qBittorrent Tips that improve the Bittorrent client

The following collection of tips for the Bittorrent client qBittorrent improves the client in several significant ways.
I switched to qBittorrent after it became apparent that uTorrent, my then-favorite client was no longer the lightweight client I once fell in love with.
The application is an excellent program that is available for different platforms and updated regularly.
While it works very well out of the box without any configuration changes, you can get more out of the client if you enable additional features or make sure the client is configured properly.
qBittorrent Tips
This guide is not a "how to speed up" article but concentrates on features that qBittorrent offers that you may find useful.
Built-in Search
The client features a built-in search that you can enable to search across several popular torrent indexing sites.
The list of sites includes The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, Kickass Torrents or Legit Torrents by default.
You need to enable the search module before you can make use of it. To do so select View > Search Engine to get started. A search tab is added to qBittorrent if Python is installed on the system. If not, you get a prompt to download and install Python on the system instead.
If you accept, qBittorrent will download Python and start the installer for you. Search is added as a tab in the end.
You can uninstall search engines with a click on "search engines" in the search interface, check for updates to update information about the installed search engines, or install new search engines from file or url.
A search queries all installed and enabled search engines by default and displays results afterwards in the qBittorrent interface. You may select a different category or a specific search engine before you run searches to customize the output.
Results are sorted by the number of seeders by default, but you may change that to name, size, leechers or search engine instead.
Global and alternate speed limits
You can configure qBittorrent to upload and download with full speed, or limit either the upload or download rate individually.
You may, on top of that, set alternate rates in the options which you may enable manually at any time, or specify a schedule for.
- Select Tools > Options in the qBittorrent interface.
- Switch to Speed in the options dialog that opens.
- Set global or alternate rates as you see fit.
The system is flexible, and you may set only upload rates if you want. The scheduling can be useful if you need the bandwidth regularly for other activities during specific days of the week (you may select individual days, all weekdays, or weekend).
Click on the speed tachometer in the status bar of the client to switch between the global and alternate speed limit manually.
Banning peers / Adding peers
Banning peers can be useful at times, for instance if you notice that a peer uses a "leech only" client or if you don't accept connections from peers from specific locations in the world.
To ban a peer select Peers from the bottom menu, right-click the peer you want to ban, and select "ban peer permanently".
The same menu enables you to add peers manually which can be useful as well at times, especially if you want to seed a file to specific peers.
Priority
You can prioritize files included in a torrent by select the content tab after selecting a torrent from the list, right-clicking on files you want to prioritize, and selecting the priority menu to pick a new priority for the file.
You may block files from being downloaded at all this way, or set them to higher than normal priority to download them faster (usually).
Watch folders
You can configure qBittorrent to monitor folders for you. The client monitors these folders for torrent files and will add them automatically to the download queue when it picks them up.
You may set a custom download path for each monitored folder after adding them.
This can be useful under certain circumstances, for instance if you don't want to add torrents directly in the client.
RSS Reader
The built-in RSS reader enables you to pull torrent files from sites supporting RSS feeds. Useful if you follow blogs or sites that offer RSS feeds as it speeds up the adding of new torrent files significantly.
Now You: Have another qBittorrent Tip? Feel free to share it in the comment section below.


Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.