Priority setting is ignored when applied to a label or multiple torrents at once

[holygamer]

There's a bug in rTorrent 0.9.8/0.13.8. When I start a torrent after setting it's label to Priority: Don't Download or I manually select a bunch of torrents and right-click on the selection then select Priority: Don't Download then the torrents still download and the priority setting is ignored. The only way to get it to use any priority setting is to select a single torrent then go to the Files tab and set the Priority setting there. However that would take a long time for over 1,000 torrents!

The reason for me wanting to do this is because I've moved my torrents from 1 seedbox to another with a different company and when re-adding thousands of torrent files I want the seed count to be accurate instead of showing zero seeds. I can then sort the torrents by the least seeds to prioritise which torrents to download before they run out of seeds.

Do you have a suggestion please for a way to do what I want until this is fixed?

[kannibalox]

It sounds like you're asking this question in regards to working with ruTorrent instead of the native UI, but luckily there is a way to do this with the built-in commands. All of these next commands are meant to be run from the Ctrl-X prompt in the native terminal UI.

This will set the priority to "off" for all files for all torrents:

d.multicall2=main,"f.multicall=,f.priority.set=0"

If you wanted to just try turning off all items' priorities, you can do this instead:

d.multicall2=main,"f.multicall=,f.priority.set=0"
# It can take a bit for the traffic to actually die down after after setting the priority, which is what you may have seen, so you can stop/start the torrents to force it to take effect.
d.multicall2=main,d.close=
d.multicall2=main,d.start=

If you don't have access to the terminal UI, there are programs like xmlrpc-c or pyrosimple's rtxmlrpc that will let you issue commands over the XMLRPC interface (full disclosure, I maintain pyrosimple).