Torrent etiquette for slow links

[Guest Irish Hare]

My line speed and bandwidth cap is such that it can take 1-2 weeks to download a single 700Mb movie and 3-5 weeks for a series or BluRay version. I try to seed, but even leaving the torrent to seed for another month or more gets to a ratio of .2 or .3 at best, often only .1 or less. Most of the time, the seeds I have running are "ignored" in the sense that there is no upload happening. Is this because there are other seeds available offering faster connections?

What is the correct etiquette for users in this position (which exists in many countries)? How long should we seed? Will we be forgiven if we give up after 3-4 weeks? Even if I keep it running, my experience is that even after 6 weeks or more the ratio still does not go up i.e. no matter how hard we try its impossible to get anywhere near to a seed ratio of 1.

[Guest Shaddow]

I ussually seed files with less than 50-100 seeds. If there are more than that I check the ratio of seeder to peer. In your case it may be proper to make available torrents with few seeders or at least ones with poor ratios. Unless you are on a private tracker your ratio doesn't matter, as long as you contribute what you can.

Personally, I download twice as fast as I upload, so my share ratio is at about.58. I share what I can and save my upload bandwidth for the files that really need it, and were people are more likley to connect to my slower connection. I keep a few torrents that have less than 10 seeds.