Trackers

Trackers introduce BitTorrent peers to each other. Reachable trackers can help discover peers, especially for magnet links, but more addresses do not guarantee more peers or faster downloads.

Motrix maintains a curated tracker list: it refreshes enabled community sources, checks reachability, and selects a bounded supplemental list for public BitTorrent tasks. Existing tasks keep their current trackers until you explicitly update them. The Trackers page in the sidebar is where you watch and tune this machinery.

The Effective tab#

The Effective tab lists the current supplemental selection, with its Health, Response (ms), Last probed time, and Source. The master switch — “Inject curated trackers” — turns the whole feature on or off. Sync Now forces a refresh; the filter box narrows the list by URL.

Tracker sources#

The source selector controls which community lists Motrix downloads. Each built-in list in the Effective tab has a Direct address on GitHub and a CDN mirror:

List	Direct enabled by default	CDN enabled by default
ngosang/trackerslist — best	Yes	No
XIU2/TrackersListCollection — best	Yes	No
DeSireFire/animeTrackerList — best	No	No

Direct and CDN describe how the list is fetched, not how BitTorrent peers connect. Choose the address that works on your network; if GitHub is unavailable, you can enable its CDN alternative. Each selection is independent. The anime list is optional in both forms.

You can also Add a plain-text list by URL (https://example.com/list.txt). Deselect a source to stop using it; custom sources can also be removed. Upgrades add newly available built-ins while preserving the enabled choices and URLs of existing sources.

Update details#

Open Update details on the Trackers page to inspect Source status, Candidates, and Update history. Source status shows the last successful refresh, cache state, and next retry. Candidates show why an address was selected, kept in reserve, excluded by the blacklist, or held back after repeated failures.

Failed source requests can use their last successful cache for up to seven days. Disabled sources and expired caches stop contributing candidates. Use Retry failed sources to retry the affected sources. Refresh scheduling continues independently of the download engine; saved defaults wait for the engine if it is unavailable.

These checks indicate reachability, not available peers or download speed. Refreshing sources does not pause or rewrite existing downloads.

The Blacklist tab#

Some trackers are misconfigured or outright suspicious. With “Apply blacklist filter” on, Motrix blocks connections to trackers flagged as Suspicious or Error; the tab shows how many URLs are currently in effect.

The built-in blacklist sources are XIU2/TrackersListCollection — blacklist and DeSireFire/animeTrackerList — bad, both fetched through CDN and enabled by default. Their selections are independent of the lists in the Effective tab. You can deselect either source or turn off the blacklist filter.

Sync and probing settings#

The knobs live in Settings → BitTorrent → Trackers:

Setting	Default	Meaning
Update tracker list automatically	on	Refresh the tracker lists on a schedule
Update interval (hours)	12 h	How often to sync (1–168 hours)
Check tracker availability	on	Test each tracker’s health before using it
Check timeout (ms)	—	Max wait for a probe response (1000–30000 ms)
Slow response threshold (ms)	—	Responses above this time are marked slow (500–10,000 ms)
Minimum success rate	—	Use trackers at or above this success rate (0–1; 0.5 = 50%)
Trackers per task	50	Supplemental tracker limit per torrent (5–200); original and manual addresses are outside this limit

The defaults are sensible; the setting most worth knowing is Trackers per task — a bigger number is not automatically better, since every tracker costs announce traffic.

Per-task trackers#

Each torrent also has its own tracker list — open the task’s detail panel and switch to the Trackers tab:

• Edit lets you paste tracker URLs, one per line (http(s), udp, and ws(s) only). Saving replaces the task’s effective tracker list; the announce list embedded in the .torrent itself is never touched.
• Sync opens an Update task trackers preview. Review the additions and removals, then choose Apply update. Original torrent announces and manually added addresses are preserved; removed supplemental addresses stay excluded. An active task may briefly pause and reconnect, then resume. A paused task stays paused. Interrupted updates are recovered from saved task state.
• A drift indicator like “3 not in global” tells you the task’s list has diverged from the curated one.