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?

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[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago

Fun fact, you probably download the file anyway because it's smaller than one of the torrent blocks. That block contains info from a file you do want, so you download the whole block. Your torrent client just puts that file in a different place.

So ultimately it doesn't make a difference, except to show you the file. If you don't actually look at the files that often, I'd leave that file checked just to make it less complicated.