Archive for the Category »BitTorrent «

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
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
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
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

Category: BitTorrent, Filesharing  Leave a Comment
Is an Open or Closed Invitation Policy Better for a Tracker?
10
June
othersna

Again, there’s no true correct answer here, and the answer probably depends on other factors. Let’s start with trackers with a closed policy first. In general, these would be places where invitations can only come from staff, and the staff aren’t giving out very many. In some cases, the policy works. For  “secret trackers,” the staff is perfectly fine with a small user base and is not interested in expanding. The user base is happy, loyal and active, so that there isn’t much turnover in membership. A place like this can be closed and not have problems.

Now say there is a tracker that is well known, with a larger member base, and has good content and activity. For various reasons (such as an influx of bad members) the tracker shuts off invites. Because the tracker is already desirable, the unintended consequence is that the place becomes even more desired by invite traders, collectors and other “bad users.” You will see invites and accounts showing up at those “trader places,” and in one extreme case, invites started going on sale on the web when one such tracker, HDbits, tried to open up invites after a long period of being closed.

Another situation is the new upstart tracker which right from the get-go has a secret url and other publicity-shy policies, but only has a small number of users and torrents. These places, in need of new members, may recruit in power user forums of other trackers, but is relatively tight with their invites. The unforeseen consequence here would be the tracker fails to take off and in the end they open up registrations. Let’s hope it’s not too late by then.

Now let’s take the trackers with the “open-door” policy. They are usually large enough to handle 20K members or more, and either open for registrations frequently, or make it easy for member to obtain or issue invites. Well these trackers will certainly have a lot of activity, and a lot of new members coming in to keep the place “fresh.” But what about the bad users that get invited? Well a place like this would not be of interest to traders and collectors because it’s too easy to obtain. If the concern is infiltration by anti-p2p groups, I’ve heard that all trackers that have invited members not personally known to them are already infiltrated. No proof, but it is possible. What about people who try to get dupe accounts or are cheaters? Most likely the tracker has ways of quickly weeding these bad users out.

In summary, the rarity of invites has nothing to do with the quality of the tracker. In the end, it’s the other factors – content, speed, community that matters. But I’m inclined to think that when it comes to a risk vs. benefit issue, being more liberal with invites is more beneficial than less.

Category: BitTorrent  Leave a Comment
Demonoid Open For Registration June 2009!
03
June
othersna

The title is not a typo. I know from reading the article at FileNetworks (a fine blog) that Demonoid is open for registration as of today, June 3, 2010. The recent opening of Demonoid for open registrations brought  back fond memories of a year ago today.

A year ago today, I was a big user of public trackers and indexers such as The Pirate Bay, Isohunt, and Mininova, all of which were fully operational for a year ago. I tried to be a good user and seed back 1:1, and even participated in the forums, even though it seemed out of the millions of people using public trackers, a very small percentage posted in the forums. I was vaguely familiar with private trackers, but back then I thought you had to personally know someone who used private trackers to get into one. I certainly had no knowledge of any private tracker except for Demonoid. Back then the only torrent blog I read regularly was TorrentFreak, which is and was heavily slanted towards the use of public trackers. But they did have articles about Demonoid, and would mention how they would open for registration every few months, for only a few days at a time. In May 2009 they opened on a weekend and I missed it. After that, I would log into Demonoid daily hoping to catch them open for registration and that day occurred a year ago in June 2009. At that point, yours truly became a member of his first private tracker!

Now Demonoid could be nicknamed “baby’s first private tracker.” It does not keep track of ratio using a passkey system but on a somewhat  inaccurate method comparing finished torrents with the IP associated with it. Although no one can be disabled for low ratio, it does measure your ratio, and you could use a Demonoid ratio proof when applying for another tracker.  The speeds there are slower there because the tracker is semi-private. That is, non-members can access the torrents on the tracker and therefore a user may be reluctant to contribute a lot of bandwidth to all the non-members downloading from the tracker. I know my seedbox provider forbids the use of the seedbox on public trackers or on Demonoid.

But the best thing about Demonoid is the extensive content. To this day I have found really rare stuff, like episodes of TV shows cancelled many years ago, or movies which are unavailable commercially (except for a worn VHS tape on sale at eBay).  They also have a huge collection of pictures, e-books and comics.

Here’s some more memories of June 2009. I had posted requests for several rare movies I was looking for on public tracker forums to no avail. Within a few days of posting my requests at Demonoid, the kind members pointed me towards Cinemageddon and Karagarga, two trackers I had not heard of. CG had open registrations, but where could I find the KG invite? Demonoid also had an invite section, but I mainly saw a lot of requesting, and not a lot of offers, especially for the ones which looked interesting.  They did have a thread about the IRC interview for what.cd, which led me to my membership there, but I was still stuck when it came to getting into the trackers which were invite-only. But after digging through those invite threads there was a recruitment thread for The Pirate Society. I did a Google search, and I found a review article at Filesharefreak (another fine blog) which basically told me TPS was where I needed to be.  It was and still is.

So anyone reading this article who is on the outside looking in at the private tracker world, do yourselves a favor. Sign up for Demonoid while it’s still open.

Category: BitTorrent, The Pirate Society  One Comment
Tracker Interviews and Applications
19
May
othersna

I’m going to discuss private tracker interviews and applications for potential members. Now mind you, I am not staff at any private tracker so I don’t know any specifics on the way such interviews and applications are judged, but I give my opinion from the standpoint of a applicant (a successful one each time) and from reading the opinions that tracker staff have rendered on blogs and forums such as TPS.

Some trackers, in order to recruit new members,  will open up interviews on IRC or make available an “external application” for people interested in joining the tracker. The purpose would be to screen potential members to see if they would make good members, but also to give the applicant a feel for what the tracker is all about.

Generally, a tracker which recruits by interview or application will ask for screenshots and/or profile links to some of the applicant’s private trackers. This would imply that the recruiting tracker is looking for someone with some private tracker experience. Before choosing which profile links to submit, try to see what kind of member the tracker is looking for. If it is “community based,” you should submit a profile link to a place where you are active in the community (lots of forum posts and torrent comments). If you are more of an IRC person, try to make that known somewhere in the application. Now another thing I thought would be good was to submit profile links where I had a lot of download activity. Having a large buffered account with only a few GB downloaded but over a hundred GB uploaded is not necessarily a good thing. It just shows you have a fast connection or a seedbox, but not that you are an active member.

The other recurrent theme I read from tracker staff is to be honest with the questions, especially the ones which asks if you have been banned or warned at any tracker and why. All I can say is, if you are not upfront with this information and it is discovered by the tracker later, it doesn’t look good.  Sometimes an application can give a clue of what the tracker’s membership is like. If it asks if you are easily offended by crude jokes, then it would imply there is a lot of crude joking going on in the forums and in the IRC. Some will ask you about your interests.  For example a music tracker will want to know your music interests, and a movie tracker will want to know what movies you like.  Some will ask what skills or talents you have to offer them. Some things to mention (if you have such talents) would be skills with coding or graphics. I just mentioned the only skill I have to offer TPS and my trackers. I write blog articles and can fill forums with quality spam…

A few IRC interviews will quiz you on technical knowledge. Anyone with some private tracker experience should be able to calculate a ratio, know that DHT should be turned off for private tracker torrents, or know that doing a “hit & run” on a torrent is bad. It would also help to know basic port forwarding and how to be connectible. Some tracker interviews consist of more difficult examinations of knowledge. The what.cd interview is most famous with its rather difficult examination about music encoding. Fortunately they offer a guide on how to study for it. Basically the expectation is that what you learn from studying for the exam will help you if you later decide to upload content, and also will help you decide which encoding format is best for you. They have strict rules about not allowing lossy-lossy transcodes, so knowing what those are is a must.  There is a movie tracker that also used to ask questions about video encoding, but did not give any clues on what you needed to know. I suppose one should know the various containers and formats, like .avi vs .mkv or XviD vs x264.  I know the basics on how to use DVDFab and Handbrake, but if this interview asks about which AVS Scripts I use when setting up MEGUI for encoding, well, I’m afraid I would fail the exam as well.

My final words of wisdom is to not feel bad if your application is rejected. You may be a good private tracker at other places, but the one you are applying for may not feel  you are a match. The way to think of it is, if you were accepted, you probably would not use it much because you may not like it so much. So again, try to find reviews of the tracker you are applying for and make sure it is one you would be active at.

Category: BitTorrent  Leave a Comment
Tech Newbie to the Internet World, Computer Genius to My Friends
08
May
othersna

My generation is known as the “Cuspers.” We are too young to be “Baby Boomers,” but too old to be “Generation X.” I’ve read that a big difference between a Boomer and a Cusper is that a Cusper is not as afraid of embracing technology. Well for me that’s pretty much true. From childhood to my college years, I enjoyed playing with computers. Now mind you, my first experience on a computer was playing a game called “Star Trek ‘73″ on a teletypewriter. I actually took a few computer programming classes in high school and college, but they were in Basic and Fortran. (don’t laugh). On the horizon, the real computer geniuses at my college were using the new Unix computer and programming with a new language called “C.” I then forgot about computers until I discovered the internet in 1993. I didn’t get into a lot of the tech issues, but rather enjoyed the social aspects of using e-mail, message boards, and websites.

Fast forward to 2008 when I discovered the world of Bittorrent. Again, I had little interest in the details of how it all worked, and was really more interested in the end result, which is having the content I wanted on my hard drive. But torrenting is a hobby which forces you to have some technical knowledge, especially if you want to get the most out of it. For example, I had never used IRC before until I started torrenting, but I realized it is a necessity if you need support fast, or need to communicate with someone in real time on the internet. The very first time I used IRC was when I took the what.cd interview.

Now using a torrent client like uTorrent is fairly straightforward, but I did need to spend some time learning how to forward ports and get “connectible.” When dealing with music files, I needed to rapidly learn the basics of sound files, and how to obtain them from original sources without losing quality. I learned how to master EAC, and learned the purpose of  .log, .cue, and .m3u files as well. With video files, there was even more to learn. There are all sorts of formats and I needed to know not just the differences between them, but also how to play the various formats (VLC is FTW). Then came learning how to do screenshots, how to obtain rip specs, and how to convert a video so that it plays on my iPod. Some issues are still way over my head, like setting up AVIsynth scripts for MEGui. (So far I’ll stick with HandBrake and DVDFab.)

Again, I thank my fellow members at TPS for all their help with learning how to not only survive but thrive in the torrent world. In some ways, I still feel like a newbie compared to the knowledgeable people there. A very special thanks goes to the seedbox team at TPS since I have no clue on the technical aspects of using a seedbox and relied on their tutorials and one-on-one help when I had questions or problems. Note that one year ago I did not even know what a seedbox was. Now I have enough basic seedbox knowledge to  use one  efficiently.

But I have some solace in knowing that in real life, people think of me as some sort of computer genius. (Believe me, I am not.) There are people out there who are grateful that I know how to fix their relatively simple computer problems, like removing a virus from their computer. Or that I impressed someone by telling them I set up a local area network at my office (including a wi-fi connection). But sometimes the biggest thanks I get is from those rare people in real life that I trust enough to share my “pirate booty” with. They don’t ask a lot of details on how I got what I have, but they think I’m a genius for figuring out how to get it!

Category: BitTorrent, Filesharing, Tech  One Comment
Freeleech!
24
April
othersna

Except for maybe open registrations, no other announcement at a ratio-based tracker generates as much buzz as one announcing freeleech. Such an announcement is all the more exciting when it occurs at a tracker known to be hard to seed at, or one which has not had freeleech in a long time or even ever in its existence.

Why does a tracker have freeleech? Most of the time it occurs in celebration of an event, such as a tracker’s birthday, or a major holiday. (One tracker had freeleech in celebration of Orthodox New Year. I noted Happy Orthodox New Year as I downloaded lots of torrents from there!) Sometimes the freeleech is awarded to members because a goal has been reached such as monthly donations, uploads in a certain category, or number of members idling in the IRC. I think periodic freeleech at ratio-based trackers is  a good idea. The freeleech generates positive buzz for the tracker, increases leeching activity and therefore improves upload amounts for other users, and allows users to get content they may have shied away from because of ratio concerns.  The only problem which may come up is an increase in hit & run activity, but hopefully the tracker has enough good members to keep seeding the torrents they obtained via freeleech, and that the good members use the buffer they have just obtained.

Here are a few freeleech stories I can share. (Again, out of respect for the various trackers I will refrain from mentioning specifics.) The first big freeleech I experienced was last fall at a music tracker. This place gave it as a reward for an upload contest, and the members delivered the uploads in a major way. Once freeleech started, I would have up to 10 of my seeding torrents getting snatches constantly. Plus I was able to get lots of big FLAC files which would have killed my ratio. By the end, I got everything I could think of at the time and I made power user, without the use of a seedbox.

Two of my niche trackers specializing in e-books and business had freeleech opportunities in the past few months. These niche trackers are hard to seed at since it is hard to predict which torrents would be popular. I had a good ratio at both, but was unable to go after some big items for fear of ruining my ratio. At the e-book tracker, I found a 14 GB collection of something which I actually could use, and got 7 GB in upload return. Considering most e-books are only a few MB in size, I no longer have to worry about ratio there for most of my downloading. At the business place, I really wanted something there but it was a huge file. The place offered a freeleech of a huge application, and by downloading and seeding it not only did I get enough freeleech to get that torrent I wanted, I also made power user.

Most recently my other music place had a freeleech. This place has been known to be very hard to seed at and I was actually in some ratio trouble there early on. I had never seen this place offer a site-wise freeleech and when it did, I got enough upload to reach a user class I never thought I would ever reach. (It’s nice being able to post in that “1337” forum.) It was also good to be able to replace my mp3 files with FLAC ones as well.

The last tip I can give is that we have a thread at TPS where members can announce that a freeleech opportunity has come up and I check the regularly. If you’re one of those users that only logs into a tracker once a week, you could end up missing the opportunity so this thread is a useful one.

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