I just got banned from a private tracker for ratio cheating. This happened a couple of days after I moved from using my windows machine with utorrent to using ubuntu with ktorrent.

The last time I worked primarily on a linux machine I hadn't been doing much torrenting, so I had little experience with anything beyond ubuntu's default. I knew I wanted something a little more robust, but I didn't want to use Azareus (since I dislike running java ontop of everything else) nor pair uTorrent up with WINE. I did some quick research into the popular clients, making sure that they were allowed on the sites I regularly used, and then decided that ktorrent sounded like the best bet.

I spent the first few days just getting music, since there wasn't any tv I was interested in. On Tuesday I downloaded about 500MB from bitmetv and uploaded something like 15, since by the time I got on the torrent there were a lot of seeders, but I didn't want to wait for it to show up somewhere else. I was having some weird problems, but on the downloading side.

Today (Wednesday) I went to log into the site and my account was removed. The person who gave me the invite has been warned because they've labeled me a cheater and as the person who invited me she's responsible.

We couldn't figure out what happened, other than that I was using a different client that I had already confirmed was allowed. She did some further searching on the forums and it turns out that it is marked as banned in one thread. So we figured that was the problem, and she sent a PM letting them know that we weren't contesting my ban since I was (unknowingly) using a banned client, but that the faq should be updated to reflect its status.

The response we got back was that I wasn't banned for using a banned client, but rather I was banned for cheating and that "most cheaters try to blame their client". I was tracked as reporting 200+MB/s. I'm not asking her to argue further about this, because all that will happen is that she will get banned as well.

But the idea that someone else could get into the exact same trouble as I did is really bothering me. Is this behaviour a known bug for (certain conditions in) 2.0.3? To your knowledge, is that version of ktorrent currently banned at bitmetv?

I just can't figure out what happened, and of course I now have no access to their site to try to track things down on my own.

We know there was a bug in 2.1beta1 but I can't confirm that the same bug is present in 2.0.3. I don't think so.

Anyway, I'm not sure we can do much without announce log files, either from yourself or even better from tracker but I doubt that's gonna happen.

The announce log files are gone now because I've closed and opened the client since then, I certainly would have backed them up if I thought there was a chance of something going wrong.

I don't know how this stuff works. Could it have been an error with the tracker? I didn't modify anything on my end, beyond selecting a download folder and possibly setting some upload maximums. Where could these things have gone wrong?

I'm not asking for help getting reinstated there. I was only a member for a few weeks so I certainly know how to get along without it.

But I would like to figure out what happened. Are you saying that since theres no log file backup I'm out of luck? And is there plans to keep the log files for longer in the next versions, so that these kinds of things have a better chance of being solved?

I've stopped using ktorrent because I can't trust that this exact same thing won't happen to me at dimeadozen which is the tracker I really care about. But I've always felt that being part of a community meant trying to solve these things so others don't experience the exact same problem.

You should upgrade to the final 2.1 release when it comes out this weekend.

There are no known tracker bugs at this moment.

What kind of weird problems were you having with downloads? I had the same thing happen to me with OiNK and I want to get to the bottom of this issue.

I think I did something like remove a torrent and then reopen the partially downloaded torrent. I haven't had a chance to test that yet as I don't yet know how to verify the upload rate that is being reported to the tracker.

If you have ideas about interaction that might have caused the ban then please post them here.

Cheers,


Chris