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Announce Matching

cross-seed has the ability to match cross seeds from IRC announces. This allows you to start seeding as soon as a torrent is uploaded, even before the uploader has started seeding themselves. This method of cross seeding has the lowest impact on trackers due to the nature of IRC and the biggest benefit to you by seeding the intial torrent swarm.

If you don't set this up, cross-seed will eventually match these releases with rssCadence.

Setting Up Announce Matching​

warning

Snatches from announce will happen directly with the tracker, it will not be proxied through Prowlarr/Jackett unlike all other requests cross-seed makes. For most users this is not a problem, but if you are using a proxy or VPN on Prowlarr/Jackett, you will need to ensure that your proxy or VPN is also set up for cross-seed to avoid any issues.

The most common way to connect to a trackers IRC announce channel is through autobrr, for which we recommend their guide for cross-seed.

While cross-seed is running in daemon mode, it will listen for any announces and attempt to find matches against the content you already have. You can monitor these requests and their decisions in the verbose logs.

These matches are exempt from includeSingleEpisodes and will always be matched. This is because the announce is triggered by a new upload, so it is unlikely that a season pack is available. If you want to prevent episode matching, you can block episodes in your autobrr filter.

tip

If you want to filter announces even further, consider setting up more specific filters or using Lists (which filters based on monitored items in Arrs) to minimize needless calls to cross-seed.

Announce Retries​

cross-seed will return a status code of 202 if the source torrent is still downloading. While these torrents are saved by cross-seed for later retrying, you can also set up autobrr to retry these torrents as well. This has a few benefits:

  • The retries will happen at an interval that you set, rather than waiting exclusively on cross-seed to retry. This means you can potentially start seeding faster with a shorter retry interval.
  • Once the source torrent is finally completed, the next retry that autobrr sends will return with a 200 status code. This means that autobrr will now mark this announce as successful and then run your configured actions.

Configuring Retries​

caution

You can adjust the retry delay and attempts to your liking, however autobrr will also retry if requests fail. This means that if cross-seed was down for an extended period, autobrr could overwhelm cross-seed with retry requests as soon as it comes back online. You would need to restart both autobrr and cross-seed to escape this situation.

  1. In autobrr, go to Filters > YOUR_CROSS_SEED_FILTER > External > Retry
  2. Set RETRY HTTP STATUS CODE(S) to 202
  3. Set MAXIMUM RETRY ATTEMPTS to 100
  4. Set RETRY DELAY IN SECONDS to 900 (15 minutes)
  5. Click Save and repeat for any other filters you have set up for cross-seed.

This will retry any announces where the source torrent is still downloading every 15 minutes for a day. If the torrent finishes downloading after this window, cross-seed will still inject the torrent with its internal retry system but autobrr will not have considered it a success.