If you are an Administrator or Moderator for the tracker,
you have 2 ways of deleting torrents from the tracker.
Click the link that appears in the far right column on the
row that contains the torrent you wish to delete.
While viewing the stats page for a particular torrent, you
can click on the
button
displayed in the Navigation Bar.
SPECIAL NOTE 1: You should not delete torrents by removing files
from your /torrents directory. This will not remove them from
the tracker's database and will cause errors.
SPECIAL NOTE 2: If you shutdown/restart your tracker shortly
after deleting a torrent, it might not be removed from the
database and will still appear in the torrent table, even
though the actual torrent file will be deleted from the
/torrents directory.
... as an Uploader (Regular User)
If you have enabled bnbt_delete_own_torrents, users will
be able to delete ONLY their own torrents from the
My Torrents page of your tracker.
What happens to the swarm?
To answer this question, it is important that you understand
how BitTorrent clients interact with your tracker.
When someone opens a torrent that uses your tracker, her client
contacts the tracker for a few seconds and gathers the following
information:
the IP Address of each swarm member (seeds and peers)
the port numbers that each swarm member's client is using
for that torrent
the peer id for each swarm member (not gathered when the
tracker is using the compact announce method)
After gathering this information, the BitTorrent client disconnects
immediately from your tracker, and makes direct peer-to-peer
connections with each of the members in the swarm.
If your tracker were to suddenly shutdown, the current swarm would
continue to interact with each other. They are not depending on
the tracker to transmit data between each other. This is the
nature of pure peer-to-peer filesharing. However, any new clients
would not be able to join the swarm, if the tracker was not running.
Clients typically re-announce (re-connect) to the tracker about
every 30 minutes to have their swarm list updated and to report
their current download stats to the tracker.
The same behavior occurs when you delete a torrent.
So in conclusion... If you delete a torrent from your tracker,
and there is currently a swarm using that torrent, the current
members of the swarm will continue to transmit data to one
another, but no one new will be able to join the swarm.
You should usually only delete a torrent when it is dead
and there is no activity on the torrent.
