this may be a dumb question but i was reading some articles and trying to understand seeding and peers; i generally pull up a torrent and grab the actual files but uncheck the random txt files like the ones that say where it was downloaded from (just for personal preference to keep my directories clean). does that cause any problems for others? should i not be excluding them from downloading? i generally keep torrents seeding when they’re done but if i don’t download those small files am i causing problems?
this is true if you manually delete the txt file.
however, just unchecking it in the client doesn’t result in a broken seeder - at least transmission-gtk 4 will write the “file.txt” even if you didn’t check its box, or transmission will create a (sparse) “file.txt.part” file if there’s additional pieces to the “file.txt” that you didn’t download.
I would expect other clients to behave similarly.