Private Trackers

Private trackers require every download to be seeded back; failing to do so is a hit-and-run (H&R) and gets accounts banned. AIOStreams never seeds on your behalf and never adds a torrent to your debrid service unless you press play — here's exactly when that happens, and the settings that make it impossible to trigger by accident.

Search vs. Playback

Search (listing results) checks whether each result's hash is already cached on your debrid service, to show the ⚡/⏳ badge — it never adds anything to your debrid service. For hash-less results it may fetch the .torrent file to resolve a hash (see Hash-less Indexers), but that's just a metadata read, not a download from the tracker's swarm — no seeding obligation starts from it.

Playback is the only moment anything is added:

• Cached → the debrid service already has it stored from a prior fetch (by any user). Nothing new is downloaded, nothing to seed back.
• Uncached → pressing play makes the debrid service fetch it from the tracker's swarm. This is the only point a seeding obligation can start, and only for the result you clicked.

Protecting an Uncached Private Torrent

Once an uncached private torrent is added, AIOStreams protects the seed afterwards:

• Auto Remove Downloads (Services → Built-in) skips cleanup for a download the debrid service itself reports as private — the normal case on a private-tracker-aware service like TorBox.
• A losing failover race's cleanup is slightly more thorough here: it also falls back to the indexer's own private flag if the debrid service didn't report one.
• Use torrent download URLs (BUILTIN_DEBRID_USE_TORRENT_DOWNLOAD_URL, instance-level, on by default) prefers a tracker's .torrent URL over a bare magnet, since most private trackers embed your passkey there — needed for the debrid service's download to attribute correctly to your account.
• The indexer-derived private flag comes from the indexer's type="private" attribute, or, when a .torrent had to be downloaded (see below), the BEP27 flag parsed from it directly — separate from the debrid service's own private field that Auto Remove Downloads checks.

Hash-less Indexers (a separate, non-H&R issue)

A Torznab/Newznab feed should include each result's hash directly (torznab:attr infohash or a magnet enclosure). When it does, AIOStreams never touches the tracker again until playback. When it doesn't, AIOStreams must download the .torrent file for every candidate result just to get its hash — not only the one you play. That's slower and can trip an indexer's rate limit from the extra request volume (a request-rate problem, not a seeding one).

Use Test Connection on a Torznab addon to check which case you're in — it flags a missing hash with:

This indexer may need to download the torrent file for every result, which can affect performance or hit request limits. Consider lowering the results limit if you notice issues.

This only applies to indexers added directly as Torznab/Newznab — going through NZBHydra2 or Prowlarr means the manager decides whether a hash comes back. Curated mid-to-high-tier trackers rarely hit this in practice — a search returns few results, so even hash-less ones mean few forced downloads.

Trumping Trackers

Some trackers replace individual episode torrents with a season pack once one is uploaded. For these, set the addon's Season/Episode Search Strategy to Dynamic (Season Preferred) so AIOStreams still finds the pack after the episodes are pruned, paired with the Season/Episode Matching filter to reject mismatches.

Summary