Removing the support for forwarded ports - Blog | Mullvad VPN
mullvad.net
Today we announce that we no longer support port forwarding. New port forwards will no longer be supported, and existing ports will be removed 2023-07-01.

Dang. Genuinely good service ruined by the abuse of csam promulgating fuckheads who deserve to rot for their evil

  • RION [she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    from what i'm reading you can still download but this makes it a lot harder to upload/seed. if you're on a private tracker or really want to pay it forward with a good sharing ratio then this is no bueno

    • FuckYourselfEndless [ze/hir]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Can't you use the torrent client to port forward? I am using QBittorrent and Mullvad and I still get some amount of upload though I can't remember if I port forwarded anything using Mullvad.

      • RION [she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Apparently there are some settings in torrent clients to help juice your upload but that's only optimizing what your VPN already allows? I'm basing this all off a few threads in r/mullvadvpn so I'd go there if you want more concrete info

        • neo [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Port forwarding is a feature to establish a route from within one network to another network. Imagine Mullvad is acting as your router. You used to be able to go into Mullvad's website and get a forwarded port. This means you could set your torrent client's port to match what Mullvad gave you, making your torrent client directly reachable to anyone on the internet.

          Without the port forwarding feature, you can only connect to other "reachable" torrent clients that are directly exposed to the internet.

          If you have never set up this feature from Mullvad's site before, you will not experience a change in anything. But the benefit with a forwarded port is that you can communicate to more peers in a swarm, because you can connect to both reachable and non-reachable clients. Technically, it's the non-reachable ones who can reach you.

          For well-seeded and alive torrents this doesn't matter to much. For creating new torrents and sharing them, or connecting to nearly dead torrents, this sucks.

          Also, port forwarding isn't just about uploading. It's just about establishing connections.