Tracker whitelist

[Avamander]

It would be really nice if it were possible to create a whitelist of trackers, rest get not used.

I would personally use it to only use a few specific trackers that work and not make my client bother with the hundreds that don't.

[xavery]

That sounds like a weird request. Having more trackers on a torrent generally does not hurt. Have you perhaps found that it impacts performance or usability?

[Avamander]

It definitely wastes some bandwidth and resources by pinging non-working trackers. I'm now thinking that it'd also provide a small privacy benefit by allowing not pinging trackers in the same jurisdiction for ex.

[sio]

I think the desired behavior should better be achieved with external tools, e.g. /etc/hosts and/or firewall settings.

[Avamander]

Neither of those provides a practical whitelist option.

[Mikaela]

I would also be interested in this feature and would be curious on the performance impact if it was possible to only whitelist DHT/PEX/trackerless.

Having long lists of trackers isn't that helpful.

• https://ktetch.co.uk/2014/01/bittorrent-tracker-madness/

I guess alternative (for me at least) could be an option to mass-edit trackers, but the only thing I could find on that was a feature request for another Bittorrent client. qbittorrent/qBittorrent#5362

Edit: I found out that while transmission-remote-gtk has no mass tracker editing, transmission-gtk kind of has.

[Avamander]

Technically a script could be written to purify .torrent files but that still leaves magnet links that have to be somehow cleaned when just clicked upon. It'd be nice if transmission just had this feature.

[ckerr]

My gut feeling is that this is not a feature that many people would use, but I'm not 100% against it. If someone wants to write a PR for it and the code is simple / testable / fast I'd be willing to consider it.

Generally esoteric "power user" features like this are kept in the settings.json file instead of being exposed in the GUI. This is partially because Transmission has several native GUIs so adding settings is a lot of work, but equally important is the choice of keeping the GUI experience simple.