Sorry for the late response, but yes, I believe you can. There is an option in the config called allow_public_upload which can be changed to true or false.

Yes, I torrent on the same machine where all my personal stuff is. The biggest reason for this is that I don’t have a dedicated machine to torrent 24/7, though I’d definitely like to set that up at some point. I like being able to seed niche torrents to those who need them, and a machine seeding 24/7 would definitely help with that. Also having easy simple access to the downloaded files is always a plus, but there’s a myriad of ways to do this over a local network (pretty sure some torrenting clients even have an option to torrent over LAN).

My torrent client is bound to my VPN’s network interface, and my VPN has a killswitch as well, so I’m not paranoid that things will suddenly leak. Been running this setup for months now without issues.