triadruid

As mentioned in an earlier post, I'm taking the quasi-legal route of upgrading my tape collection to digital; downloading torrents of the songs off of the Intertubes. However either the tubes have gone a little flat, or my program is a little prickly, or some third thing I haven't thought of. So here's a post for the VURD.

Things started off well: I tore through about a dozen artists who all had complete discographies, and download speeds were roughly Absurdly Fast, in the manner of torrents over broadband. I generally share out to about 5-8x what I get and then discontinue the torrent, and I generally only run them fullspeed overnight, when my other thirds (and myself) aren't trying to use the network for anything useful.

Now, I'm not technophobic exactly, but I am definitely techno-slow sometimes; I just this morning deciphered what the point of torrent 'trackers' do. I'm not using any sort of default torrent search engine, really, just looking across the whole Intarwebz via Google most days. torrentz.com and thepiratebay seem to be laid out nicely with good results and minimal spam, but that's anecdotal at best.

So I guess my big questions are:

is there a torrent search site that gives the best/most recent trackers?
is there a way to see your own share ratio/'score' overall, since that obviously affects seeding privileges? (in Ktorrent, for example, the higher your share ratio the more likely it is to grant you seed privs)
Anyone else have the experience of having several Stalled and a few 2.0/Kbps torrents cause the Blagosphere to implode on their home connection, or are we just Speshul?

::edit:: And of course, while I'm posting this, our work servers decide to choke and die... or maybe it's just Mozilla?