I dont know what is causing but i tried tons of fixes, i mainly use public torrenting, and sonarr and radarr are doing it.
I added *.arj and arj to the quality profile avoid list without success, and prowlarr is as torrent (i’ve read sometimes it gets confused and uses nzbget)
I get those very frequently the day before a popular show airs.
I wish there was a setting in sonarr to only grab released episodes (like radarr has) bit it seems like blocking extensions is the way to go.
The sonarr devs keep refusing to do this because “use better trackers”.
They don’t understand most people can’t join the top of the line trackers right away, and that using public trackers is a massive help to filling the gaps, even if they unfortunately get crappy files from time to time.I went down the rabbit hole on this the other day as I was trying to find a way to block unreleased episodes. It’s unbelievable to me the resistance they put against such a simple feature. Like no one is requesting to force it that way, just give the option to make it so.
The two reasons I saw for canceling the feature request over menu duplicates is the “use better trackers” mainly but also that shows are so often released or leak early they this setting would block you from getting them faster… Those are the dumbest reasons ever to not provide a setting that people are literally asking over and over again for.
The change is done for radarr so it might not be terribly hard to adapt into sonarr. Being open source I would have expected someone to do the change already but if they fight against it so much as a principle who would expect them to approve the change…
I mean, I’ve only gotten those from one tracker, and haven’t gotten them since I’ve removed that one tracker. Sonarr at least recognizes it’s not a media file and won’t copy it to your media folder. And you can use regex filters with qBittorrent. There hasn’t been a legitimate use of .arj in what, 30 years? So you won’t be missing anything by filtering it.
Use better trackers
In Qbittorrent you can tell it to not download certain files. So you can tell it to ignore anything with *arj, for example.
I’ve had this happen with people pretending to be certain groups and making the file a .lnk (a link to a website, I assume). Sonarr will still send the file to Qbittorrent, but it won’t get downloaded at all.
I got one so I picked it apart. The link runs a script on the local system that downloads a kubernetes runtime. From there I assume it runs a Bitcoin miner or something, I didn’t go any further.
Completely forgot the .ARJ archive format existed until now
You can try adding cleanuperr to your *.arr stack. It will listen to your queues and if something gets stuck, like .arj files, it’ll remove them, blocklist them, and maybe re-search? I’m not sure.
You can also change your settings in sonarr to not do any rss sync searches with your public indexers. This stops sonarr from seaching those indexers automatically for the next release. I’ve notices most of that garbage pops up before the official release, then gets drowned out by the real stuff after the release. If you leave the auto/interactive search enabled, you can just click the auto search button for the episode the day after it comes out. You likely won’t pick up any garbage this way.
I wrote a script that spam reports these, and I run it when I’m feeling frustrated with a something, but nothing I’ve spam reported with the script has gotten taken down yet. So, that sucks too.
I’m surprised there isn’t an option in sonarr to only automatically search for episodes that are released. Unless there is and I’m missing it? In the past year I’ve noticed its worse, I keep getting .lnk files but luckily the system is smart enough to not import them. Hopefully a fix comes soon!
The main devs are rejecting the feature with really bad excuses. Basically, it comes down to two reasons:
- if you get those lnk files and what ever, then you are using a bad tracker and you need to do better.
- episodes are often released early and with such a setting you would miss out on them. The thing is I don’t care about early releases, but when a show arrives officially.
Yeah it doesn’t look at file extensions. Block the release group name. Those releases are malware.
I’ve been having this problem too, and it’s hardly any single release group. SuccessfulCrab has been the worst offender, but I’ve also seen some from EZTV and MeGusta. Jerks seed these torrents under all sorts of different names. I also am not quite sure how to filter them out. Fortunately, my *arr stack knows better than to import those files.
I’ve only seen it for two so far, and after I blocked them it was fine.
Part of the problem was Sonarr trying to grab episodes that hadn’t aired yet. I think a fix for that is forthcoming. That should cut down on them. I don’t know if there is a fix to let you block extensions.
They don’t know what type of file its grabbing until it tries to import, just the metadata provided by the indexers you’re using.
Is the size consistent? Can you set size constraints that would exclude these? (I don’t have a good answer)
