On Tracker/TPS Partnerships
04
September
othersna

This article is again, my opinion only, and is written to provoke thought and ask questions. When I joined TPS fourteen months ago, I remember there being an extensive involvement with tracker staff, where there would be many active recruitment threads for trackers, busy forum activity by tracker staff, and subsequently, TPS would respond by respecting trackers’ rules when it came to invite, bonus point and publicity rules. But what happens when TPS and a tracker end their relationship, or when tracker staff just fade off and not participate at TPS? What are the consequences?

Let’s take the invite policy for example. There are trackers where it is specifically forbidden in their rules to give out invites on forums, and I’ll respect that, but unless staff from a tracker gets involved with us, it’s very time consuming for TPS staff to track down all rules of various trackers. Now suppose a tracker’s rules say “No public giveaways” and “Invites are for your friends whom you know and trust.”  TPS is a closed (non-public) forum and we encourage our members to offer invites to fellow members they know and trust. So is there a problem? If a tracker has no problem with offers/requests of their invites at other invite  forums, perhaps there should be no problem with TPS allowing the same.

Now let’s talk about Bonus Points (aka Karma points, cash, gold etc.) These are points gained by seeding, uploading, and participating in community activities. I can understand why a tracker would not want these points given away at TPS since the points can be misused as a commodity to gain “rep points.” But again, it’s very difficult to determine if a tracker has a problem with bonus points being shared at TPS if there is no tracker staff to guide us. What about a member who is in some ratio trouble, and is requesting TPS members download torrents that he is solo seeding or has uploaded. In my opinion there’s no problem with this, as long as there is no exchange of a “rep point” or anything else to follow. If anything, it’s a good thing for members with buffer to spend that buffer down and add to the ratio economy.

Publicity rules are also very confusing. There are “low publicity” trackers which specifically ask for members not to display screenshots, give out their full URL, or discuss what goes on inside their tracker. I  try to respect those rules here and modify any posts which have “unwanted publicity,” but we need to be informed if publicity is unwanted.  Some trackers would actually benefit from some publicity. On the other end, if I see a tracker being reviewed at one of the popular public torrent news sites, then I can assume that what’s printed there is “fair game” for discussion at TPS.

Now suppose there’s a tracker which has no staff active at TPS. The tracker either never associated itself with us, or their staff just stopped coming. If TPS staff are members of those trackers, we’ll try to keep their rules in mind, but otherwise we’d appreciate someone guiding us, rather than have our members banned or warned because someone “snitched” on them after the fact. (I’d much rather have a partnership than an adversarial relationship.)

Category: The Pirate Society, Trackers  Leave a Comment
Predicting Success of New Trackers
29
August
othersna

It’s been written that a many new private trackers will fail before their first birthdays, so is there a way one can predict which ones may go on to join the “great ones” out there? Let me discuss two new trackers from the perspective of a potential new user.

The first one is called deli.sh. Its story is actually pretty remarkable. Two people come up with an idea of a niche tracker dedicated only to food, a niche never before seen in the private tracker world. Very shortly afterwards, they come up with the name (a quite clever one), and a logo (their name written up with vegetables shaped like letters). They code it using Gazelle RC2, and at the forum of another private tracker they openly discuss their idea, and there is a lot of buzz. In less than a month, they get out of beta and open registrations, and get good reviews from both FileShareFreak and the FileNetworksBlog. (A positive word from either of these two places is huge publicity.)

Since fine dining, and fine wine/spirits are hobbies of mine, and my wife and kids enjoy watching food TV shows, I join and look around. My first impression is a good one. It has a visually pleasing green color style, and the Gazelle RC2 codebase is easily recognizable and familiar to use. I go to the forums and for a new place with a small number of users, there are lots of conversations going on, and I just jump in. I see the number of torrents was small, but they are adding about 100 a day. I already found five I liked, and their initial promotion of freeleech for new torrents helps me build some buffer. (Plus I used my seedbox.)

Well I predict this place will be a major success. It has hit all of the right marks – covers a niche in a completely new category, has an enthusiastic staff and community, looks great, and has positive buzz. They just need to sustain that growth and activity level.

The second place is also new. It’s a new General/0day tracker called “torrentinos.” One of their staff members asked TPS staff for advice on how to get their tracker off the ground, and one tip I mentioned was getting the word out. So this TPS blog may be the first torrent blog which gives a shout out to torrentinos. This tracker has open registrations now, and there is a recruitment thread at TPS. I have not joined torrentinos and am basing my thoughts on the review (with screenshots) that was posted at TPS. The codebase looks like a form of TBdev, and the torrents listed are a good variety of video and apps. I see some HD, and very few “spam” torrents (like those mediocre V2 mp3 music files).

The membership and total number of torrents is still very small as they have just started. So will this place succeed? I don’t know, but I want to see what will happen in the near future. For example, they will want to get a mention in FileShareFreak’s monthly “New Tracker” article, and a “thumbs up” from Sharky will help immensely. (assuming they have duly earned that “thumbs up.”) They will need to greatly increase their number of torrents, and there was mention of getting an auto-upload bot. They will need enough funds to last three or more months without donations. As far as content goes, perhaps they can set themselves apart by having a higher percentage of HD, BD/BR Rips, or other quality content. They claim “99%” of their content is on a seedbox so speeds should be good. They need to have a lot of storage space so that torrent RETENTION is good. The active users need to keep their forums and IRC active enough to keep the interest of their members and if they are really good the site can get a good reputation for their “community.” So far they are avoiding the “elite” attitude, which is another good thing for a tracker just starting out and looking for members. They should work on building a quality site and the membership will follow.

But the biggest thing against them is that they are a General/0day site, and the private tracker market is way oversaturated with such sites. They need to be able to answer the question “What does this place offer that the others don’t?” Good luck to them.

Category: BitTorrent, Trackers  Leave a Comment
Attn Trackers: TPS Is Not Like Those Other Invite Forums
24
August
othersna

This is my “open letter” to tracker staff about “invite forums” and how TPS fits into the scheme of things. I mention repeatedly that I consider TPS as a Bittorrent community of people with shared interests, and is a community which has sections for invite requests/offers, as well as direct recruitment by trackers. Nonetheless, I have resigned myself to the fact that the outside torrent world basically considers us an “invite forum.” Since many of our members, including me,  initially joined TPS looking to get tracker invites, I’m not about to dispute this view.

So invariably, the topic of “invite forums” may pop up in tracker forums and IRC discussions. I see almost always, the opinion tracker staff have of “invite forums” is negative. Basically they talk about how these places are a cesspool of bad users willing to play every trick in the book to score an invite to their tracker. By “bad users” I mean the collectors, traders, cheaters, invite sellers, and banned ex-members. Some tracker rules and guidelines will specifically forbid giving out invites to their tracker on invite forums, and will threaten to ban anyone caught obtaining their membership from an invite offer or request at an invite forum.

Well let’s compare TPS with those other places. For one thing, the other places will often have the word “invite” in them (even spelled backwards). There is no question those places exist for members to request or giveaway invites, often in a reckless manner. There are some which allow trading, or encourage their members  to giveaway invites in order to be able to receive them, which in my mind is the same thing as trading.  They may have no or few restrictions on which tracker’s invites can be offered, and have no consideration of a tracker’s rules. It’s no wonder tracker staff despise those places. (To be Devil’s advocate I will note that am sure good members of trackers have come from those “other places” as well.)

At TPS tracker staff are welcome to join and see what goes on inside. If a tracker doesn’t want their invites offered here, the tracker goes on the “No Movement” list and there is no offering or requesting of invites from that tracker. We also try to guide our new members into becoming responsible and good members of their trackers, and those who are known to be bad users get put on the “castaway” list – banished from TPS.

Now that I’m through defending TPS, I want to give my opinion on the whole concept of private trackers and invitations. Tracker staff, whether or not invite forums exist, you can’t stop a bad user from joining. If anything, the best of the bad can find ways to join your tracker with ease and are experts in avoiding the banhammer. The paradox is, the more a tracker tries to keep bad users out, the more desirable it becomes to such a user. Increasing invite rarity or eliminating them altogether will only make the tracker more attractive to the bad user. Other measures, such as having a “secret” url will make the tracker seem more “elite,” and as I’ve written before, the users who are fixated on joining a tracker they perceive as “elite” are the ones trackers would least want in their tracker. Should a tracker convince an invite forum to follow their rules, then the rule-breaking just goes underground. I note that at TPS, the staff will not snoop in on our members’ PMs or private IRC conversations.

There is an opinion circulating in the filesharing community, that the whole concept of tightly restricting access to private trackers will lead to their downfall. The greatest example of this is the “high-definition” tracker which opened invitations to their tracker after having very few for a long time. The result was numerous offers to sell their invites popped up on the internet.  Another example is the new tracker which pulls the “elite” card while still getting started (no invites on forums, secret url, fake login page). The result: they come across as pretentious and potential good users will get turned off.

Please note my opinions are solely my own and not representative of TPS. My intention is not to offend tracker staff, but to provide a contrarian opinion.

Category: Uncategorized  One Comment
There’s A Piece Of Land In The Desert I Want To Sell You
15
August
othersna

One of my favorite sections of TPS is the “Pirate’s Den,” a section where members can post on topics not listed elsewhere, so usually this section gets filled with silly, unusual, or just plain weird stories, often with members adding their personal stories as well. After reading an article in today’s paper (Link = http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cal-city-20100814,0,2325763.story) I was reminded of a story that my father told me years ago. I was going to post it in the Pirate’s Den, but I thought this story deserved to go into the blog.

Some background:  The article is about a land developer who planned to build a city in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert, and he hired a small army of marketers to try to get people to buy shares of land in this place, but as would be predicted, the plan fizzled and people who bought the shares were stuck with unprofitable parcels of desert.

Well it turns out a “friend of a friend” was one such marketer, and was able to arrange a sales pitch meeting with my father in the early 1970s. The marketer was real slick, and brought in a 16 mm movie projector with a sales film (this was before the video recorder was invented) and a box of expensive steamed dumplings. One of those dumplings was basically a large rice noodle (take note of this). The other thing of note is that my dad had heard that this guy was unable to have children and would sarcastically insinuate to me that the problem was due to erectile dysfunction. (take note of this as well).

Well my dad is watching the film, which told a fantastical story of how this city in the desert, named California City, would become the next big boom town, and those who bought shares early would surely make a fortune as the real estate prices would rise as the town developed, and that you shouldn’t be late in buying because the shares would sell out quickly. My dad noticed very quickly that the film showed that the town consisted of basically one street, and that from looking  between the buildings it was clear that behind the buildings were miles of barren undeveloped desert and that the sales pitch was basically a scam.

So here’s the punch line. It seems that the marketer’s pitch in the beginning was quite virile and potent, but after my dad pointed out the flaw in the marketer’s sales pitch, the potent arguments had a rapid detumescence such that the argument became as limp and flaccid as the steamed rice noodle dumpling that the guy brought (or the alleged permanent state of the marketer’s… well you know what I mean).

Category: Offbeat  Leave a Comment
Comparison Of Two Niche Public Indexers vs. Two Private Trackers
12
August
othersna

The Pirate Society community is geared more towards private trackers, but  just for interest I will compare a music and a movie public indexer with two respective private trackers.

The music indexer is coda.fm. I used to use it back when I used public trackers. It’s been around since January 2009. As an indexer, it has no tracker of its own. People who want to upload torrents to it would create a torrent using a public tracker such as openbittorrent, upload the torrent file to coda.fm, and leave a decription. The coda.fm would verify the torrent, and the torrent file would be available for download. Users can browse the various albums by name, artist and genre. The site has a place for registered members to make comments, but I don’t see a forum.  There are currently 5,468 torrents indexed and there is a good selection of genres. Chances are a very popular album will be found there.  Speeds there are really good, and the torrents are well seeded. (Considering I expect most users to “hit & run” on the torrents.  I do not see a way to find specs of the file such as a .log file. Most files are mp3, and occasionally there are FLAC files. There is no IRC channel for chat. One annoying aspect is numerous ads including a pop-up ad but I understand the necessity of the ads as I see they don’t take donations.

Now compare this to a music private tracker which we all know and love. (Not naming it but there should be no question which one it is). For one thing, it has over 800,000 torrents and is expected to top 1 million by the end of the year. There is never a question about the quality of the rips, and over 190,000 of them are “perfect” FLAC rips. I was hard pressed to find an album not found there and I understand members are active in filling requests. The site is run on Gazelle, and allows everything to be extremely well organized. The place has an active community (IRC, Forum, Comments). Speeds are good for seeded torrents, and are occasionally slow for solo-seeded torrents. This place has a reputation for being hard to seed.

The public movie indexer, take.fm is operated by the same person who runs coda.fm, and the site has a similar look and feel. Being new, there are only about 1800 torrents indexed, and most are 700 MB rips. I see the famous ripper (in public tracker circles) “aXXo” listed as the original source for quite a few of the movies. Almost all the movies are recent releases, and there are very few old or classic movies. I tested their speed for one torrent and it was fairly fast at 100 KB/sec. Interesting that there were about 20 seeders, all with slow speeds adding to the relatively fast speed. Otherwise the look and feel of the site is similar to that of coda.fm’s.

I compare it to the private movie tracker most similar to the music tracker I wrote about. It, like the music tracker, is run on the Gazelle platform (an updated version). This tracker is a general one and therefore indexes and tracks movie torrents of multiple genres. There are over 31,000 torrents listed (over 18,000 individual movies). An individual movie can come in various formats. Quality of the content is important to this tracker, and there are rip specs and screenshots available to help members determine quality. Like the music tracker, the community has available to it IRC, a forum, and torrent comments. Personally, I’d like the community to be more active. Like the music tracker, newer torrents are very fast, but solo-seeded torrents are slower. There is a bonus system to help keep the torrents well seeded.

So I again ask what should filesharers prefer? The public or the private places. If you’re not that particular about the quality of the content, and are mainly interested in the most popular content, and like the ability to hit & run and avoid ratio management, these public places will suit you. I do caution that your chances of “getting caught” are higher when using a public tracker, and several experts have noted that those “peer block” programs don’t work. I like the quality, selection, and security of the private places and will stay with them. I wish success for coda.fm and take.fm.

Category: BitTorrent  Tags:  Leave a Comment
Short-Term Seeders – One Of My Pet Peeves
05
August
othersna

In most of my blog articles, I refrain from ranting, but I have a new pet peeve. I’ve got a problem with filesharers who use private trackers and are “Short-Term” seeders. This is what I mean. Let’s take torrents on a ratio-free site. Members of the tracker need to seed to a ratio of 1:1 or for a total seed time of 72 hours.  Now I’ll download a torrent and keep it seeding for a long time, even to the point of being a solo seeder when the original uploader abandons the torrent. Now on these months-old torrents, other members will leech from me, seed the minimum 72 hours and stop seeding, leaving me the solo seeder again. Every few weeks another person will become a leecher, and then the same pattern happens. Now these users avoid getting a hit & run warning but to me are against the whole spirit of filesharing, especially in the private tracker world where part of being a good member means long-term seeding to keep torrents fast and alive months after appearing on the tracker.

I notice that on trackers where it is really hard to seed, a torrent will often have more than one seeder, even more than a year out from initial seeding. I want to see that kind of spirit on trackers where it is really easy to seed. I practice what I preach. Every single torrent I have uploaded in the past year  is still seeding. I even have torrents seeding on my seedbox for more than six months. On torrents where I was not the initial seeder but am a solo seeder now, I keep that torrent alive long-term. Note on many of these trackers I have plenty of buffer and am keeping the torrent alive because it’s the right thing to do,  not because I need the upload credit.

On a related topic, my second pet peeve is the seeder who throttles his speed to 10 KB or less on trackers where bonus points are given for seeding. This to me is a form of cheating. Now if the seeder really has a slow connection then I don’t have a problem with it, but I do have a problem with members of trackers who will seed a lot of torrents long-term, but deliberately throttle their speeds on each torrent to such a slow speed that it takes days to weeks to complete a download. In the meantime, such users are collecting bonus points based only on the number and size of their seeding torrents. Note rarely will a tracker offer a bonus for those who seed with fast speeds. Fortunately, most trackers will issue warnings if they catch wind of the “throttler,” and rightly so.

Category: BitTorrent, Filesharing  Leave a Comment
FLAC or Mp3?
28
July
othersna

Well like a lot of similar “this or that” type of questions, it’s a matter of preference. I’m going to go over them and then discuss why I have my particular preference. This article is aimed towards the casual digital music listener, and will be much too basic for you music enthusiasts who know music encoding like the back of your hand. However I would hope you music pros choose FLAC.

First, some basics for the beginner. Music on a commercial CD is stored as a large, uncompressed WAV file, a format way too large to be used for digital storage. Therefore, the files need to be compressed for practical storage purposes. FLAC stands for “Free Lossless Audio Compression.” Therefore the software to compress a WAV file to FLAC is open-source and free for use by the public. Lossless means that the converted FLAC file is smaller than the original WAV file, but contains all of the digital information that was originally there, and one can transcode the file back to WAV without losing any information. Think of a FLAC file as a ZIP file for audio files, but specifically geared towards audio such that programs can play them with the same quality as a WAV file. FLAC files will generally be approximately 6 MB/minute of music.

MP3 files, the most commonly used files for music compression, are lossy files. Therefore, when music is encoded from a CD to an MP3 file, digital information is lost forever. If you transcode that file back to a WAV, the file will not be the same as what you started with. Its quality will be lower. The other thing beginners need to know is that there are various qualities of MP3. The early MP3 files were at a much lower quality than the original WAV file. Recently, MP3 files can be encoded at a much higher bitrate (amount of digital information sent per unit time). For example, a higher quality MP3 file would be encoded as V0, a variable bitrate which roughly averages 245 kbs. A V0 music file will vary in size depending upon the complexity of the song, but it is roughly 1/4 the size of the equivalent FLAC file.

OK, so now for the pros and cons. The average music listener, using low to average quality sound equipment, will usually not be able to tell the difference between a FLAC or a V0 file. Using my “decent but not high-end” audio equipment, I can easily tell the difference between a FLAC and a V2 (approx 192 kbs) mp3 file, especially with a piece of music which has a lot of instruments with a large range of frequencies. The sound of a V2 file will sound less “rich” (musicians call this quality “timbre”). However I have not done a blinded test of V0 vs. FLAC for myself.  Also in favor of MP3 files is the fact that most music players (including the iPod) will play MP3 files but cannot play FLAC. I recently bought a SanDisk Fuze, which does play FLAC and $89 for a 8 GB player is a good price.  Those who have limitations of storage space will prefer the smaller MP3 files as well but with the rapidly lowering price of external hard drives, the cost of storing a lot of FLAC files will progressively decrease.

Now here is why I prefer FLAC. Some of my arguments are based on emotion and are somewhat irrational, but like I said, there is no correct answer to the original question. First, keeping a collection of 100% “Perfect Rip” FLAC albums, complete with CUE files and gap information is like having the digital equivalent of having an archive of the original CD disks. You can burn these files back onto a CD and it should be digitally equivalent to the original CD. If you need a MP3 version, you can always convert the FLAC to MP3, but converting MP3 back to a CD will give you a lesser quality disk, and you should never transcode an MP3 file back to FLAC or to another MP3 file. You really get a degradation of quality when you transcode lossy to lossy.  Now I may be irrational when it comes to this, but I’ve always wanted to get the “best” of everything, so part of why I want to collect FLAC albums is because they represent the very best of music encodes. Even if I do convert them to MP3 to play on my iPod,  at least I have the FLAC album for archival purposes. However, my obsession/compulsion to collect the best FLAC has cost me money (external hard drives, seedbox rentals) and time(diligence to freeleech opportunities on my music trackers to build buffer). Those who are satisfied with their MP3 files probably think I’m wasting my money, but my situation isn’t much different from the guy who wants the best in golf clubs, fishing rods, or high-definition TVs. (But my hobby is less expensive.)

Did I answer the question?

Reference:  HydrogenAudio Wiki

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Category: Music, Tech  One Comment
How to Conduct Yourself When Talking To Tracker Staff
23
July
othersna

It is my hope that you guys don’t have to go through what I recently went through, but thought I’d just share some thoughts. Sometimes members may find themselves disabled or be questioned by tracker staff for a benign reason that attracted their attention. Perhaps you logged into the tracker while visiting another country. The tracker sees your IP changed over a country’s border, and the first suspicion is that you traded your account. Perhaps  faulty download/upload data gets sent to the tracker, giving them suspicion that you may have cheated. The craziest reason I’ve seen is that someone who doesn’t like you made an account on a forum using your usual tracker nickname and made trade offers. (I kid you not but this really happened to two people at TPS.)

Now here’s the perspective from the tracker staff. They claim a huge majority of people going into the “IRC channel for the disabled” are guilty as hell of trading, cheating or other offenses worthy of a banning. When entering the channel, they will either deny anything happened, or make a lame excuse. (They were hacked, or their roommate logged into their account and misbehaved, or their dog did whatever they were accused of.) So these staff members are already going to be pretty wary of the usual excuses and are not in the mood to have their time wasted.

The first advice is to be completely and totally honest with them. If you actually broke a rule, they claim to basically give a full confession since they have all the details on what happened. The other advice is to be polite and to avoid arguing or name-calling. The staff working the channel will quickly do a kick/ban if your conversation “degenerates” to that level.

So anyway, my story is not much to write about, except it was a “success story.” To avoid drama, I will refrain from naming the tracker or specifics of the issue. All I will say is that members at another forum have written that they have been “banned for no reason,” from this tracker and then say the tracker staff in the disabled channel was rude and kicked them from the channel “for no reason.” For me, there seemed to be some sort of misunderstanding and I was requested to go into the disabled channel and I was so nervous I was literally shaking. However in speaking to the staffer, I was completely upfront and open. The staffer was perfectly professional and polite, so there was no reason for me to argue with him, and in the end the misunderstanding was cleared, and the staffer wished me a “good night.”

And I still have my account in good standing.

Category: BitTorrent  Leave a Comment
Embrace Your Inner Geek
15
July
othersna

After a load of torrent and filesharing articles, time for something silly. July 13 was designated as “Embrace Your Inner Geek Day,” so let’s indulge. I will admit that in my high school and early college days, I was for the most part, a “geek.” Now I was one not by choice, but because I didn’t know any better. My parents, both immigrants, wanted their children to be more successful than they were and basically felt the best way towards this goal was to push education. That meant I grew up enjoying  the challenge of taking hard courses and strived for academic excellence. Along the way, I associated with people who had the same goals and we basically had the same style.  So certain things did not bother me (at the time). Like having unkempt hair, “Coke-bottle” thick glasses, and unfashionable clothes. It did not bother me to have a pen, a mechanical pencil, and an eraser stick in my front pocket, or a calculator hanging from my belt loop. (I still carry my iPod Touch and Palm Pre Smartphone everywhere. Old habits die hard.) But about midway through college, it was pointed out to me that having such a style was, well, “socially unacceptable.” You also weren’t too popular with the women. There were women geeks, but they were very few and far between and the male geeks were all fighting for their attention. So I fixed my hair, got contact lenses, and adapted the “East Coast Preppy” style that I still keep today. (Never mind hardly anyone has this style in Southern California. Just call me an iconoclast.

Just a few notes on geeks I have known. Not all are into computers and technology. You have your business geeks – the guys who watch CNBC religiously and talk about “oscillators” and “100 day moving averages.” Or the music geeks – into their classical music or theater and thinking anything popular is “noise,” or the political geeks (on both the right and left) who obsess over everything happening in Washington and every move the political parties are doing.  Another thing people may think is that male geeks are so into their books and studies  that they are not interested in women. Nothing could be further from the truth. From my readings on various internet forums, the women that geeks seem to love most are: Natalie Portman (Star Wars), Gillian Anderson (X-Files) and Emma Watson (Harry Potter). The business geeks like Maria Bartiromo of CNBC (the “Money Honey”). And the political geeks love the “newsbabes” on Fox News (if conservative) or MSNBC (if liberal).

I read an article which noted that American Geeks are held in high regard. Think of the guys who discovered DNA, or split the atom, to the people who made computers and the internet what they are today. Wasn’t  Steven Wozniak beloved on “Dancing With The Stars?” Of course, money talks, and you can clearly say some of these guys did pretty well financially because of their geekiness.  Not to mention some find intelligence to be sexy! So all you geeks and former geeks out there, embrace what you are or once were!

Category: Offbeat  Leave a Comment
Pros and Cons of Public Trackers vs Private Trackers – Another Viewpoint
12
July
othersna

As I had written before, I was using public trackers for a year before entering the private tracker world, and to be honest I had no major complaints with using public trackers. My main reason for joining private trackers was to find sites which would have the content I could not find on public trackers. At the time, I’d read articles and comments on the internet describing private trackers as magical places where the safety,  content, organization, and community were so much better. Now that I’ve been on private trackers for a year, and reading alternative viewpoints, here is my honest opinion.

In the beginning of my private tracker career, I felt privileged to be a member of “the club,” and felt I would never go back to public trackers. Was I being elitist? Yes, and I regret it now. One of the first things which brought me back down to earth was talking to the pirates I know in real life. Note all of them use public trackers or DDL sites such as Newsgroups. To the ones I trusted, I gave them a quick rundown of what private trackers were like and for some I even offered invites. But unanimously they turned me down, basically saying it was just too much work and effort to use private trackers.  They are not interested in getting involved with keeping a ratio, or keeping torrents seeding for a long time. For example, my cousin says he pays a fee per month for his Newsgroup access and he can get whatever he wants by DDL and be done with it. He tells me he has almost always gotten what he was looking for.

So here’s my honest comparison of public trackers vs. private trackers. Let’s start with “safety,” otherwise known as “not getting caught by anti-p2p groups.”  From my readings, it seems that in almost all cases, filesharers who received a warning letter from their ISP were using public trackers. To my knowledge users using private trackers have almost never received such letters. There was one well-documented incident where a user on a private tracker got an ISP warning letter, but it happened a year ago and I have not heard anything since. Now there is the danger of a private tracker getting infiltrated and eventually shut down. If this happens, the fear is that the anti-p2p group would search the tracker’s database and come after users. However, whenever I have heard of private tracker shutdowns, the only people prosecuted were the owners and prominent uploaders.  One rumor floating around is that any private tracker which has an invite system in which an invitee would enter the tracker without personally knowing his inviter, has already been infiltrated by an anti-p2p group. But some of these trackers have been operating for years. You’d think the infiltrators would have done something by now.

What about content? There is no question a public tracker will have more torrents than any private tracker, and old and less popular torrents tend to stay seeding at the public tracker. However at public trackers the torrents are usually disorganized, with multiple versions of the same content.  Some of the General/0day  trackers are known for the speed in which a popular content is uploaded. But if you’re not in a hurry, something similar will get to the public trackers in due time. Private trackers, especially ones with good coding, will keep the torrents much better organized than in a public tracker and one can find what they’re looking for quickly.  If torrent speed is important, I will say right now the speed of popular, recent content at both types of trackers is usually quite fast, and the speed of an older torrent is much slower for both.  If you have a seedbox and you use a private tracker where a lot of members use seedboxes, then your speed will be much faster than when using a public tracker since a lot of seedbox operators forbid the use of seedboxes on private trackers.  Where private trackers really shine is niche content. For these trackers, the members are devoted to the niche, and work hard to make the tracker full of exclusive content not seen at any other tracker.

Finally, there’s community.  The casual downloader would not care about community. They just want to go to the tracker, find what they want, download it, and stop the torrent as soon as they complete the download.  They’re not interested in getting to know other users of the tracker as well.  In private trackers, dedicated members will try to maintain a good sense of community. This starts with keeping torrents seeding as long as possible,  making good comments on torrents,  and participating in the forums and/or IRC. I’ll give you two examples of places with a great community. In one movie tracker, there’s a thread where you can describe a movie that you are looking for, but forgot the title, and chances are, a fellow member will have the correct answer. On one music tracker, you can post the .log file of one of your rips, and the members will critique how well they thought your rip was.  Believe it or not I used to try to post in the Pirate Bay forums, but given the huge number of people who go there, the forum activity is quite lacking.

So in summary, one can’t say that private trackers in general are better than public ones. It just depends on what your filesharing needs are.  At this time, I’m willing, even happy to put the effort into my private trackers to get the benefits they provide me

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