Revised 13.3.2007

Since some trackers requires users to be logged in to download torrentfiles, you will need to setup your torrent-client to use cookies from their site. This is my attempt to make a simple HOWTO.

The feeds can be found here.

This simple HOWTO was written specificly for Azureus with the RSS Feed Scanner plugin. This HOWTO assumes that you are using Firefox version 2, but the methodology should never the less be the pretty much the same.

While not tested, this approach should work for any site that has a RSS-feed, but requires cookies present to download torrent-files.

If the tracker does not require you to be logged in to download torrents, you can skip steps 1, 2 and any step involving cookies in step 4.

Table of contents

1. Finding and wiping your cookies

To make sure you are not feeding the site more cookies than it needs, you need to make sure all your cookies are clean. To make sure of this, the simplest approach is to make sure you are logged in, locating all your cookies and then removing them.

This will effectively clean all traces that you have been to the site before and in the process log you out. This way, when you log in again, only the cookies representing you being logged in will be present. These are the cookies we want.

1.1 Finding and wiping your cookies in Mozilla Firefox

First Go to the Options sub-menu on the Tools-menu.

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Second, locate the Privacy-tab, and click the Show cookies-button.

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In the cookies window, filter the results down to those of hello-online.org using the filter at the top. Select the actual entries that match and click the Remove Cookies-button.

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Congratulations, you have found and wiped your cookies. You can now close the Cookies and Options-windows.

1.2 Finding and wiping your cookies in Microsoft Internet Explorer

Open Internet Explorer. From the File Menu choose Open, then click Browse. Navigate to your Documents & Settings folder. This folder is usually named C:\Documents and Settings\your username. From here navigate to the folder called Cookies.

Look for files where the filename is either starting with or containing hello-online.org. Typically there is a chance you may encounter both a file starting with hello-online.org and a file starting with www.hello-online.org, although you may only have one.

Delete the file or files you've found containing hello-online.org.

2. Extracting the required information from your cookies

This howto will assume you are using the Hello! Online tracker (although this no longer works there). Replace hello-online.org with whatever domain your tracker has.

Log back into Hello! Online using this form, and not the regular login at the top right. Make sure you have Remember me checked.

2.1 Extracting the cookie values

Using the same technique as in step 1, relocate your cookies, but this time do not delete them.

If you are using Firefox, you should have entries present that belong to Hello! Online. If you are using Internet Explorer you should open the new cookie-file that should have been generated, and the same should apply here. You should find five distinct keys, with five distinct values.

As far as I can tell, these are the values which are needed to be supplied to Hello! Online for your torrent-client to be able to pass for being you, logged in, authorized to download torrent-files:

If you are using Firefox, you will manually have to select, copy and paste both the Name-field and the Content-field to Notepad or another text-editor. Your copy of the field names and content has to be exact.

If you are using Internet Explorer, you already have the cookie-file open in (presumably) Notepad or a equivalent editor, and are ready to proceed. Note that here the first line will be the Name-field, the following line a Content-field, and so on.

The values found here will be the ones you use in Azureus.

Regardless of if you are using Firefox or Internet Explorer you should now have a file open in Notepad or a similar text-editor resembling something like this:

screenshot

Please note that these are made up numbers, and will not work if you try to use them. Use the numbers you have found for yourself.

2.2 Making a cookie-string

First a little bit of preperation. We need to construct a cookie-string which the RSSFeed Scanner will pass on to the tracker. It should look similar to this, except the question-marks should be replaced with the values you found in your cookies, and which you should have easily accesible in Notepad.

pass_hash=?;coopa=?;member_id=?;session_id=?;ipb_stronghold=?

Have this line preprepared, on one line, ready to use in Notepad.

3. Finding proper feeds

Look at the Hello! Online RSS-Feed main page, and find a feed that suits your needs.

Remember that you may not want to download everything that comes announced in the feed, and the simpler filters you can make in Azureus later, the better. If you are only interested in a particular category of downloads, you should choose the feed which best suits this purpose.

You may also try to come up with a search criteria on Hello! Online, which narrows you results in only the torrents you are interested in show up. For instance, I have found out that searching for Konya mo, will return Michishige Sayumi's radio show and that only.

You can use this to generate a customized feed, which given the same search criteria will return a feed with the exact same results.

If you end up with lots of feeds here, it might be simpler to go with the standard feed which will announce all torrents posted.

Make sure you have the URLs for the feed or feeds you want available. We are finaly ready to setup automatic downloading. Yay!

4. Setting up feeds in Azureus

Now that we have the all information we need, we are ready to setup and configure our RSS feeds. Again, this HOWTO assumes you are using the RSSFeed Scanner plugin for Azureus.

To access the RSSFeed Scanner settings, choose RSSFeed Scanner sub-menu from the Plugins-menu.

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If you do not have this plugin installed, simply choose Installation wizard, from the same menu, find the plugin, choose install and restart Azureus.

4.1 Adding and setting up the actual feeds

You should now have a panel open in Azureus similar to this one:

screenshot

Click the plus-sign to add a new feed. Give it a appropriate name, so it will be recognizable later. Copy the URL of your preferred feed to the URL-field.

Make sure all the options checkboxes are checked. Copy the cookie-string you constructed in step 2.2 into the Cookies-field. Also make sure to enable the feed (unlike in the screenshot). Finally remember to click the Save-button when you are done.

To test if your feed is setup correctly, go to the Status-tab in RSSFeed Scanner. If the feed is not refreshed, right-click it and force a manual refresh.

Proceed by right-clicking any torrent and choose the Save torrent menu-option.

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If you have added your feed correctly, the torrent should now be saved and queued in your regular My torrents-section of Azureus. If you recieve an error saying that Azureus can't find any torrent files, your cookie string is incorrect and you need to go back to step 2.1.

Repeat this step for all feeds you are using.

4.2 Adding and setting up downloading filters

Just like you added a feed, press the plus-sign in the Filters section below and setup your filter. Here is again an example for Michishige's Radio show:

screenshot

What you need to customize compared to this example is the name of the filter, the filtering-expression itself and what feed should be searched when this filter is applied. Make sure all the checkboxes and drop-down menus appear as in the screenshot.

Also notice how I use (.*) as a wildcard and how the uploader is delimited using (\uploader\). If you feel like, you can omit the filtering on the actual uploader, although I prefer to do so myself.

Before we consider ourself done, we should test that the filter works. Make sure Enabled is checked before doing this. To test your filter, copy the title of the torrent into the Test match-field and click the Test-button. If things are not working, review and adjust your filter until the test suceeds.

When done, make sure you press the Save-button.

Repeat this step for every download you want automated.

5. You are almost done

To check if it works immediately, you will need to clean up your torrent-directory, remove any current torrents which can be found in the feeds, and then refresh your torrent under RSSFeed Scanner's Status-tab.

If things are setup correctly, the torrent should be picked up automaticly, and queued for download.

5.1 No, you are not done yet

You have achieved automatic downloading. You can have Azureues download your favorite shows for you while you are sleeping. You don't even have to visit Hello! Online anymore. What more could there possibly be to setup?!?

Uploaders use their time and bandwidth to make sure you get what you want. If you appreciate what they upload so much that you in fact want it downloaded automaticly, so you can watch it as soon as possible, chances are you owe them a whole lot.

Make sure you visit the tracker and leave a comment letting them know you appreciate their effort.

You've done that? Ok. Now you are done.

Footnote

This HOWTO was written by me, Jostein Kjønigsen, and written as acurately as possible to help people fully utilize the potential of RSS-feeds. There may be errors, it may be inacurate or wrong. If you discover any errors, please let me know. Send me an email with the proper details.

If you are having troubles making this work, do not mail me asking for tech-support. Sparetime is a problem to me already.

Created by Jostein Kjønigsen.