Are they for you? Why or why not?
I tried signing up for a few but they want me to disable my VPN … nope.
Those ones aren’t worth having.
I think I’m on a tracker with that rule too but I just ignore it. Not like they can tell.
Unless you’re on a self-hosted VPN (defeating the whole purpose), it’s not especially hard to identify VPN connections. All of the common ones are known, and many use IP ranges and reverse lookups that clearly identify the VPN/seedbox provider.
It’s a bit harder when you are connected to one that resolves to a residential-looking hostname. But again, unless it’s truly unique (defeating the purpose), simply sorting users by IP will reveal almost all of them.
Some trackers used to do this to weed out people with multiple accounts. Some of the big ones still actively detect and block (or punish) anyone connecting to their website with a VPN (torrent traffic is still generally allowed, though)
I haven’t gotten banned yet, at least. Even if I did, it wouldn’t be a big loss. I’m definitely not gonna torrent without a vpn anyway.
Finding public torrents for audio books is utter bullshit in my experience. Myanonamouse has a massive selection, is friendly and well organised and doesn’t have absurd rules, just reasonable ones.
I love the place.
For anything else not audio book related public trackers work just fine for me.
I really want to join them, but “sign up with your actual IP” is an unconditional dealbreaker as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t consider a VPN optional for regular web browsing. I’m definitely not turning it off for something that’s actually Illegal.
It is diverting the content from public torrents for the sole reason that no one can be bothered to make decentralised cataloguing work better than in the early 1990s in my very biased opinion.
I also mainly use public trackers id love to get some good German films and so on but they are all behind a private tracker but I learned that after I setup by *arr sadly
I agree. It’s one of my favourite websites. Not just for the torrents but the community is really great too. The book clubs are super neat too!
Great as long as it’s easy to maintain ratio. And by “easy” I mean basically not having to do anything that can’t be automated. I also don’t care enough about the harder-to-get-in trackers that I would spend a lot of time sending in screenshots of profiles of other trackers I’m on or whatever. I’m not trying to get internet points for being on the very “coolest” private trackers.
The good thing is that decent private trackers have a well maintained catalog and most content usually has at least one or two seeders even months/years after the torrent was created, and these seeders often have a ton of bandwidth.
In contrast, public trackers often falsely advertise the amount of peers in the swarm (so a torrent that’s supposedly alive is often dead). I’d say I’m grabbing about 80/20 from private/public trackers, and I seed each torrent for around 30 days. Public torrents are often so starved for somewhat decent seeders that I regularly have a ratio of 20+ after the 30 days I’m seeding for. And that’s without a seedbox, just a normal Internet connection.
In the end, both are fine. When you setup your *arr tools correctly, they usually choose a decent release automatically, whether from private or public trackers.
So far there’s never been a thing I couldn’t find on a public tracker, so there was never a need to look into it.
I would and for the most part have used private trackers for either a specific type of thing or a specific kinda obscure or not very popular title. I find that the more not well known a thing is, the more likely it’s going to be found and (re)seeded on a private tracker.
Exactly my experience. I’m in a private tracker for books and audiobooks that sometimes has content that’s not on other sites (audiobooks, in particular).
I also just joined a different private tracker that specializes in pre-organized .img files pre-loaded for emulation setups. Like, a one-file 1TB image ready to roll with everything preconfigured.
For popular TV/film, private trackers are unnecessary, unless maybe you’re very particular about 4K/8K REMUX quality or something more specific.
I just don’t have the time for it or well, I do, but I don’t wanna put effort into mantaining ratios and whatnot. I have stuff to do that I enjoy more than be part of a internet club.
But that’s just me.
Out of curiosity, what effort is needed to maintain ratio?
My experience is that just seeding what you like indefinitely is not useful. You have to be proactive and find popular torrents to seed and accrue any meaningful upload amount.
The tracker I use has a bonus point system to encourage all seeders even of unpopular releases but it’s slow.
I found that the perfect solution for my use case (music) ended up being Soulseek. I don’t have much money for seedboxes or buying extra storage so I feel like I’m priced out of private trackers.
At the very least, you need to keep an eye on it. Just seeding can be insufficent because of speeds, competition and popularity of things you download.
Is it a lot of effort? Probably no but in my case any effort is too much effort. Is just not my thing. I admire the spirit but I don’t have it in me.
Some of them are designed for having people buying upload credits. I’m into one where only the admins are allowed to post new torrents, and they keep everything on 5 seedboxes. It’s almost impossible to seed back, as their own seedboxes are pushing too much upload, then old torrents are removed and re-uploaded “to gather interest”, but that means you will never find new peers. And then they always send messages complaining that they’re spending 500 a month for those seedboxes “to guarantee fast downloads” and everyone should become a donator or the site will close. Assholes, those seedboxes are indeed guaranteeing fast downloads, but also are guaranteeing zero upload back
I think it depends on why you pirate. Are you doing it because you don’t want to pay? Then services like usenet and private trackers, where there is some expectation of payment (be it monetary or bandwidth) are probably not for you.
Do you pirate because you hate DRM and want to self host a robust media library that you can curate without fear of media being removed because of an expired license or something? Then you might be more into private trackers and Usenet. I spend almost as much on hard drives and Usenet subscriptions and PT donations as a Netflix account.
Or if you want films or série in a specific languages with decent quality and not too big file size
I’m not really a fan because in a lot of cases it forces you to download stuff you might not want just to establish and maintain an acceptable ratio so eventually you can get the stuff you do want.
if I wanted something obscure and not really interested in the popular thing I’m either wasting bandwidth and/or server space starting out or searching for that thing on a public tracker.
the one private tracker I do use is extremely generous with upload credits for newbies and I was able to take advantage of that plus contribute something right away so I didn’t and still don’t have any issues but I know that’s not the case with some people.
I can find most everything I want/need on public trackers, so I’ve never felt the need to jump through their hoops; however easy that would be.
If i wanted to jump through complicated hoops, I’d try paid streaming services!
Not for me.
- My setup puts all external traffic from my torrent container through the VPN
- Getting into a private tracker is a pain
- Setting up the VPN exception is a pain
- I won’t even know if the tracker is worth it until I’m already in and can see their library
- Some are easy like mam
- I am using all my private trackers with VPN. Some even encourage that.
Just use I2P 🤷 It’s slow, but it’s safe
I’ve only been part of one private tracker, and I got kicked from them after not logging in for a month despite meeting ratios. haven’t bothered since then
iptorrents ig lol
nah, it was digitalcore
I’ve never liked them outside of the niches the private trackers I had access to were about.
I’ve had one that sucked for anything other than music (and even the music was annoying because the uploaders had boners for FLAC and this was back when file size still mattered and FLACs are fucking huge and don’t sound different enough to warrant the file size), one that only hosted textbooks for college courses, and another that was strictly niche as fuck films that nobody has ever even really heard of.
It’s good to filter out bad actors uploading viruses, but it also limits how much stuff is there period.
ITT: the sourest of grapes.