Re-reading my previous comment, I think I gave you some incorrect information. Let me try again.

If you want to use a VPN and stay/become connectable to peers in P2P apps such as torrent clients, you need one of the few VPNs that support port forwarding. So far, so good.

However, I think I was wrong about the configuration. It’s correct that you need to define a port number in your torrent client’s settings, but when using a VPN, your router’s port forwarding configuration is irrelevant, opposing to what I previously said. Instead, somewhere in your VPN’s settings or when logged in on the VPN provider’s website, you should set the same port number as in your torrent client. If the provider already assigned some port number to you, copy that to your torrent client config instead. Also look into how to bind your torrent client to your VPN so no traffic escapes if the VPN disconnects.

The router admin dashboard is only relevant for traffic that doesn’t go through the VPN, so probably irrelevant for your torrenting, and you can only forward ports if you have your own public IP, rather than a shared one (CGNAT). I don’t know which you have or if you’ll ever need one. Ask your ISP if you need a public IP for something on your network that doesn’t go through the VPN, e.g. some game server. While some ISPs give every customer a public IP, others sell it as an add-on for a small monthly fee if the technology (e.g. fiber) allows it, but only some technologies do. But as I said, the router port config doesn’t matter when torrenting through the VPN.

Regarding SOCKS5, I found this description of it by in this blog post by ExpressVPN:

A SOCKS proxy acts as an intermediary between your device and the internet. Instead of your network packets being sent directly to their destination, they are first routed through the proxy server. The proxy then forwards those requests on your behalf, replacing your IP address with its own.

So no, it’s not. From some quick searches, it seems possible use a SOCKS proxy from your VPN provider for your torrent client in order to hide your real IP from other peers, but since I can’t find any proof of port forwarding being possible through such a proxy, this probably wont make you connectable…

Are we talking about Wordfeud or is there another online Scrabble game?

This looks cool, and I like your thoughts on it! Are you planning on an Android release too, somewhere down the road?

I’m not the one you’re asking, but it seems to be this repo on Github and I read that it works because Jellyfin does/can(?) expose a Subsonic API.

Then what you need is a VPN that supports port forwarding. There are very few, but I bet you can find a thread somewhere on Lemmy discussing the options you have. Then, if I’m not mistaken, you still need to know/set the port number in your torrent client and config the router correctly, probably through its admin site which you’ll find on the router’s IP in the browser. If you don’t know the login (and admin/admin doesn’t work) you can find the default credentials by searching the web for your router model number + admin login. When logged in, you can set new admin login credentials if you don’t want other users of your local network to be able to access or change the config settings.

Check the open port number of your torrent client – which should also be set in your router’s port forwarding or firewall config (alternatively enable UPnP in the router config to let it handle such things for you).

You can use a utility like CanYouSeeMe.org to check if it’s correctly configured.

EDIT If you can’t make it work, you might be behind double NAT, sharing varying IPs with multiple other of the ISP’s customers at once. In that case, you’ll need to find one of the few trustworthy VPN providers that support port forwarding to get connectable, as it’s called, and be able to connect to all peers no matter if they’re connectable or not. Alternatively, rent a connectable seedbox in the cloud.