yeah, i didn’t want to get into the private tracker stuff, since i never used one before; i described pretty much the ressources you have as a “commoner”. I am aware that there are many specialized sources out there, where a lot more obscure material is available, but most of those take special effort to gain access to.

If it’s hard to find, first i try searching via jackett integration into qbittorrent. if unsuccessful, i go over to xrel.to and search for it there (its a pure information site, don’t ask for downloads there pls). You can verify if there has ever been a release of the specific title, and if, you can see the exact name of the release. if you can’t find it there too, you can be pretty sure that there never was a release, neither p2p nor scene. if it’s newer content, you can try to search later; if its older content, go buy it and upload it yourself (safely!) so the next person doesn’t have the same issue.

I don’t have any opinion on them regarding their performance. with proton there exist case files which show that they do not keep logs when not court ordered to do so (in the case i know about, they had to be court ordered to activate logs for login attempts to a specific mailbox). I haven’t heard anything bad about Mullvad either.

Windscribe seems to be fine, but they had at least one big misstep where a private key for OpenVPN was saved locally on a server that then was seized by authorities. PIA, on the other hand, had no issues hiring a criminally convicted CTO and merged with Kape Technologies, which was in the business of creating browser toolbars containing potientially unwanted programs.They have been audited in 2022 tho, so maybe they are alright now…

Thanks, I will take a look in the morning!

I use protonvpn, which has a very nice windows client and a not so nice, but functional Linux client (don’t know about MacOS). Port forwarding works either way, and you have the option of using wireguard or OpenVPN. Their website has a lot of tutorials.

I liked mullvad too, and they are cheaper, but I switched a few months ago because I got a deal for protonvpn and wanted to check out if port forwarding makes any difference for getting my share ratio back in order (and with a seedbox already in mind)

thanks for the info! I’m already covered on the VPN front incl port forwarding at least, opsec is a thing for me since the music industry started sending out love letters to napster users in europe :-)

i’d rather do it myself, since i want to learn as much as possible, including setting up an -arr stack. what hoster is performant and not too expensive?

I had the same issue with my router, and i had to go into Advanced -> Socket Backlog Size and set it to 1 (default is 5) to completely fix it. Do you have a TP-Link router as well?