From my experience, it's not really the number of leeches that gets you good ratio, it how soon you can get on a new torrent. This is because you will get a lot of people downloading it, but many will have very restricted upload or won't seed very long.
If you can be one of the first leeches on a new UFC for example, you will earn mad ratio, especially if you have a seedbox or high bandwidth connection.
That's why for new users like us, the "Today's Torrents" page is the most important. From my examination of it, it appears that torrents only stay on that page for 24 or 48 hours. If it's there, you know its very fresh, and if it only has a leech or two, but is a UFC or something else uber-popular, then you are in like Flynn!
Basically, starting out at a private tracker is not about building your collection, it is about building ratio, and the best way to do that is to have patience and not grab anything until something like the next UFC comes out, then START on a torrent like that, rather than grabbing the older stuff you want, THEN trying to build ratio.
It just won't work.
The very first torrent I downloaded here was a 4GB training DVD set that I didn't even want (although after I got it, it turned out to be good
) but I was the first leech on it, and I ended up building at least 15GB upload from it. A donation certainly helps in the early days, as I can attest, but its what you do those first few days that set you up for later.Whatever you do, get it sorted now, otherwise you'll get so deep in the hole that you won't be able to dig your way out.
