Private trackers

Admin · Aug 28, 2024

OPS would be even worse if it wasn't for RED
One of the reason why OPS get's away with having a dysfunctional economy is that a lot of uploads there are simply re-uploads from RED.

So it doesn't really serve as a backup in the case something bad would happen to RED since if RED goes down OPS would begin to work significantly worse unless/until staff their somehow fixed their economy (which is hard to do once it's already dysfunctional).

komata_kya wrote:

Truth is, OPS wouln't be even half as good if it wasn't for RED. Just look at how many torrent are just crossposts from RED. People might get a wrong idea where they think OPS works better than it actually is, because it is being subsidized by RED uploaders. Like what's the goal of a hard economy, when OPS is easy and it works fine, not realizing REDs hard economy actually helps OPS.

vintologi24 wrote:

Of course but getting things easily without effort will always be appealing to people.

Doing things like ripping CDs take effort.

Going over your old WHAT downloads to see if anything there can be uploaded to RED takes effort.

Fixing bad metadata tags manually takes effort.

Ripping from streaming services takes effort.

And we need people to do those things in order to have a good library of content. We need more uploads to RED, not less.

https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/1f35wui/red_economy_ops_economy/

Admin · Aug 29, 2024

Another redditor banned for asking for invite
Turns out that trackers are very strict with regard to rules regarding invites, this isn't exactly something new.

mangoboy0 wrote:

Banned from GGn for no reason?
We were talking on IRC about other trackers and then I asked a simple question. I asked if people know any music trackers other than RED where I can actually download music and not be treated like shit. Some nice people answered, telling me I should go to OPS.

I was very excited to join and accidentally asked for an invite. An admin looked into my profile and then I was banned.

This is so weird and confusing. It was an accident, I didn't really mean it. I was even a Legendary Gamer, which is huge. It's the 3rd to last rank. Not many people can achieve this.

I respect staff, but this was outrageous. It's stupid and unfair. I believe you should just buy games instead of dealing with this stupid bullshit.
People who were there likely know what happened.

2fa_allthethings wrote:

OP asked for invites multiple times in IRC over the course of a few days. Even asking if he can trade ggn invite for a ptp invite on another tracker.

Not once, not twice, but multiple times.

OP was basically doing a speedrun on how to get banned.

vintologi24 wrote:

btw: you could have just applied in the recruitment thread.

Well you did get banned from GGn now so that's no good there, sure they might unban you if you are really lucky there but good luck getting access to the invite forum back.

You could check out the invite forum for the tracker you hate so much but maybe GGn has reported the incident to RED so you might be fucked there too, or they reported it to OPS in which case you are might no longer be able to join there.

LakeAccomplished2656 wrote:

This is the hilarious part. It would have been so easy to already be on OPS or RED.

HlantiChrist TL Staff (verified) wrote:

Someone is banned from TorrentLeech for "No Reason" as well.

mangoboy0 wrote and later deleted:

I hate everyone who talked about me in IRC
Apparently some users talked about me in IRC. A kind soul has shown me IRC logs and I have some words for you.

First of all, the guy whose name begins with an A and ends with an S and has a Y in the middle. You suck balls. Fuck you. I thought we were friends and you just talk shit about me like that.

The second fuck you is directed at the person whose name ends with 00a0. You talk too much. You enjoyed my ban? Well enjoy this: (cant find middle finger emoji)

Third fuck you goes to the pug. You've always hated me and I felt the same for you. I hate you a lot. Nobody likes you.

The rest of you also suck cocks. Fuck all of you idiots.

Admin · Aug 30, 2024

Now someone claiming to be mangoboy claims that he was impersonated
Interestingly he claims now that he wasn't ignorant on what he was doing and he is now merely trying to at least get access to other trackers back.

-jarburg- wrote:

I was impersonated on /r/trackers - The real mangoboy story. And an appeal to MaM, TL and other beloved trackers' administration. Please read.
The post that impersonated me in question - Banned from GGn for no reason

It is quite fantastic to me how and why I was impersonated on reddit. I am a nobody.

Yet following this post I was banned from many of my beloved trackers - MaM, TL, Emp to name a few. And I'm sure whoever it was will be lurking, see this post too and be giddy about it, but that's okay, that's a side effect, I am however forced to tell my own story now, which is bizzare too because Im a nobody.

However, my hope in telling this story is at least getting my other tracker accounts to the state they were in before this post was made and a collective decision was taken between the site owners to blacklist me. The previous state was having my account enabled but invite privileges banned.
.
The story
Here's the thing. Im dumb. But not malicious.

Let me say it again. Im dumb. But not malicious.

Did I ask for invites in GGn-IRC? Yes. Not all of those times are "asking" though. For instance, when I was talking about Cinemabytes and PTP invites in the screenshot - https://pastebin.com/A9mQMtfc - the context was that we were discussing PTP's high requirements in GGn. Then I said I need CB invite - not asking for it - but mentioning to other users that I want to get into it - so the "need an invite" in that context was not from a user but from the forums. And the "i'll suck your dick for a ptp invite" is an obvious - in context - joke at the time.

However, I cannot argue upon that since with the subsequent ban all perspective in history changes. So if you say now that "hey man, youre lying it was clearly you asking and maybe hoping youd get it" I don't have anything to refute you with because of my eventual GGn ban.
.
Do I contest my GGn ban?
No.

The post in question feigns ignorance. The real mangoboy - me - does not.

I said before I am dumb and not malicious. But I am dumb. I'm not going to over-explain it though and will tell you right now that the ban was fair despite my idiocy.

Maybe the only point of contest if I were to have one is that its a permanent lifetime ban. I wish it was an year ban or so but they do treat such cases of members asking for invites quite strictly.

So, yes, the ban was fair. I contested it only once - right after the ban - and talked with the admin Mr. Ze- (I will not finish their name for privacy purposes, those who know, know) who let me know there was no chance of it reversing.
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GGn ban's effect on me
My GGn ban effected me profoundly. It would seem fantastical too but after the ban I felt a very dull void. Its the feeling of losing access to good things, you know? Getting fired from a good job, losing out on a great girl, etc. The feeling of loss.

I know its just a tracker - there are more - but GGn was a GOOD thing. And it saddened - saddens - me that I lost on it.

I chose right then to not put myself in such a spot again. You have to know this about me, im a fighter, a hustler and I like to win. The probability of me not learning from this experience would mean losing out on good things in the future - a great job, a good girl, you know?

The ban was a profound experience of loss. Still is. Right away I packed my PC. I identified that I had become a chronic addict of the internet. I spent my days reading, studying, getting really bored, really depressed, thinking of my GGn dwarves that would net no gems anymore, listening to audiodramas and just being offline.

A few days later I wrote [an apology letter] (https://litter.catbox.moe/cylceu.pdf) addressed to Mr. Ze- and other administration of GGn. I never posted it because its too soon, Im not changed, and it wouldnt be genuine either.

The only reason I choose to publish it now is because of that impersonator tarnishing my feelings for private tracker scene and getting me banned from all my beloved trackers where I'd lovingly invested a great amount of material - I'd uploaded a lot of obscure but popular stuff on MaM. Its my favourite tracker.
I hope any who reads it realises the sincerity in that letter and my words.
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My situation with other trackers following the ban
After my ban of GGn, other trackers, rightfully so, disabled my invite privileges. Meaning, I could use the site but I could not invite nor be invited anywhere else. That is fair.

First when I lost my invite privileges on Empornium I messaged the staff asking why. They replied "I think you remember what happened in the irc of another tracker an hour ago, be happy just youre invite privileges are banned". They were right. I was happy. And I was scared too, so I never replied. I didn't want to say anything to hurt myself.

And that was the situation. I was just using the trackers. And I'd decided to stay like this forever. Just use the trackers for my needs and stay lowkey.
.
The impersonator's effect on other sites
Today, however, I woke up to find my MaM, TL and EMP accounts banned. I talked to MaM IRC and they let me know of this impersonating reddit post. Because of the post I went from being someone who was banned from the invite aspect of the private trackers to someone who's now blacklisted altogether.
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My appeal to MaM, TL and Emp
I am sorry I have to reaching like this but via my talks in the IRC it was communicated to me that it cannot be reversed. There was a healthy speculation that the reddit user u/mangoboy0 was in fact me and that the step to go from having my invite-privileges banned to complete ban is the right course of things.

I would like to make an appeal to the site owners to allow my accounts to go back to the previous state - the state before the impersonating reddit post was made - that is, invite privileges banned.

If you were to peruse my accounts they are healthy, respectable and dedicated.

Imagine my surprise when a collective decision to ban me was taken following this post. I have no reason nor intention to disrespect the scene. I am myself a committed - if very dumb - member of the scene too. Please do not brandish the intention of the misguided fool who impersonated me upon me.
I request you to unban my MaM, TL and EMP accounts and have them go back to the state they were before the reddit post but after the GGn ban.
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Afterthoughts
Ofc this is probably in vain. Reversing a decision is harder than making it. So idk how big of a hope do I have in having this post be effective in getting me my MaM account (which I consider the most precious of all). I don't know where I'll go for books and radio shows. I am quite addicted to both.

But in any case, I was forced to make this post following the impersonation. Goes to show that bad luck multiplies. I also cannot ignore my own accountability in giving way to such a troll.

I'm also aware there will be many comments saying - "Top 10 reasons why you fucked up" and some having some sympathy. I will not be replying to any. I think I've said all I wanted to in this post and so I will not be taking part in the ensuing discussion. Like I've said, I'm packing this PC soon.

In any case, mangoboy was an alias i used exclusively on trackers. I don't think my MaM account will be unbanned so I'll probably have to look elsewhere for books.

But still, I felt it was right for me to clear up the complex misunderstanding and the story that was of this iteration of my internet persona - mangoboy.
I'm definitive that I'll use this opportunity as a catalyst to better my real life and will just earn more to afford the stuff - audiobooks, books, games, etc - that i need.

So, unless my accounts on MaM, TL and Emp get unbanned, the journey of mangoboy and my own 1.5yr of solid journey with private trackers is done with.

It was quite a wonderful subsection of society I came across and was quite fun.

Everyone, take care, treat your accounts right, and share information freely.

Farewell, The real mangoboy.

aside24 wrote:

Impersonation is rampant on IRC trackers. I've heard multiple cases of people being banned on trackers because someone else used their tracker profile as 'community standing proof'

It's a real problem but staff just doesn't care. They don't doublecheck, they don't believe anything and just ban ban ban

For all the love that's going around in piracy & trackers, there's a whole lot of unbased deleting of people their accounts going around

vintologi24 wrote:

I am not sure if the impersonation (assuming it was actually impersonation rather than your first failed attempt at reversing the ban) was the cause of you getting cabal ban.

It's standard practice that bad users are reported to other trackers as well so they also get banned there.

-jarburg- wrote:

Yeah, TL told me unless I have absolute proof that the impersonated account isnt me they cant do anything about it. I can't absolutely prove that u/mangoboy0 wasn't me. I don't have access to the IP they were using on reddit and match it with my own. Their account is suspended so I can't even check for a join date. Even if I could that still wouldn't "absolutely" prove its not me.

How do you even do that? Absolutely prove that the account impersonating you isn't you?

vintologi24 wrote:

I actually figured out a way in which you might be able to prove that.
But i think you are screwed regardless.

-jarburg- wrote:

Its okay, I don't care now. Youve been quite invested in the thread so thank you for that.

-jarburg- wrote:

Like I said after the ban I had my invite privileges banned from many trackers. That was fair. The cabal ban happened after the post. My appeal mentions getting back to the state after the GGn ban but before the impersonating post.

About your claim that the earlier post was my first failed attempt at reversing the ban - Idk what I can say except trust me - because anything i say can probably be refuted. It's just politics, I guess.

vintologi24 wrote:

I moderate a discord server and we sometimes start with a less severe measure (such as timeout) and then we decide that further action is needed.
That's likely what happened in your case.

First step was to take away your invite perms but then they decided that further actions were needed.

-jarburg- wrote:

I understand. Like I said in the main post body that after my GGn ban I disappeared. I just stayed lowkey. It was the impersonated reddit post that got me cabal banned.

vintologi24 wrote:

I am pretty sure the cabal ban was coming regardless.

-jarburg- wrote:

Again, Like I said in the main body - Emp admins said I should be happy only my invite privileges were banned. After my GGn ban theyd decided the state of my other accounts. It was only after the impersonated post that I was cabal banned.

So a cabal ban could not probably have been coming "regardless".

I don't think youve read my post.

vintologi24 wrote:

I guess you can keep telling yourself that.

This new update to the story was a bit underwhelming, i was hoping for something more funny, kinda disappointing.

Zykr3 wrote:

honestly i can‘t even tell if this is a shit post or not. the wording and the GGn apology letter (this one had me rolling dude just the way you formatted the first „T“ on the first page like its some 18th century gothic novel LMFAOO) seems completely excessive to be genuine.
but anyways, real or fake, i think decisions like that take some time. you probably would have gotten banned for this alone:

2024-08-16 14:30:25 <mangoboy> <staff>, in all honestly ive got a question for you, can i exchange GGn invite for a PTP invite on another tracker?

invite exchange is an offense that will get you banned on every tracker you are on. i doubt that the post (impersonated or not) was the sole reason for the ban on other trackers.

oh and btw: this is the first time i‘ve heard of CB. are they affiliated with AB?

byParallax wrote:

Scrolled through the post and letter and honestly as someone who’s had to manage plenty of online communities my assumption is that whoever received that must have immediately thought « fuck who cares I’m not reading all that ». It’s tooooo much.

-jarburg- wrote:

More clarification and context based on my comments in the screenshot - https://pastebin.com/A9mQMtfc

When I become Legendary Gamer i see I'll get 2 invites a month, I wanna profit too, therefore, asking for tips to insure against bad account

The person who invited me gets a bonus everytime I ranked up. I thought I could do the same. I've seen many unofficial invite posts on trackers. Thought I can too create these (barring those that have a "DONT POST INVITE FOR THESE TRACKERS HERE" post). Was asking advice for how to spot bad account. Mr. Lepik then said its for inviting people you know, a privilege, that was that.

If anyone can give me an invite to CinemaBytes I'll be soooooooo happy

It was not in my memory that I explicity asked for it. Guess I did. I've got no excuse.

in all honestly ive got a question for you, can i exchange GGn invite for a PTP invite on another tracker?

Like I said, Im dumb but not malicious. My reasoning was if I were doing anything dumb the members who stop me. Mr. Lepik did stop me here and said "I would tell anyone who is even thinking about it in the STRICTEST terms to not do it".

Ohh awesome, does anyone have an invite?

This is the one that got me banned. I've got no excuse.

Why did I ever ask for invites on IRC anyway?

Idk, they said its okay to invite your friends, felt I was friends with IRC members. Dunno. Bad judgement.

Afterthoughts
I've got no qualms about the GGn ban. Still, thought to clear it since I didnt in the main post body. My main appeal is to just reverse the effect of the impersonation post on my account but to not reverse the effect of GGn ban on them.

But besides the appeal, its just an action Im being forced to take after the post that impersonated me.

LinkinsRepeater GGn staff (verified) wrote:

Yeah I was impersonated once by [deleted] too.

Feelsbadman

-jarburg-
•27m ago•Edited 10m ago

Look man, no need to be cheeky.

Here's the post if you want it - https://web.archive.org/web/20240902100638/https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/1f720p5/i_was_impersonated_on_rtrackers_the_real_mangoboy/

I deleted it because ultimately each tracker was still asking me to prove how u/mangoboy0 - the original poster of the post - was not me. I cant obviously do that, im not reddit admin or have links to them.

I'll tell you this, Link. Before that post all other trackers had only invite-banned me. But after that post Im permabanned from all trackers for life. I can't dispute it. I can't say anything about it. And the particular tracker admins just tell me my appeal was rejected without even reading what i had to say.

Its like the fucking mafia. Its fucking easy to ban so they ban. And all bans are lifetimes. A consensus between site owners was reached behind my back instigated by a fucking reddit impersonation - probably by someone experienced who knew this would work - and now im cabal banned.

The invite-ban was fair. But getting perma-banned because of some impersonator i cant obviously prove isn't me? Thats fucking absurd, bro. All in the end to have the admins say "Oh well even if it isnt you we're sure youd be banned soon.". Absurd. Nobody can say that. I would've stayed at that neutered invite-banned state for all life and stayed low-key if not for the impersonated post.

Its absolutely fucked up that there are no failsaves for impersonation.

Not one person in your lot of admins willing to say to your cabal committee that aight yk why not talk with him? Maybe it isn't him? If we're convinced we'll just re-instate his account to its earlier state.

But nah, its just easy to ban and keep the ban active cause the first commandment is that the word is absolute. Lack of empathy and lack of fairness.
My GGn account was lost to me by my own actions. That's fair. Then I got invite-banned on other trackers by my own actions. That's fair. But getting permabanned because your cabal committee thinks a laughable impersonation is real is not by my action and its grossly unfair.
The cabal committee lacks empathy and understanding. Its sad.

And I'll tell you this - This is a loss for me. A real loss. In time youll forget me, Ill forget you, all my needs and requirements will be morphed and met in other ways. But the premise of my banned accounts is a blot on the operation of your cabal committees and its fucked up how trigger happy you lot are. And how deaf too.

I lost access to books, audiobooks, and generally safe trackers because of that post. I committed an offense on your site - GGn and i got banned from there. That's fair. But getting banned from other trackers too where I was good? Where I stayed lowkey - only downloaded and fucked off? Instigated by a reddit post? Thats fucked up.

And they tell me if I can get GGn to say "its okay guys we don't mind him on your site" that they might consider it. But nah, when I tell Phantasm that can he appeal to a senior staff he says no.

Block all the fucking ways to a solution. Fucking wrongful outcome. Its sad. Its a loss for me. But whatever, life goes on, we adapt.
Anyway I deleted the post because i didnt want anymore drama in the tracker scene from reddit users. But since you're being cheeky about it there you go have the link.

Cheers.

Admin · Aug 31, 2024

Advice from TL staff (verified)
Most of this should be obvious to people but somehow isn't.

HlantiChrist wrote:

My advice to everyone who are wanting to join/be/are a member of a private tracker.
Just to start off. I have been everything from first line support, to an admin, and I've been staff at several trackers over 13 years. I like to think I know what I am talking about. Here are my pro tips on how to get along.

#1. Be respectful, towards staff, and other users. If someone pisses you off, either ignore them, or report them. Do not confront them.
#2. Nobody owes you anything. Do not demand stuff, ask politely. Nobody cares if you have seeded 3000 tb of data, it does not matter. Your attitude and behavior trumps anything you may have done in the past. Lot's of people have good stats, and in the grand scheme of things, your 200 tb upload contribution, is never enough to carry special favors.
#3. IF you are disabled, come clean. It is your best chance to get your account restored. We ALWAYS know a lot more than you THINK we know. When you lie, you seal your fate.
#4. Ask! If you are unsure about rules or how to do stuff. Believe me, we have heard it all before, and we know how to help. It is why we are here. I can't even begin to tell you how many people get screwed because they don't ASK when they don't KNOW. Assumptions is the mother of all fuck-ups.
#5. Invites are a privilege, not a right. Only, invite people you KNOW and TRUST. You gain NOTHING by giving them to random people, beyond risking inviting people that can get YOU banned, and, perhaps worst of all, people you previously invited can get banned.
#6. This should be obvious. Never ARGUE with staff. It is ok to disagree, but you need to accept their word as gospel. They are not required to explain their reasoning, nor do you have any rights. There is no appeals board, crying on reddit after you where banned will not make any difference. May seem unfair, but that's just how it is.

New topic: It's always been a mystery to me, how some people think going on rants, etc will make anyone want to help them in any way. Yet, it happens a lot.

Generally, we will treat even rude users politely, but starting off by telling the staff-member who is trying to help you what a big idiot he is for disabling you in the first place, is rarely a good idea. If you are raging/pissed off, give it a day, and calm down before contacting staff, coming in, guns blazing, will not help you, in any way, except it might feel good at the time. Though that generally wears off after a while. Kinda like pissing your pants to keep warm.
I have restored accounts to users, who rightfully should have been permanently disabled due to their actions. But, because they came clean, where respectful, and showed some ability to do some self reflection, They were given a second, and in some cases even a third chance. Being respectful and honest will very rarely hurt your chances in life in general(Except when talking to police, never do that without a lawyer).

Look at it from MY point of view: Helping nice people = Feels nice. = Makes ME want to help YOU.

And now, for the n00bs: "But how do I join a private tracker to begin with?" That's actually the wrong question. What you should ask, is "How do I NOT join a private tracker?" It is a much easier question to answer.
#1. Do not buy an invite from anywhere but the tracker itself, though if they straight up sell invites, I'd be skeptical to begin with.
#2. Don't accept an invite from a RANDOM user outside of a private tracker class restricted forum.
#3. Do not trade invites, anywhere.
#4. Do not ask anyone for an invite, unless you know them. Never do it in a public forum.
If you follow those four simple rules, you shouldn't have to worry about getting disabled over where you got your invite.
Ok, sure, this may be somewhat simplified, but, that's my honest advice. And I do appreciate that your experience may vary/have varied in the past.

Diazepam_Abuser wrote:

but people on r/trackers told me that all staffers are evil self obsessed assholes on a power trip. It's true! Last time i got banned from 10 different trackers just for saying "Hello!" in the forums. I don't think me trading invites, being racist and picking fights over the smallest things possible had anything to do with it.

Well written post !

NotSeger wrote:

I bet it was in one of those “cabal” trackers. I heard their mods are all mean and ban you for no reason. You can’t even beg for invites on IRC without losing your account.

/s

hpass wrote:

I only asked three times, and I was a power user. Power user is uuuuuuge.

projektilski wrote:

This should be obvious. Never ARGUE with staff. It is ok to disagree, but you need to accept their word as gospel

That elitist self-righteous shit is what makes me never want to join a private tracker.
I have a life, and to waste it on a private tracker with that kind of admins, why

HlantiChrist wrote:

That's them facts of joining a privately owned company. No different if you walk into a restaurant and start arguing with the waiter. It's not a democracy. You are allowed to voice your opinion, on most trackers. We - encourage it, in our forums. Feedback is always welcome. But once you start to argue with a staff member. You need to remember who owns and operates the site. It's not you. The reason I use the term Staff, as a general term, is I can't speak for everyone else, but I generally have a very high level of tolerance. Other's may not. If a staff member is having a bad day, and a user comes along to tell them how to do shit. That may not end well. I am not saying it's right. But I am saying that's just how it is. It is like being in court. Sure, calling the judge an asshole is fun, right then and there, but it's rarely a good idea.

vintologi24 wrote:

While you are a user of a tracker obviously doesn't own the site itself you are still perhaps contributing a lot to the seed (uploading, seeding, etc).

If staff were to screw up too badly a lot of higher value users would migrate to some other place.

I personally like how RED is managed so i am adding a lot of content to that site.

Admin · Sep 2, 2024

Why i don't argue with staff
If a site is incompetently run the only rational recourse is to migrate somewhere else once you are given that opportunity. Even if i don't care if they ban my account i am still not going to be overly confrontational, i will just let the site eventually die or become irrelevant (if it isn't already), i generally try to avoid joining sites like that in the first place.

And if staff is competent you will probably not have to argue with them in the first place.

Bad policies/decision from what i have seen is mostly an issue on lower quality trackers that you don't want to use anyway.

Example of bad policy is requiring that people fill out a form or reach a certain user-class before they can start uploading to the site. I don't see myself ever uploading anything to a site like that.

If you have some idea for how to make an already good site better you can try making a suggestion (if they have a system for that). On RED there was for example a suggestion to incentivize seeding of torrents that has few seeders and eventually staff implemented the freeload system (not the solution suggested but still a good system).

You can also of course have conversation with staff when appropriate. From my experience GGn and RED has good staff that will resolve issues when needed.

And if there is some promising upcoming site that has policies you like you can join and become an uploader to help them out.

Admin · Sep 2, 2024

Honestly trying out other trackers has made me appreciate RED more

0. When you are looking for some type of music there you are very likely to actually find it and have it be seeded. They have more torrents than any other private tracker.

1. RED doesn't have any "Hit and run" rules. You will not get into trouble there from having computer issues preventing you from seeding for a while. You will not get banned because it took too long to move files to a new seeding location.

2. They do have an interview system where you can join the site directly instead of having to be recruited from some other site or being pushed into signing up for a bad seedbox service. It is currently a rather frustrating process for the people waiting in line for the interview (people often end up waiting for days) but at least the option is there. If you want to make this more convenient you can of course apply to join once you have reached the elite user class.

3. You get immune from inactivity pruning once you become a power user. You don't have to worry about getting into trouble (potentially getting fully banned) because you needed to focus on something else and say take 1 year break from torrenting.

4. They let you start uploading right away rather than requiring you to apply for that. This is valuable for people on say ratio watch since then they can dig themselves out of their whole by uploading instead of having to rent a seedbox.

5. Their request feature is actually effective since they have a working economy. You will not see your request end up unfulfilled despite bounty over 1TiB.

6. A lot of other torrent sites can be joined from ranking up on the site. RED is one of the best sites in that regard and avoiding RED is currently often impractical for users looking to join some other sites.

7. You are incentivized to seed poorly seeded torrents thanks to their freeload events. This is better than most/all systems i have seen on other trackers.

8. They have a pretty good search engine for finding music you are looking for.

Of course there is still room for improvement and the site will very likely get better over time at least in terms of the library. There was actually a sharp increase in the number of torrents uploaded after 2023:

https://torrents.neocities.org/

I do remember being annoyed at some stuff at RED but that annoyance kinda disappeared when i started trying out other private tracker sites. There are of course things i would do a bit differently if i was in charge but that will be the case for every private tracker.

Admin · Sep 3, 2024

People sometimes grind for years only to get massively disappointed
You might think that some tracker is going to be great for you only to later end up very disappointed.

In this case it's a bit stupid since "breaking bad" is TV so it's outside the scope of what PTP is covering.

Longjumping-Kick-988 wrote:

Wasted 2.5 years getting into PTP.. The disappointment is immeasurable
When I first set my sights on getting into PTP, I knew it wouldn’t be an easy road. After all, the reputation of PTP as the pinnacle of private trackers made it a distant dream for most. But I wasn’t just “most.” I was determined, and this is the story of how I grinded for two and a half long years, pouring my heart and soul into RED to finally make that dream a reality. Little did I know that the dream I was chasing would end in such profound disappointment.

The Beginning: Joining RED
My journey began on RED, the renowned tracker where many start but few truly succeed. Joining RED was exhilarating, but I quickly realized that it was just the beginning. I knew that to even be considered for PTP, I’d need to prove myself in ways that would push me to my limits.

The Early Days: Learning the Ropes
Starting on RED was like entering a new world. The community was vast, and the rules were intricate. I spent hours reading through the wiki, studying the seeding strategies, and learning about how to maintain a good ratio. My nights were consumed by this new obsession, as I meticulously planned how I would approach the grind.

The First Grind: Building the Ratio
The first major hurdle was building a solid ratio. On RED, ratio is king, and I wasn’t about to be dethroned. I invested in seedboxes, optimized my internet connection, and scoured the tracker for the most obscure torrents that I knew would give me a good seeding advantage. It wasn’t easy. The hours were long, and the competition was fierce. I remember the anxiety of checking my uploads every hour, hoping to see that little green arrow indicating a successful seed.
But this was just the beginning.

Leveling Up: Contribution and Community Engagement
Ratio wasn’t the only thing that mattered. To stand out on RED, I needed to become an active part of the community. I started uploading my own torrents, curating content that I knew would be valuable to the user base. Each upload was a gamble, with the potential to either boost my standing or set me back weeks.

I began participating in the forums, offering advice where I could, and engaging in discussions. The goal was to become a recognized name within the community—a name that people associated with quality contributions. Every comment, every thread, and every upload was part of my strategy to elevate myself closer to that PTP invite.

The Grind Intensifies: Hitting Milestones
As the months turned into years, the grind became a way of life. I wasn’t just participating in RED; I was living it. My daily routine revolved around torrenting. I woke up to check my seeds, spent my breaks at work planning my next uploads, and my evenings fine-tuning my seeding strategies.

I hit milestone after milestone. First, reaching power user status. Then, elite user. But I knew that these titles were just stepping stones. My ultimate goal was in sight, but I couldn’t afford to let up.

The Sweat and the Sacrifice
The grind was intense. There were times when I questioned whether it was worth it. The countless nights spent babysitting torrents, the hours sacrificed, and the endless cycle of upload, seed, repeat—it all took a toll. My social life dwindled, and there were moments when I felt like giving up. But every time I considered it, I remembered why I started: to get into PTP.

The sweat was real, both metaphorically and literally. I sweated through technical issues, ratio drops, and the constant fear of missing a crucial upload window. But each challenge only fueled my determination.

The Final Stretch: The Golden Opportunity
After two and a half years of grinding, I finally saw a glimmer of hope. I had become a well-known figure on RED, with a reputation for quality contributions and a solid ratio to back it up. But even then, I knew that securing a PTP invite wouldn’t be easy. I needed to find the right opportunity.

That opportunity came when I was approached by a respected member of the community who recognized my efforts. They offered to put in a good word for me, something that I had worked so hard to earn. Even then, I knew it wasn’t guaranteed. But I had done everything in my power to get this far, and I wasn’t about to let it slip away.

The Payoff: Joining PTP
The day I received my PTP invite was surreal. After two and a half years of grinding, I had finally achieved my goal. It felt like everything I had worked for had come to fruition. The sweat, the sacrifices, and the endless grind had all been worth it.
Or so I thought.

The Crushing Disappointment
After all the blood, sweat, and tears I poured into this grind, I was finally on PTP, the tracker I had idolized for years. I expected a treasure trove of the best content, a nirvana for cinephiles and TV lovers alike. But when I searched for one of my all-time favorite shows, Breaking Bad, I was stunned. Breaking Bad—one of the most critically acclaimed series of all time—was nowhere to be found.
I couldn’t believe it. All those years of grinding, all those nights spent perfecting my ratio, all the sacrifices I made, and for what? To join a tracker that doesn’t even have Breaking Bad?

I felt betrayed. This was supposed to be the holy grail of private trackers, the pinnacle of my torrenting career, and yet it was missing something so fundamental. It felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. All the grind, all the sweat, all the effort—it was for naught. The dream I had chased for two and a half years turned out to be nothing more than an illusion.
Conclusion: Was It Worth It?

Looking back on my journey from RED to PTP, it’s hard not to feel disillusioned. The grind was intense, and the challenges were many, but the ultimate payoff didn’t live up to the hype. The disappointment of realizing that PTP wasn’t the nirvana I had imagined still stings. If I had known then what I know now, I might have reconsidered the path I took.

To anyone else out there on the same journey, I say this: Be careful what you wish for. The grind might get you to where you want to go, but sometimes, the destination isn’t what you dreamed it would be. Keep grinding, but make sure it’s truly worth the sweat and sacrifice. And maybe, just maybe, reconsider whether the chase for PTP is really worth it—especially if it’s missing Breaking Bad.

Admin · Sep 14, 2024

Peer Scraping Incident on Orpheus
This illustrates the value in avoiding the lower tier trackers. I remember people trying to convince me to join that site and i of course refused since it's very much inferior to RED.

Well at least they actually notified the users rather than trying to sweep it under the rug hoping that their users are not going to find out anything.

Full message (copied form Orpheus):

With great displeasure we need to inform you that a malicious actor has successfully carried out a massive peer scraping attack on our tracker on Thursday.

The unknown actor has downloaded the majority of our torrent files and corresponding peer lists.
This means the malicious third party is now in possession of most of our users' torrent client information (seeding IP, client port, torrents seeded).

As far as we can observe their immediate goal is downloading a huge part of our library, but we do not know if they have further plans with the collected data.

As a mitigation, we recommend that users change their torrent client ports, or seeding IP (for example users seeding from behind a VPN) if possible to thwart whatever (further) intentions the attacker has.

We detected the attack about six hours after the peer scraping had been carried out. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about this incident at this point, other than preventing the malicious user's further access to our site and tracker.

This attack should have been prevented by code we have in place, but for a yet unknown reason was not. Since the moment we noticed the incident we have devised, and in parts already implemented, further protection mechanisms. However, this whole incident is most dissatisfying for us, as we recognize the sensitive nature of the data. We strive to do better.

Admin · Sep 20, 2024

Redditor lost 50$ trying to buy an account
He ended up just getting ghosted which is actually the best case scenario, he was lucky it didn't end even worse.

Low IQ person wrote:

Never trust Godfather of TorrentInv...
NEVER trust the owner (Godfather) of torrentinv... Recently I've bought an account from him, I sent the money and he simply didn't sent me the account details. He is a scammer, and it is an advice, don't buy anything from him or u will lose your money.

Proof: https://ibb.co/cDpFnDb https://ibb.co/WPT8XrF

GenerousTurtle wrote:

Dumbass™. Even if you meet the purest and most honest seller you only buying temporary access to tracker. Eventually they are banned along with the whole tree.

Unroasted3079 wrote:

few years ago i was also interested in buying , but after reading few posts,i came to know that they will ban me the moment they know i have purchased the account

then i dropped the idea of purchasing, and i started to leveling up myself ,now im almost reached the top tier ( except ptp ,btn )
even if he sended you account details ,you will most likely to get banned in few months

vintologi24 wrote:

You are lucky you got ghosted.

They could have gotten you into trouble with loads of private trackers by doxxing you as someone trying to buy an account. They could also have tried extorting you for even more money.

Or you would have actually gotten an account only to get cabal banned later down the line, even TL would have banned you.

What did you expect?

Euphoric-Animator-97 wrote:

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Don’t. Buy. Invites.

It’s not that hard a rule to follow.

Admin · Oct 2, 2024

nyaa vs animebytes
nyaa has no business being as good as it is being a public tracker.

But how does it stack up to animebytes?

Here animebytes offers a 982.17 GiB download for naruto (the original, not shippuden) if you want that in the full bluray quality (remux).

Wiith nyaa you cannot get a remux, you can download the bluray ISOs which isn't really practical for actually watching anime (you could maybe try remuxing yourself but that's not very convenient).

But you can still watch naruto, just in lower quality (or by remuxing 30 bluray ISOs).

Download speed
While nyaa is very good in that regard for being a private trackers torrents on animebytes are still much better seeded on average.

On animebytes you will typically max out 1Gbps download speed.

On nyaa you will sometimes get good speed (especially on newer stuff) but you will also run into stuff that is very poorly seeded if seeded at all.

Admin · Oct 5, 2024

The mentality that gets people banned
Some people have the mentality "i only have to follow rules when staff see what i am doing" but people like that tend to slip up and get caught eventually.

While he did not share the name of his account that's very easy for staff to deduce from screenshot provided.

He basically asked me to violate RED rules because he didn't want to do the interview required to get an account there.

I am not sure if i should share the screenshot he provided here but it definitely provided enough details for staff to BHD to figure out who he is in the case they get hold of it (i will provide it to them if asked of course but i cannot easily contact them without a BHD account).

Example: he showed the account name of one of his followers, staff can easily check said users and quickly find the account.

I don't know if the profile screenshot provided (on another tracker) is covered by that rule.

Admin · Oct 15, 2024

The tale of Sunny_Sikander aka Few-Egg-1469
Earlier he posted on an invite trading subreddit about how he wasn't going to get banned.

https://archive.is/nOoUM

https://archive.is/6u1dd

https://archive.is/Or9GB

Later he DMed me begging for invite to a site i couldn't invite him to in the first place.

I don't know if any of the profiles he provided was real but he ended up exposing his ip later by behaving in a similar manner in an interview room (probably for the OPS interview). It's fairly likely that this got him banned from cgpeers if he had an account there in the first place.

https://archive.is/ZvFBj

He never explained why he said that he could provide cgpeers profile screenshot only to 3 days later not being able to. That doesn't make any sense unless he had an account that got banned.

https://archive.is/ZvFBj

The TL and iPT screenshots i got was almost certainly not from his account so perhaps he got banned there too (at least TL).

Admin · Oct 18, 2024

"I will not get banned" had the predictable outcome
This site he got banned from was of course shit but that's because he cannot gain access to anything better now lel.

https://archive.is/GdyzC

Sunny_Sikander wrote:

Banned from DesiTorrents after 36 hours of joining it... Ridiculous but I am not upset over it because I found the website is truly useless !!!
So I join DT and about 36 hours later I find myself banned from the website. I dunno why, I haven't even logged into any VPN there, dead sure about it. If you accept members after checking their Ratio Proofs from 3 other trackers then how can you be so callous to ban ? LOL, so this means the admins like to waste their own time as well as that of the people who send application.
Ohh well.... That having said, I am not at all upset over this.

Reason why I am not upset :- I did not find anything in DT that I did not already have. The only thing that I was searching in it was "Bollywood Filmfare Awards videos from 1970s-1990s", those rare archives that are not found easily. I thought something of that sort would be there on DT but I was disappointed. All I found was random hindi movies and some old stuffs which no seeders on them, mind you all those stuffs I already have access to on other trackers. Even the Aahat tv show episodes are on AvistaZ or on Youtube. DT has nothing that is not there on other trackers ... let this be known !

I joined AvistaZ and it seems like a great tracker to me, Yes the hindi content there is limited, I have everything that is in it but it is ok, the rest of the non hindi content in it is awesome and I respect that, the site seems to be organized and having some rules which are not strict at all.... I like it. I am yet to join BW (will search for an invite), will see how it is. It must be better than DT for sure, heck even 1337x is 10 times better than DT for hindi content. In this era of OTTs if you are running a tracker solely based on hindi content then you have some high standards to live up to, can't just put us common stuffs and run a tracker.

lol ....don't join DT ever, I am not kidding, I literally did not find anything in it thats not present outside, I am the type of guy who as soon as I join a tracker I scan it thoroughly.... this one disappointed me and the hubris of the admins is an added caveat. The admins there seem to be high school dropouts who opened a tracker by randomly collecting some stuffs from the internet ? lol

AVoiDeDStranger

You can go to their Discord support and suck a mod’s dick to get unbanned. They just love people doing it and made it mandatory for everyone recently.

Booksaboutstuff wrote:

You are infact so not upset that you decided to type up this post

Sunny_Sikander

I am not upset in the conventional way that people are after getting banned from PTP/BTN/something like that .... like you losing a great source for rare materials... that kind of upset,...no I am not

I am angry in another way, like I actually sent an application to that site with ratio proofs only to learn that it has nothing special in it ... and on top of that 2 days later I find that I am banned.... that kind of angry.

So yeah, I am not upset, I am angry (on myself for even joining it).

AshikagaTadayoshi
DT has a long history, but the current admin team is new and lacks proper communication skills. They don't know how to engage respectfully in discussions and often seem to take pleasure in criticizing users over trivial matters. Many times, they behave like school dropouts, lacking both common sense and critical thinking. I’ve never encountered another admin team that acts this way. There's nothing that can’t be discussed respectfully. Using profanity to abuse users only highlights their lack of professionalism. As for the content, I can't comment much since I don't care about rare award shows or other obscure shows.

Thor-22G is easily the most barbaric admin of DT. I assume he must be an unhappy, sadistic person!

Sunny_Sikander
Definitely they are school dropouts.

Even the non hindi content in it is very poor, I checked for other indian languages like Malayalam, Tamil contents in it, did not find anything special because I have access to all the OTTs in India .... So the question is where does all this ego come from??? Must be people who never left their towns after school because in college people meet others from diverse background and they broaden their horizons. These fellows probably never had that... so you are right.

AVoiDeDStranger

The ego comes from the fact that, exclusively for Indian content, there are only two choices, and the other one is already a shitshow beyond imagination.

Spiron123 wrote:

Your past behaviour possibly vindicates even the likes of DT staff.

Admin · Oct 25, 2024

Super hard to join trackers, are any of them actually good?
Note that PTP is not actually super-hard to join, i myself was offered a user invite to it in the past (which i turned down of course) and i should be able to join it officially at some point if i want to (i basically never watch movies though so no need really).

The general problem with trackers that are very hard to join is that a lot of people are then unable to join the tracker to share content there so you end up with a place that is very hard to access and if you somehow manage to get there you really cannot find much of value anyway.

But are there exceptions where a small very hard to join tracker actually provides decent value in terms of content?

Artofmisdirection
It's a tracker for magicians, i heard they are not even officially recruiting any more but might have some interesting content.

I don't see myself putting much effort into getting an invite there but i would apply if they recruited based on contributions to other trackers (i plan on getting elite TM on red eventually, etc).

xRobert1016x wrote:

In the past, you were able to send an email to admin@artofmisdirection.com and they would send you an application form back, but idk if they still do things that way

For me personally, any tracker is impossible if they don’t recruit (something something making friends for the sole purpose of getting invites is bad and makes me feel iffy)

RemarkableCollar1392 wrote:

I don't even know if it's still up, but it sounds like AoM fits your criteria. It had a small userbase with a lot of exclusive content. I don't think there were any others that provided so much exclusive content with a small community.

superbits
Tracker focused on General, Swedish and Nordic content. I don't know if the site is particularly good though but i would like to be able to check it out to see for myself.

But i don't know if it's worth using unofficial invite to gain access (you might get into trouble from being invited by a bad user) and actively pursuing a user invite can also get you into trouble even if you are never successful in acquiring one.

I am not aware of any torrent site they are officially recruiting from so your only way of getting in might be via a user invite which can result in you eventually getting treebanned even if the person who invited you themselves didn't do anything wrong.

DeepBassNine
It's a small music tracker (around 5% of the content RED has) that is specialized in their music niche.

I don't see them recruiting officially anywhere.

BiB
They basically locked their site down after being subjected to a ghostleeching attack and later being named in a lawsuit (unclear how much trouble they are into) but if they sort out those problems it might be an interesting site to eventually get into.

They are infamous for making it hard to maintain ratio there (significantly harder than RED).

TheVault
E-earning tracker similar to the geeks but harder to join.

Easiest path for joining is probably via thegeeks where you need to have made 30 valuable forum posts and have account age of at least 3 months.

it seesm like they don't have user invite but it might not actually be harder than say PTP if you stick to official recruitment/application only.

Admin · Nov 12, 2024

Blutopia goes down in flames
I did notice that there was a lot of enthusiasm for that site earlier on 4chan but after they made it relatively easy to join all that entusiasm disappeared, perhaps it becoming less exclusive also made it less desirable to join in the first place?

But then they had an SSD failure so they had to use the backup:

Turns out the backup didn't work and now they are screwed.

-HDVinnie- wrote:

This post is misleading in a way. Simply saying I resigned leaves a void like I just dipped. That’s not the case. I am still here for BLU. I am still here for the torrent realm. I am still here developing UNIT3D. I will continue to help as I always have.

I’m not good at this and will admit that off the rip. So bear with me. I know I have a lot of haters so it is what it is but this is my attempt to let everyone know the story.

As most know I started UNIT3D from scratch in 2016 after being a dev for xbtit and u232 for many years under a different name and other trackers. I grew tired of hard to manage and simply bad code. In 2017 BLU was born as the first UNIT3D based tracker. I have dedicated the last 8 years to BLU and UNIT3D. They mean a ton to me and the community has grown tremendously. I helped as many other failing torrent communities that needed help with code and porting so they could survive.

BLU was self run for the first 4 years of its life in which we then started to accept donations. We never begged with weekly pms, news, etc. The community was strong and we chugged along fine.

We have gone through server issues in past and recovered just fine. These things happen and with daily backups it’s not an issue which we were doing. Locally and remote to other staff. One staff resigned. Then the other. This was in 2024.

BLU was booming. Peer growth, user growth, content growth and all around community growth was exceptional. Yes we recently had a horror month event. Saying we brought in thousands and thousands from it is just false though. I won’t debate it in a public manner. The community was booming and we brought back the upload bot server.

Here lies the issue. I have been drained. I had personal things I can’t and won’t get into. We recently had ssd failures which is a normal situation would be fine. Wait for host to replace and load a backup along with all kernel and dependency tuning. When the one staff resigned that was managing the off server backups I failed as a sysops to retract it to another staff and turn my local copies back on. That is on me. I take full responsibility and apologize. I am crushed just as much as you guys. Those that really know and interact with me would know this.

That being said this irc post makes it seem like I just went awol and resigned with nothing but echoes. That is not the case. Yes I have stepped down. Why? Because after 8 years I failed with something I know like the back of my hand. Simple backups. Is my personal draining and life issues an excuse. No. But it is what it is. It cannot be undone. For this I don’t deserve to be at BLU at that level anymore.

I am working with staff. I have transferred control. I am working to help and make things right from the outside. I will continue to develop UNIT3D that BLU and dozens and dozens of other trackers rely on. Anyone that was invited to BLU if they bring it back will be reinstated. I am already working on building list to resend invites for staff to use. Donor statues will be reapplied. Will it happen overnight. No. But BLUs community is one of the strongest so please don’t hate. Bear with us. For those that feel you were robbed. That’s simply not true and it’s really sad to hear that. Feel free to email me.

YorbaLindaRefugee wrote:

As soon as I saw the newer option for lifetime donations appear, then reappear a couple more times at random with manufactured scarcity to motivate buy-in, I knew a 'sudden' outage and abandonment by the owner was incoming. I CANNOT be the only person who saw how transparent this was.
A last influx or two of cash and now he scrambles off into the sunset. RIP. Site is done. May the owner encounter what he deserves.
I'm curious, if you're someone that got suckered into the 'lifetime' donation on or around the date they first went live, how many weeks/months of free leech did that actually get you?

Admin · Nov 14, 2024

Why i declined offer for PTP invite
I am aware that a lot of people desperately want to join PTP but personally it's not the type of content i am actually looking for.

The person who offered me the invite did seem like a nice person but i don't know about the others they invited. I got the impression that they felt like an invite not used would be wasted which is not really how it worked, i explained to them that they should be fine with having invites you recieve never getting utilized.

While i am a good user for the tracker i join part of the reason for that is me avoiding trackers i don't think i will get much/any usage out of.

And if i for some reason would want to join PTP later it's likely that i will find a way to do so officially (especially if RED comes back online after their domain issues). I actually plan on getting elite tm on RED eventually but i will probably not even use that to join any site i am interested in (elite seems to be enough for the sites i am actually interested in).

Admin · Nov 15, 2024

Why porn trackers are overrated
I kinda like h-p2p and after they closed down i kept joining other porn trackers (and re-enabled my happyfappy account) hoping to find something like that but all i ended up with was accounts that i don't really want now.

Pretty much all porn-trackers has the issue of you not actually finding good content there, it probably exists but how to you find it among heaps of utter garbage?

Honestly you are better off simply using yt-dlp and get what you want from porn streaming sites, that does not require maintaining any account and you can start doing that right away rather than wait for an opportunity to get an official invite (or risk loads of trouble from user invites).

I do find it ironic how EMP is basically impossible to officially join now after they stopped recruiting and i still regret even signing up there now, i really didn't need that site for anything. I even considered not accepting the official invite i got but i opted to sign up assuming i could at least get immunity from inactivity pruning there, turns out you can't.

I once wanted access to onlyfans content due to seeing a hot video on pornhub, no porn site had anything from them but i was still able to get what i wanted from coomer.su

rising9574 · Nov 15, 2024

hello,

It seems for specific content websites like Simp city etc work better than porn trackers.

From what I understand websites like EMP bitporn etc will have the official studio stuff which is widely available and easy to get a hold of. I think the packs that they offer are their only redeeming factor.

Admin · Nov 15, 2024

Official studio porn tends to not be very good, it's overly fake and tend to not be particularly interesting for the most part.

You are much more likely to find good stuff on porn streaming sites where anyone can upload, sure it might get deleted if it's too spicy but if you are lucky you downloaded it before that happened.

Or it's hidden behind an onlyfans paywall, maybe EMP could be useful for that in that you can make a 400 GiB request hoping that some simp there is actually going to pay for that (not sure why they could though since their economy is a joke)

Admin · Nov 15, 2024

Animebytes
For a while i was coping "i can get what i want from nyaa" but while this is true for the most part in the sense that you can find what you are looking for there for the most part it will often be in poor quality while aninebytes has a bluray remux with lossless audio.

Animebytes does however have a pretty easy economy due to 1080p and higher being freeleech, that easy economy means that there really isn't much of a reason for people to put effort into uploading stuff there and if you make a request it will probably get ignored due to people not bothering to put in the effort for very little in return.

Still it's probably the best option for anime if you actually want remuxes with english subtitles. U2 might be better for BDMV uploads but i am not really interested in that.

Animebytes does have loads of music uploads but here their dumb rules means that you will miss out on things like artwork, if a cover image is included it will often be of poor quality due to them not allowing larger than 2MiB (why??).

They do have a waifu gatcha game you can play but honestly i did not find any of those waifus super-appealing, i would have liked to see them have a lot more character to play for.

I don't regret putting effort into becoming elite on RED quickly so i could join AB as elite but i am also very much into anime.

Admin · Nov 28, 2024

Redditor got treebanned after accepting invite from a very bad user
He could have maybe prevented this by archiving DM conversations he had with the bad user who invited him.

You accepting an invite from a bad user itself makes you guilty of wrong-doing and you will risk negative consequences from that. Staff might give you a chance to prove your innocence (sometimes they don't really bother with that though) but even then you might not be able to provide what they are looking for.

SexLiesAndReddit wrote:

End of the Line
Sadly, my 7+ year run enjoying Cinematik has come to an end in a really odd way.

Apparently the person who invited me way back just got caught selling Tik invites as a business. Not sure for how long he was doing this. And it sounds like they just blanket suspended anyone he ever invited unless they can prove that they didn't pay him.

Their rules I guess, but very frustrating to be grilled about my honesty while trying to find as many breadcrumbs from the past as I could. How to prove that you didn't purchase something is a bit of a puzzle. Especially when sites (and emails) come and go.

In the end, whatever I could produce / recall wasn't sufficient, so I guess I'm booted for good, and my seedbox is currently deleting a lot of great Tik releases.

'Tik is still a great site no doubt and I'm glad I got to partake. But I do feel cheated, I'm just not too sure by who. I'm not angry, just really disappointed and frustrated. And strangely, a bit insulted by people I've never met, except over IRC.

So, boys and girls, be careful out there and be aware that it's not just about keeping good ratios. Apparently, all it takes is one bad seed (pun intended!).

No_Yam_7323 wrote:

There is definitely more to this story than the OP is putting. 7 years is a long time, if the inviter was caught only selling a couple I highly doubt it would have been so intense and only something along the lines of no invite forums, no invites, and such after a reasonable discussion. In fact even if it was a lot, I'd bet that was still a possibility and the OP was just trying to "stick it to the man" rather than sharing what he could. Anywhere you get invited it is quite easy to remember it was from tracker xyz and such.

I would bet if you posted the logs of the convo it would reveal an entirely different thing here. Just redact all usernames to be respectful.

SexLiesAndReddit wrote:

Nope. I pretty much laid it all out.

As others have suggested, the Tik mod (or whoever was on IRC) was just walking the entire tree down from that user. The only detail I omitted was that the admin claimed that the offender had "admitted that they had been selling invites".

If I'd thought about this at the time, I should have said something like "If you already have a relationship with this person, why not just ask them for a list of all the handles they sold to?"

The vendor would have nothing to lose, the admin's life would have been a lot easier, and I would avoided an hour of my life trying to prove a negative to a pedantic admits. I mean, if I had been the admin, that would be the first thing I asked. Although how they got the person to confess is beyond me.

No_Yam_7323 wrote:

I know this is false, TiK staff is not one to simply not listen to people. I guarantee if you show the logs it will show how they were more than respectful to you given the situation you put yourself in.

If you already have a relationship with this person, why not just ask them for a list of all the handles they sold to?

This pretty much says it all, it sounds like you did indeed purchase an account and are trying to hide it now. The scum selling invites don't care about the sites or the users they invite.

SexLiesAndReddit wrote:

I never claimed that person from Tik was disrespectful.
Self important and overly serious maybe, but they didn't call me bad names and never actually called me a liar, although the inference was most certainly there at the end.

But it was also increasingly obvious that I had to prove my way out of this as opposed to them having evidence of something. Like I said, tough to prove a negative.

In the end, their lack of evidence trumped my lack of evidence.

But, even though this was initiated by me as a Support call, no amount of prep or research on my part would have resulted in anything that they wanted to see.

If they had done this about a year after I joined Tik, this would have been super easy - I'd still have PMs to show them. But 7 years after? No way. My OpSec is just not that sloppy.

Like many others have posted, there's a couple of lessons here. The first is to very, very, very careful who you accept invites from. Kinda sad, but true.
Second, understand that the mods / admins rule on these (and lots of other) sites, and they have the final word. Doesn't matter how arbitrary or 'unfair' (I hate that word) that appears, even to me.

But this isn't a court, it's certainly not a normal 'business', and it's their pirate ship, so they get to decide. And that's not unique to just Tik.
Somone up thread got downvoted for saying yet another ban sob story. And they ain't wrong.

No_Yam_7323 wrote:

They did have their proof though. Their proof is about the person who invited you, so the proof of you being caught in the middle isn't their fault. It's not like you were invited further down the tree, but that same user. The seller/trader is not going to give them any reliable information of which would be proof they would have. If anything that bad user who invited you would claim everyone he invited was a sold account, why, because the more people"wrongfully banned" the more likely another user might purchase an account.

Again, I'm not saying you did anything wrong on how you got invited, but you need to see it from the site's side. Even if this were a court, it would honestly come down to they have proof right now and you didn't.

Another thing related here is how you claimed to have donated a few times, which is great. Everyone that has the extra money and loves a site should. But a known thing that happens is people that buy/sell accounts do tend to try and donate, hoping that it makes them harder to ban, which it does because you don't know who is a normal donor and who is doing it for the wrong reasons. This isn't an accusation that yours was either way, just more backstory you probably didn't know.

greengrower1234 wrote:

Knowing the TiK staff, they'd likely already received confession/honesty, call it whatever you will, from an/other user/s having bought/traded their invite. That would explain why they were so incessant about needing you to provide proof, because they proof they had was virtually certain, and they were giving you the benefit of the doubt that you were one of the few users that occasionally gets caught up in poor invite trees, but actually received the invite under good intentions.

Since the only evidence you seemingly had was your offense against your honesty, it makes sense you were not trusted or enabled.

Admin · Dec 7, 2024

RED messed up their freeleech event
They decided to make all torrents up to 5GiB freeleech until December 10 @ 00:00 UTC

https://redacted.sh/blog.php#blog93

While this may seem like a great idea at first it really didn't work out too well since it ended up largely feeding autosnatchers (especially ones running on very fast seedboxes) which is unfair to the users who put effort into actually uploading new content.

This is actually disappointing since i was under the impression that RED had more competent governance than most trackers and while this still remains true we are seeing them now do the same mistake a lot of other trackers have done earlier.

Now you can just upload pretty much any garbage that complies with the rules and you will get people snatching it, can be mp3 320, V0, doesn't matter.

If they wanted to do a freeleech they should have limited it to existing torrents and not make anything newly uploaded freeleech.

But freeload is generally better since it rewards people for long-term seeding.

Usually on RED flac gets way more downloads than mp3 but due to the large amount of autosnatchers in actions that actually reversed.

We see a similar pattern with new 16 bit uploads now having way more seeders than the (for preservation) more important 24-bit versions:

Note that they could have simply disabled freeeleech for new torrents after seeing this problem but instead they did nothing and just kept feeding autosnatchers (as if there is any value in having 20 seedboxers seed a V0 mp3).

My guess is that they wanted to stress-test their new server (they talked about upgrading it when while they were resolving their domain issue) but it's unfortunately that might end up ruining the economy for good resulting in fewer uploads and less effective request system. We don't need another OPS.

Admin · Dec 11, 2024

pirate streaming vs nyaa vs animebytes
I actually switched to nyaa before the crackdown on those shitty streaming sites started.

Not only have those shitty streaming sites been aggressively pushing intrusive ads "please disable your adblocker to watch this video" but the quality offered is pretty bad as well, both in terms of video and audio.

Nyaa was definitely a big upgrade over streaming sites and didn't really have any downside with it compared to streaming sites. Since it's a public tracker there is no requirement to actually seed anything, you don't have to worry about ratio, I have even read about people streaming from nyaa but i don't know how good that is going to work.

Honestly even if crynchyroll was free i wouldn't use it due to how bad their audio quality is (128Kbps) and i don't think any of those shitty pirate streaming sites are any better in that regard.

Nyaa actually has a lot of anime with lossless audio but very often it's not a bluray remux. It has no business being as good as it is while also being a public tracker.

If you want to get the same video quality as the original bluray animebytes is often the way to go. I still sometimes check out nyaa mostly out of curiosity and i have come across cases where they the audio quality offered was bad as well.

Main issue i have noticed with animebytes is having to wait longer to actually get that better bluray remux quality, at first you can only get 128Kbps audio typically and ok video quality (often 8000 Kbps). Even if a bluray is released it might not be anyone who has ripped it to upload, you can make a request but that might not actually get filled due to AB having a very easy economy where people don't need that upload credit for anything.

Note that animebytes have very strict rules for unofficial user invites, if you want to join you probably have to rank up on some other site first and then you can request an invite to animebytes (and joining the site to rank up can also be a bit tedious). I myself did put effort into being able to join AB as early as possible (via proper official invite) and honestly it was worth it.

Admin · Dec 12, 2024

Why you want lossless audio with anime
There is no shortage of people who claim that "you cannot hear a difference" but then when you actually try yourself that always turns out to be completely wrong.

https://mega.nz/folder/J2dmRTKT#DOIJw-ZwVS3OyzJubo_qpA

You can do this yourself by opening up the video file in audacity and then selecting a section yourself.

There is a clear difference even for flac vs ogg vorbis Q9. I did test blind of course.

But typically anime audio is way worse than ogg vorbis Q9, AAC 128 is fairly popular which is really bad. That's one big reason for not using shitty streaming sites.

Admin · Dec 16, 2024

The amount of hoops required to watch some TV slop is pretty ridiculous.
So i had the situation earlier where a shitty free and legal streaming service aired survivor UK so i got curious so see if i could download that slop.

TPB: part of season 1 and all of season 3

digitalcoreclub: only 3 episodes (season 3)

milkie: has the full season 3 but not seeded (i assume, not going to try to download).

FL: didn't find any episode there.

Maybe BTN has all 3 seasons (not planning to join just to check that though) but then you would have to seed it for a minimum amount of time due to their
H&R rules, i don't want to waste SSD space that could be used for seeding bluray remuxes of anime.

I should be able to join HDB eventually so i might hold out for that. They have the highest requirements of any tracker that recruit on RED which makes it slightly more interesting.

Youtube: has all 3 seasons but in very low quality (240p).

Admin · Dec 18, 2024

Ranking up on RED isn't as useful as people make it out to be
You are able to join animebytes earlier by becoming elite there which is nice but joining as PU is an option if you are able to cope with nyaa for 6 more months.

The elite forum has some nice perks you might enjoy (it's one of the better forums on the site).

HDB is one of the few good TV/movie trackers that doesn't have annoying H&R rules but i probably wouldn't be able to maintain an account there due to their activity requirements (seems like you need VIP to get immunity from that). So while i could probably get some usage out of i will have to wait it out until i actually need the site (likely resulting in me never joining).

But if you actually want something more useful than mindless entertainment you are not going to find much in terms of additional sites you can join due to being torrent master or higher. Main site for more professional use is cgpeers but that only requires 200 GiB upload and 1.0+ ratio (if you are elite).

I actually considered downloading some movies just for the audio, i even tried it once only to find out that the movie didn't have lossless audio (got suspicious after it didn't sound good) but usually you can get soundtracks for movies to download separately anyway and there is already so much to download.

Personally i still put some effort into ranking up on sites. This is in part for the title itself and in part in the case some site i really want start recruiting there (rather than something marginally useful).

That being said i can see why people do want to join sites like PTP given how bad streaming services are for movies.

Admin · Dec 18, 2024

Heavy-handed methods account invite/account trading are working
While you do see people on say reddit sometimes talk about the very brutal consequences that can come with buying/selling accounts/invites (or trading invites) it's actually not at all a common issue on the better sites.

And even people on those invite trading sites are starting to realize that what they were doing was a bad idea.

https://archive.is/eHCvO

Admin · Dec 20, 2024

Half on r/trackers visitors never invited anyone
And a lot of people who did invite people got very much disappointed. Usually it was that people didn't really bother to actully maintain their accounts, they used the tracker for a while (if at all) but eventually dropped it without contributing much if anything to the site.

One individual even lost access to the animebytes invite forum due to inviting someone who ended up getting banned quickly.

FB2K9 wrote:

I've invited a total of 4 people. 3 to JPS, 1 to AB.

2 of the JPS invitees stopped using their accounts in under a year, 1 is still active.

But the AB invite got banned pretty quick and I lost my invite privileages as a result. I don't care that I can't invite anymore, its not like I was inviting a lot anyway, but the loss of access to the invites forums hits way harder. I'm still going to get to where I want to go, but it'll take a lot longer is all.

It was an online friend that I had know for a few years at the time. I went over the basics of private trackers and AB specific rules (like minimum seed times) with him and gave him a bunch of bonus points so he wouldn't have to worry about ratio for a long time. In the end I don't know what he did because his online presence everywhere just disappeared after the ban and I never asked the staff in my shame.

Admin · Dec 20, 2024

Why i haven't invited anyone myself
Obviously i do not want to add any external liability to my account. The last thing i want is someone being able to screw me over without me having any control over it. I can see why other people want to trust others and help them out but from my experience people you try to help often later stab you in the back.

How can you be sure one previously trustworthy friend doesn't develop a gambling addiction and tries to sell an invites to each some quick cash? especially if they can earn over 1000$ doing that. Of course long-term selling invites isn't worth it due to you no longer being able to access the content you want but a lot of people don't think like that, they only think about the next high they are going to get from drugs/gambling.

And generally trackers that are actually good and useful are trackers you can join via official recruitment. I think it's better for my friend to rank up via their own effort rather than getting easy access only to later become disabled due to not actually having used the account.

With anime nyaa is an option as a very good public tracker. People can cope with that for like a year before joining animebytes (6 to 8 months if you rank up quickly to elite on RED).

GGn is easy to join from RED.

For music there is RED and OPS, both can be joined directly via an interview.

For movies and TV there are loads of options available that are relatively easy to join.

Admin · Dec 21, 2024

https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/30t7us/evidence_of_matthers_trading_activites_and_ddos/

nice lore (they did a treeban)

adolf512 — Today at 6:10 PM
That's why i don't invite anyone, i don't trust others not to screw me over to earn 3000$ from invite selling.

wel ard — Today at 6:18 PM
Ptp has everything and is basically free

Inviting is a risk

Just went through it with ptp admins. I invited a long time friend but because he was in SA and I am NA they freaked out

Took hours over irc and endless screenshots/proofs to not get a treeban.
Literally had to send like wow screenshots, steam friend list pics
It was wild

adolf512 — Today at 6:27 PM
That's a big reason for avoiding user invites for joining sites as well. If they had done a full treeban anyone else invited by you would have been basically screwed. Better to join officially if you can (if you actually would get usage out of the site).

wel ard Today at 6:28 PM
yeah, they did do a treeban for a bit

Had a more thorough inspection of my life than the IRS to get everyone unbanned
they're all IRL friends so I knew I was in the right
but god damn

adolf512 — Today at 6:32 PM
They put you through all that merely due to not living in the same area as the one you invited? Or was there something else that also happened?

wel ard — Today at 6:33 PM
that was literally it

I have 3 invites on the site

2 are irl friends who live within 5 min

I invited a friend who lives in Argentina many countries away

and that sent everything into lockdown

I was like racking my brain to think if I possibly had like some account somewhere

that could be causing this

but nope

we cleared it up

it was fine in the end, but they were quite thorough lol

adolf512 — Today at 6:37 PM
I actually had someone ask if i wanted an invite to PTP (only knew them online) but i declined of course.

wel ard — Today at 6:38 PM
its a great tracker I get why they are so defensive of it

I don't think its against the rules to invite online friends. I really doubt most people actually know other tracker people irl

I work in autismo tech so my pool is a little deeper than most

and I still only have 2 that took many years to find lol

Admin · Dec 21, 2024

The ratio system is a lot better than people give it credit for
While purely looking at upload and download doesn't tell the whole story regarding how much people are contributing looking at actual upload is still a good system in general.

Sure if you have a bad internet on RED you will have a hard time there obviously but you actually want people to get good upload speed, make themselves connectable, etc.

Sure having a single seeder unconnectable seeder at 1Mbps is still a lot better than not being able to download at all but having to wait hours before you actually get what you started downloading is far from an ideal situation.

The ratio system does reward uploading (even if there was no bounty) by you getting at least ratio 1 if it got snatched.

The ratio system does reward long-term seeding since by seeding a torrent long enough you will probably get someone downloading from you. The fewer seeds a torrent has the more upload you are likely to get if someone snatches it, thus the ratio system naturally inventivizes seeding of low seeded torrents.

This might be true but you can simply make adjustments to rectify that if it's actually a problem. I did read about CGpeers already having a system for that.

Having a seeding bonus can make things worse
If people get a lot of bonus points from seeding there will be less need for them to get upload which will lower the inventive to seed long term or upload.

RED for example have better seeded torrents than OPS (and also a lot more of them).

Compromise: required ratio based on how much you are seeding
There are a lot of different options here some of which has already been implemented.

RED has lower required ratio if you seed more up to the point where you have downloaded 100GiB.

GGn has no required ratio as long as you seed enough (regardless of how much you have downloaded).

Admin · Dec 21, 2024

Should low tier users be subjected to annoying H&R rules?
Let's say i grab i download some torrent on RED only to delete it right away after i downloaded it, did that actually hurt anyone?

All i did was to waste my own buffer while some seeders get more instead. There is no real harm here. The main loser would be me since then i would have less buffer to spend on music i actually want (RED doesn't have any H&R rules).

Of course it is better if people seed generally but having someone seed say 2 weeks really isn't much better than having them seed 2 seconds. We need people who seed for years.

User A: seeds everything for 5 days (or whatever the H&R minimum is), then deletes it.

User B: seeds 50% forever and delete 50% shortly after downloading it.

H&R rules punishes user B but not user A even though user B is actually much better for the site.

There was even someone who got banned from HUNO when moving files to seed from another location, all that did was to push the user towards sites that are actually good and have one less seeder available for those torrents afterwards.

H&R rules might still however do some good in terms of shaping behaviour. People might simply keep seeding it if they cannot delete it right away.

But users who actually contribute a lot to the site shouldn't have to put up with that nonsense to begin with.

And if you want to reach new freeloaders a lesson having them end up on ratio watch is probably better than merely giving them some strikes for H&R.

Admin · Dec 22, 2024

What i would do to turn BBT around
The general plan would be to simply get rid of the freeloaders and then recruit people who are actually willing to upload (can be direct recruitment outside of other private trackers).

I don't know exactly what i would do if i were in control of that site but here are some ideas i do have

0. Disable download perms for people who haven't uploaded any torrents to the site. If people still refuse to upload i would simply ban them.

1. Implement an upload credit system using a formula like (size of the upload * number of snatches) ^ 0.5

2. Retroactively remove freeleech and have real ratio instead.

3. Cut the upload stat for users in half (with warning in advance) in order to make the economy on the site harder.

But this is assuming they would actually give me power to begin with which is unfortunately not very likely (i am not even a member of that site at the moment). They would have to reach out to me first and the site would need to already be functional enough to the point where those reforms could actually be implemented. One issue is that i would also need other people to do the work for me implementing those things since i have not learned the necessary programming skills as of now, i just don't see that happening.

Admin · Dec 22, 2024

People on private trackers often overestimate how much other people want to be there
Of course a lot of private trackers do have people who very much want to join but currently cannot but generally other people (like your friends) are not going to be particularly interested in any of the trackers you are currently using.

I have noticed that it's hard even to get others to use nyaa which is completely public.

I asked talked to maybe 10 people IRL about RED and so far only 1 has been actually interested in joining it.

And even if one if your friend would be willing to say accept an invite he/she would probably end up disabled on the tracker eventually due to inactivity. If they lack motivation to go through a RED/OPS interview they probably shouldn't be invited to private trackers to begin with.

Admin · Dec 23, 2024

Seedpool: another broken tracker with a stupid premise
Their whole gimmick is "you get freeleech if you seed 1TB" which might sound like a good idea but it actually isn't a good system.

This is yet another example of "let's replace the ratio system with something stupid".

Making everything completely freeleech if you seed 1TB is probably a bad since it does theoreitcally allow someone to cownload thousands of only to delete them afterwards over and over again. It also means that there will not really be a working economy since those with 1TB seedsize will not have any reason for filling requests or even make sure their internet is properly working.

If they want a system that rewards seeding more they should look at the GGn system where your required ratio is based on your share score (0 required ratio is you are seeding enough).

But their site doesn't even load properly. I doubt they will ever get it in a good state.

Ill keep lurking with an account there anyway for a while to see if it becomes any better but i am not getting my hopes up.

Private trackers

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