You then need to configure your router so that it will literally "forward" the network traffic of a given port or ports (6881 is the default) to the computer you are using a bittorrent client on. More information is available here:
http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm

Dear Mods,

I realize that this is not the proper location for this type of information, but I didn't know where else to place this post so that it would get high profile attention.