Thank you for taking the time writing all this up for me. That makes me glad I asked because most info I was finding with google-foo was telling me to set up port forwarding the old way with my router and not really doing a good job of laying out how and why it works to begin with. After having switched from Tribbler to a client that has uPNP, now I think I understand why I’m struggling with it less. I’m unsure if my Soulseek is connected and sending data right but this gives me some better ideas of how to find out.

I’ve been trying to understand port forwarding since I keep seeing that I need to set it up for my torrent client to work reliably. But I read that it sends your traffic “outside” of your VPN encryption. Doesn’t it kind of defeat the purpose or am I understanding it wrong?

about to go postal rn on god frfr