How to ban peers selectively in uTorrent

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Excessive leeching by peers is one of the biggest problems when using BitTorrent. One more thing to look out for is selfish and cheating BitTorrent clients like BitComet which limits uploads severely, and BitThief, which does not upload anything. Both of these problems can be solved by blocking offensive peers.

Note that this blocking is effective for the IP address, which means that blocking a peer in one torrent will block it out from everything else. IP address blocking should not be misused because it can hurt the torrent health, and ultimately lead to slower or dead torrents if used improperly.

In this tutorial, we describe how to block IP addresses in uTorrent, one of the most popular BitTorrent clients.

How to block IP addresses in uTorrent

In uTorrent, blocking clients can be done by following these steps:

• Go to Options > Preferences (or hit Ctrl+P), go to Advanced tab and scroll down to ipfilter.enable, click on it and set it to true. Click OK to exit preferences window.
• Find and click once the torrent, and click the Peers tab. Right-click anywhere inside the Peers tab and uncheck “Resolve IPs”. So, all peers will be listed by their IP address alone, which is what we need.
• Open a Notepad window and manually type in any IP address that you wish to block.
• Save the Notepad window (with the IP addresses) as “ipfilter.dat” (including the quotes). The location for saving the file should be C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\uTorrent, where USERNAME is the user name of your system account. If you have installed Windows in a different drive, change C:\ accordingly.
• Go back to uTorrent, click the any torrent, go to the Peers tab, right-click and click “Reload IP filter”.

If you need to block more IP addresses later, open ipfilter.dat, add the IP addresses, save the file, then go to uTorrent, click any torrent, go to its Peers tab, right click and click “Reload IP filter”.

If you do not want the hassle of going through all these steps, you could use an alternative client that provides easy IP blocking, but that means you would not be able to use uTorrent

June 5th, 2008 Leave a comment