this may be a dumb question but i was reading some articles and trying to understand seeding and peers; i generally pull up a torrent and grab the actual files but uncheck the random txt files like the ones that say where it was downloaded from (just for personal preference to keep my directories clean). does that cause any problems for others? should i not be excluding them from downloading? i generally keep torrents seeding when they’re done but if i don’t download those small files am i causing problems?
A torrent software that breaks your big/video file sharing while calling it complete seems somewhat questionable, not following a good practice, for the reasons you said.
qBittorrent stores the partial file data of deselected files as generic files. Given that only with it the download and a recheck marks the big file complete, without it a recheck considers the big file unfinished (and if partial files are renamed it is despite being complete as a file), I presume it will also send out the block that is partially that file and another to other peers too.
If the other file is fully in the partial block qBittorrent even creates the files despite not having been selected for downloading.