Protectarr downloads the list and writes it to the path above. qBittorrent is the process that reads it, so the path has to be one qBittorrent can open. In Docker that means a volume mounted into both containers, at the same path in both.

This is a bulk filter of addresses other people have reported, applied before a connection is made. It is unrelated to the swarm observations Protectarr records on its own, and it never bans anything by itself.

This is the short, deliberate list, separate from the bulk blocklist above: addresses you decided on, applied through qBittorrent's API rather than through a file.

Protectarr never adds to it on its own. Swarm Observations records the peers it saw on torrents it acted on, and that is evidence, not a judgement. Anything here got here because you put it here.