I’ve been investigating an issue with releases being downloaded from a non-preferred indexer (a mirror rather than the source) and it came down to minimum seeder requirements. I currently have it set to 1 for most indexers but this cases some options to be rejected.
For most of my indexers I trust that new releases will be seeded soon. In fact most of the time the issue is just caching on the seeder count. So I would like to use Minimum Seeders 0 for RSS.
However if I set minimum seeders to 0 then searches will occasionally grab a dead release. Many trackers keep dead releases around for quite a while (or forever) and it is unlikely that a seeder comes back.
IMHO the expected result when downloading an unseeded option is very different between RSS and search, so it would be great to have different thresholds.
Workaround
For now I have duplicated a few indexers and have an RSS-only with 0 minimum seeders and a copy that has 1. This is annoying to set up and has very minor UX downgrades but solves the problem.
Related
Feature Request: Opt. to allow Minimum Seeders to only apply to RSS Sync or... · Issue #2479 · Sonarr/Sonarr · GitHub talks about ignoring minimum seeders if there is no other option available. But this is a pretty different use case and Sonarr already did some prioritization here. It doesn’t solve this case.