Protecting the interest of our customers and ensuring the stability of the service have been key principles for IVPN since starting our operations more than ten years ago. To keep delivering on these promises, we have made the decision to gradually phase out the port forwarding feature from the IVPN Pro plan.
So IVPN is also removing port forward. Who’s next?
To be able to connect to someone, one of them needs to have a port forwarded. If you forward it, you can connect to everyone. If not, then you can only connect to those who have done it. This is especially a problem on almost dead torrents with a few or less peers only
With all the sites and release groups that have shut down recently there seems to be something big occurring. It looks like this might be the gradual shut down of open trackers chaps. IVPN was the choice for services for years; will have to see what happens from here. I felt comfortable using their service; however this changes my self hosting. Usenet from here on out? IRC? Where do we go from here?
Seems like another blow and a step closer to the death of public trackers for many. For us hardcore pirates we don’t give a shit but the big corps are gonna be very happy. Many people should probably just move on to Usenet
As of today (29 June 2023), Port forwarding is not offered for new customers as part of the Pro plan. Further, existing IVPN Pro customers cannot reserve new ports. Existing reservations will stay in place, and can be disabled by manual action.
We are disabling all reserved ports and completely remove this feature from our service on 30 September 2023.
I hoped this wouldn’t happen but saw it coming from a mile away, honestly. I think, as OP said in another comment, we’re going to see the rest of the better VPNs (an already short list - what is it now, just AirVPN and maybe Proton?) slowly take away this feature as well.
My Mullvad subscription runs out in a few days. Think I’ll be using the extra monthly $5 to upgrade my seedbox plan and ditch home seeding entirely.
If you download a wireguard/openVPN conf file from Proton it will let you enable nat-pmp which is basically automatic port forwarding. It seems to work fine on a Linux machine running qbittorrent, but your case might be different.
Windscribe supports ephemeral port forwarding on its paid plans and permanent port forwarding on its static IP plans. They have a 44% off sale currently.
I don’t understand. Are you talking about the static IPs? They are not dedicated. They are still shared, so Windscribe cannot pinpoint individual users on them.
Yeah that’s the point, it’s just that authorities can go to them and ask for an IP and timestamp, then go with that info to your ISP asking for the person the IP was assigned at that time.
I moved from mullvad when they dropped port forwarding and moved to ivpn only now to find they have dropped it to.
I think I will hang fire a little while now and see how things play out before having the rug pulled again. Is there going to come a time when none them offer port forwarding?
The problem with seedboxes is that you’re severely limited on storage space. If more VPN providers remove port forwarding and more people move to seedboxes, we’ll see every old torrent die off as people are only going go seed the newest content. You definitely need a balance of seedboxes and people like me with a 6TB HDD used solely for permaseeding on my home connection for both fast downloads and torrent longevity.
I’ve already made a comment ITT but I’d like to agree with you here and add on -
The problem with seedboxes is that you’re severely limited on storage space
Not only this, but a lot of seedbox providers either restrict or outright disallow the use of public trackers on their services, both for DMCA-avoidance and also for fair usage policy compliance since slots are often shared (depending on provider & plan). Dedicated servers/slots that can mitigate the latter reason are more expensive and probably out of budget for a lot of torrenters (including myself).
I can see an increasing shift in seedbox usage if more VPNs remove port-forwarding (which I can also see happening - look at how fast IVPN removed it after Mullvad. If you’d allow me a doomer moment, we could be looking at zero good options for VPNs with port forwarding by the end of the year or next). What I can’t predict is how badly or how quickly losing these options will actually affect public tracker usage/torrent availability. I’m not sure if there are any numbers out there estimating how many people utilize VPNs and port forwarding with public torrents versus those who do not.
Regardless, these VPN changes aren’t good news for us… between this and RARBG going down, it’s been a disappointing last few months. I have found my home in a few private trackers and am focusing my efforts there to upload content that I care about, but that content will not reach the masses like the public torrents I soon may not be able to seed efficiently can.
Yup, AFAIK you do not need a port forward to torrent within the I2P network. And in addition you wouldn’t even need a VPN. The main downside is that I2P needs more people torrenting so that it’ll go faster.
There are i2p trackers and the only way for torrents to get there is by crosseeding them (from clearweb), qbitorrent on the v6.0 release will make this easier.
And you can also just upload to i2p trackers directly.
I think this is definitely the way to go! Just waiting on qbit now. VPNs are starting to feel dated (to me) for torrent use, but still great for privacy.
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Can someone enlighten me to why people are port forwarding? Just wondering what everyone is doing that different from me.
To be able to connect to someone, one of them needs to have a port forwarded. If you forward it, you can connect to everyone. If not, then you can only connect to those who have done it. This is especially a problem on almost dead torrents with a few or less peers only
Damn IVPN has always been a solid provider. No public missteps and supported XMR earlier than all (reputable) others.
Time to switch to i2p and usenet at least until the next p2p protocol comes about.
With all the sites and release groups that have shut down recently there seems to be something big occurring. It looks like this might be the gradual shut down of open trackers chaps. IVPN was the choice for services for years; will have to see what happens from here. I felt comfortable using their service; however this changes my self hosting. Usenet from here on out? IRC? Where do we go from here?
Seems like another blow and a step closer to the death of public trackers for many. For us hardcore pirates we don’t give a shit but the big corps are gonna be very happy. Many people should probably just move on to Usenet
I hoped this wouldn’t happen but saw it coming from a mile away, honestly. I think, as OP said in another comment, we’re going to see the rest of the better VPNs (an already short list - what is it now, just AirVPN and maybe Proton?) slowly take away this feature as well.
My Mullvad subscription runs out in a few days. Think I’ll be using the extra monthly $5 to upgrade my seedbox plan and ditch home seeding entirely.
The paid ProtonVPN has port-forwarding for its Windows app, not for Linux yet though.
Proton has its issues. Cant use killswitch together with split tunneling and not all servers have port forwarding enabled
This is fine with me. Kill switches aren’t perfect so I just have QBit bound to the VPN so it won’t run without it.
If you download a wireguard/openVPN conf file from Proton it will let you enable nat-pmp which is basically automatic port forwarding. It seems to work fine on a Linux machine running qbittorrent, but your case might be different.
Windscribe supports ephemeral port forwarding on its paid plans and permanent port forwarding on its static IP plans. They have a 44% off sale currently.
The product description is a bit awkward:
This is why they go to your provider and asking whom this IP belongs to. They basically sey that they log your stuff
I don’t understand. Are you talking about the static IPs? They are not dedicated. They are still shared, so Windscribe cannot pinpoint individual users on them.
Yeah that’s the point, it’s just that authorities can go to them and ask for an IP and timestamp, then go with that info to your ISP asking for the person the IP was assigned at that time.
Where I live you don’t need a VPN for this…
I moved from mullvad when they dropped port forwarding and moved to ivpn only now to find they have dropped it to.
I think I will hang fire a little while now and see how things play out before having the rug pulled again. Is there going to come a time when none them offer port forwarding?
I have a feeling that this will happen to the “good” ones. I wish there was another way to seed properly without portforward.
I think you might be right. I may just end up getting a seed box of some description
The problem with seedboxes is that you’re severely limited on storage space. If more VPN providers remove port forwarding and more people move to seedboxes, we’ll see every old torrent die off as people are only going go seed the newest content. You definitely need a balance of seedboxes and people like me with a 6TB HDD used solely for permaseeding on my home connection for both fast downloads and torrent longevity.
At least the upside is that generally content still available will be faster to download with people using seedboxes
I’ve already made a comment ITT but I’d like to agree with you here and add on -
Not only this, but a lot of seedbox providers either restrict or outright disallow the use of public trackers on their services, both for DMCA-avoidance and also for fair usage policy compliance since slots are often shared (depending on provider & plan). Dedicated servers/slots that can mitigate the latter reason are more expensive and probably out of budget for a lot of torrenters (including myself).
I can see an increasing shift in seedbox usage if more VPNs remove port-forwarding (which I can also see happening - look at how fast IVPN removed it after Mullvad. If you’d allow me a doomer moment, we could be looking at zero good options for VPNs with port forwarding by the end of the year or next). What I can’t predict is how badly or how quickly losing these options will actually affect public tracker usage/torrent availability. I’m not sure if there are any numbers out there estimating how many people utilize VPNs and port forwarding with public torrents versus those who do not.
Regardless, these VPN changes aren’t good news for us… between this and RARBG going down, it’s been a disappointing last few months. I have found my home in a few private trackers and am focusing my efforts there to upload content that I care about, but that content will not reach the masses like the public torrents I soon may not be able to seed efficiently can.
What about i2p torrenting?
Yup, AFAIK you do not need a port forward to torrent within the I2P network. And in addition you wouldn’t even need a VPN. The main downside is that I2P needs more people torrenting so that it’ll go faster.
I guess that means as more VPNs do this we need to spread the word on I2P then?
I know nothing about i2p isn’t it going to depend on everyone using i2p?
There are i2p trackers and the only way for torrents to get there is by crosseeding them (from clearweb), qbitorrent on the v6.0 release will make this easier.
And you can also just upload to i2p trackers directly.
I think this is definitely the way to go! Just waiting on qbit now. VPNs are starting to feel dated (to me) for torrent use, but still great for privacy.
I’m seeing more people move that direction. It’s worth keeping an eye on it.
is there a guide for torrenting with i2p ?
I heard its slower?
It is slower, but since it is a p2p network the more people that use it the faster it gets. (in theory) (sort of like seeding the network)
I don’t even know what I’d use a VPN service without port forwarding for.
useful to bypass geoblocks
Except that most services have started blocking VPN IP addresses.