Why can't we connect to french users. Getting a "Received unexpected bitfield" message

what OS and version of tixati?
I doubt it is just french users.
post a link to the torrent file or post the magnet link if this always happens with this torrent.
where are you seeing this error?

I have the same issue - "received unexpected bitfield" - the message shows off on UDP plain connections not encrypted, from users from Russia, France and other countries it is filtering by ip country blocks?

I have latest version of Tixati, Tixati v.3.31.

Same here. And ALWAYS recieving this just from French and Russian users.
No other connection from any countries give this message, just from French and Russian.
Also it doesn't matter what torrent.

You're probably not seeing it with all users from those countries, right? Look closely.

a) There's a certain small group of addresses from a certain subnet (say, 31.200.249.0/24).
b) Those peers are active on wildly different public torrents. It is highly unlikely that some random guy downloads the exact same torrents you are interested in.
c) Those peers keep connecting for hours and days. Real user would've noticed some problem.
d) Given the total amount of peers and assumed spread of torrents, it should generate not insignificant amount of traffic on that side. Handling it without a business contract with upstream ISP would be a problem.

So it's an obvious DHT crawler, online checker, and who knows what else. Subnet seems to belong to a company advertising P2P video streaming solutions to save on traffic costs. The problem is, typical companies don't really want to handle support for users whose video isn't working, they simply let CDN services do everything for them. Also, traffic is cheap, unless you are a giant. Also, offering a service from a single location in Moscow might not be the most fault tolerant option. So it's probably just a front company providing services for pirated streaming sites (that do have problems with regular hosting and CDN services) or graphical single click download applications for casuals. For this or for some other thing, they've hacked together some peer availability checker that doesn't feel the need to close connections properly.