BitTorrent encoding error

What does this type of error mean?

This error means that the torrent in question contains something that seems to violate the standard torrent format, or something that your system may have trouble with.

Most probably the torrent was created using national special characters, such as Chinese or Japanese characters, in file names and descriptions inside the torrent file which your version of Windows doesn't know and is therefore unable to deal with. This happens if the program which created the torrent does not use Unicode encoding, which means that encoding tables are used on which the same value on one language version of Windows can represent something completely different on your version of Windows, and therefore can cause problems on your computer - or at least the resulting text looks more than strange.

Torrents encoded with Shareazas TorrentWizard won't show such behavior, as TorrentWizard uses the Unicode standard, just the same as Shareaza does. This means that any national character of any language of the world has his own value in the encoding tables and therefore it will be shown just the same on every Computer on the world.

Usually Shareaza deals with these problems automatically, but you may notice that the files included in torrents with encoding error have odd names when completed. It's also possible that these torrents won't work on all clients. Also, if you get an encoding error warning, you may have trouble reseeding the torrent with Shareaza, but in most of the cases, Shareaza should handle it just fine.

On earlier versions, changing the advanced setting BitTorrent.TorrentIgnoreErrors to TRUE was possible to force Shareaza to seed the torrent. However, this option is no longer present, as Shareaza now ignores the respective encoding errors in the torrent and proceeds with seeding it if possible.

Is this a bug?

It's not a bug. It is just the truth - uTorrent (and several other BitTorrent clients) produces .torrent files with trigger the encoding error warning, as they use a non-unicode codepage when creating file names inside the .torrent files. So for example a torrent created on a Japanese Windows with hiragana symbols in the file name will NOT be saved properly on a Greek copy of Windows.

Torrents can usually be 'repaired' be running them through a torrent creation application, like MakeTorrent2, which will fix any errors in it. But this will usually change the torrent's infohash, meaning other peers in the swarm who were uploading or downloading the previous torrent will not connect to you. So this is not really useful as a method of reseeding.

In order to avoid such problems with your own torrents, please use the Shareaza TorrentWizard, as it produces correctly encoded torrents.