Clean Up Unregistered and Stalled Torrents Automatically

Two problems pile up on any box that seeds a few thousand torrents. Some torrents the tracker has quietly dropped — they sit there red, uploading nothing, forever. Others are alive but stuck at 0 B/s because the announce went out at a bad moment and never got retried. Left alone both just accumulate, and the usual community answer is an auto-remove script. The complaint about those scripts is always the same: they either delete healthy torrents or miss the dead ones.

Liteflow, included with your seedbox, can handle both cases — and it does the safe thing first.

How the two cases are told apart

rTorrent stores a message per torrent, which is the tracker’s own last response. A dropped torrent says something along the lines of Tracker: [Failure reason “Unregistered torrent”]. A network problem says Connection timed out or Could not connect. A torrent that is simply not finding peers says nothing at all. Those three cases want three different answers, so the templates split them.

Template one — clean up failed and unregistered torrents

Runs once a day, reads every torrent’s message, and picks out two groups: unregistered at the tracker, and erroring for another reason. It stops them and sends you the list on Telegram. It deletes nothing.

1. Open your service in the client area and click Open Liteflow on the Automation card.
2. Create New → Start from Template, choose Clean up failed and unregistered torrents, then Use Template and Confirm.
3. Select your rTorrent connection on List all torrents and on Stop it.
4. On Send me the list, pick your Telegram connection and chat id. If you have not made one yet, the Telegram setup guide walks through @BotFather in a couple of minutes.
5. Click Test Flow and read what the middle step returned before publishing. That is the list it would act on today.

Why stop rather than erase? Because “unregistered” is not always permanent. Trackers go down for maintenance, get their announce URL changed, or return that message to a client whose passkey has rotated. Stopping is reversible in one click; erasing is not. Once you have read a week of daily lists and agree with every entry, change the Stop it step’s operation to Erase. Note that erase removes the torrent from the client and leaves the files on disk — it frees a slot, not space.

Template two — kick stalled downloads back into life

rTorrent has no “force reannounce” button that a flow can press. What it does have is start and stop, and stopping then starting a torrent forces a fresh announce — which is what a reannounce script does anyway.

1. Create New → Start from Template, choose Kick stalled downloads back into life, Use Template, Confirm.
2. Select your rTorrent connection on List incomplete, Stop and Start again.
3. Publish. It runs hourly.

It only touches torrents that are incomplete, active, and downloading at exactly zero. Anything the tracker has already dropped is skipped on purpose — that is the other template’s job, and stop-starting a dead torrent just hammers the tracker for nothing. maxPerRun on the middle step caps it at 20 torrents per hour so a large stuck queue does not turn into an announce flood; raise it if you know your tracker tolerates it.

Racing is different

If you are chasing a first-few-seeders position, an hourly loop is far too slow — you want a reannounce within seconds of the grab, which is what autobrr does natively. These templates are housekeeping for a large, long-lived library, not a racing tool.

What to check if nothing gets picked up

• Empty list every day. Good news, usually. Confirm by opening ruTorrent and sorting by status — if you can see red torrents there but the flow found none, their message wording is unusual; send it to support and we will widen the pattern.
• It picked up something healthy. Stop the flow, look at the torrent’s tracker message in ruTorrent, and tell us what it says. Nothing was deleted, so there is nothing to undo beyond starting it again.
• Stalled torrents come straight back. The announce is working and the swarm genuinely has no seeders. No script fixes that.