Port opening/forwarding difference

Until today I wasn't aware there was a difference between opening and forwarding, I thought it was common terminology.

I have always had a problem with Bittorrent starting about a year ago. I have a linksys router, and I have forwarded all the necessary ports needed but am still left with mediocre speeds of 10-15 kbps on heavily seeded torrents for the WoW updates.

Will opening my ports do justice? I looked into my router config in IE and do not see anything about opening ports opposed to forwarding them, can anybody help?

I have a linksys D router, Win XP SP2 on Cogeco Cable Internet using Anzureus.

 

Azureus uses port 6881 by default, however, a lot of ISP's throttle this port, so you should really choose another.

HERE is some information and instructions.

 

I'm about toad this, I'll just have you know I use 16881-16889 and I have opened those on TCP-UDP aswell as 6969.

Hope that link helps.

 

For DHT, it says to make sure it's enabled but it's not clear in the wiki how to enable it or how to make sure it's enabled.