Stop Seeding Automatically After a Set Number of Days

Ratio rules are the ones everybody sets up first, and on a lot of private trackers they are the wrong rule. Plenty of trackers do not ask for a ratio at all — they ask you to seed for a minimum time, usually somewhere between 72 hours and 28 days. A torrent can hit ratio 3.0 in an afternoon and still land you a hit-and-run if you remove it on day two.

Liteflow, included with your seedbox, can enforce seed time directly, using the timestamp rTorrent records when a download completes.

Set it up

1. Open your service in the client area and click Open Liteflow on the Automation card.
2. Create New → Start from Template, choose Stop seeding after a set number of days, then Use Template and Confirm.
3. Click List seeding and select your rTorrent connection.
4. Click Pick torrents past the seed time. Under Inputs, change days from 14 to whatever your tracker requires.
5. Click Stop seeding and select the same connection.
6. Click Test Flow. Read the output of the middle step — it lists exactly which torrents would be stopped, and how many days each has actually seeded, before anything happens.
7. Publish. It runs once a day at 04:00 by default; change the hour and timezone on the trigger.

Stopping versus deleting

The template stops, and stops only. That is deliberate. Stopping is free to undo: the data is still on disk, the torrent is still in your client, and one click starts it seeding again. Deleting is not.

Once you have watched the flow for a week and agree with every torrent it picked, you can change the last step’s Operation from Stop to Erase. Know what erase does before you do: it removes the torrent from rTorrent, and it leaves the downloaded files on disk. It frees a slot, not space. To reclaim space you still delete the files yourself — through the file manager, over SFTP, or with ruTorrent’s own “remove and delete data”.

Only apply it where it belongs

A single seed-time rule across every tracker is how people accidentally break their own accounts. Two safer patterns:

• One flow per label. Put a label in the List seeding step. Import the template once per tracker, label your grabs accordingly, and give each its own number of days.
• Longest rule wins. If you cannot be bothered with labels, set days to the longest requirement across the trackers you use. Over-seeding costs you nothing but a disk slot; under-seeding costs you a warning.

Combining it with a ratio rule

The two rules answer different questions and it is fine to run both — the ratio template handles “seeded enough”, this one handles “seeded long enough”. Run both and a torrent stops when either condition is met, which is almost never what a tracker wants. If your tracker requires both, run only the seed-time flow and set the days high enough that ratio is reached comfortably inside the window.

What the flow cannot see

rTorrent records when a download finished, not when you added it, and not how long it has been actively connected. A torrent you stopped for a week still ages. If you use the bandwidth-window schedule, remember that paused hours still count towards these fourteen days even though you uploaded nothing during them.