Are they for you? Why or why not?
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It’s all I use. I feel like there’s less risk and they’re way more organized.
The organization and typical submission requirements are what really put them over public trackers for me.
Public tracker: It’s this big and this many files. Figure it out.*
Private tracker: All the metadata* Experience may vary. Post is overly dramatic for comedic effect
If you are forced to disable your vpn there is more risk. I’m not sure if some permit a vpn but I wouldn’t be trusting any of them without one.
I use a VPN and it’s on a kill switch, so if it gets disconnected for whatever reason, the machine can’t reach the internet at all.
I can’t imagine why a private tracker would disallow you from using a VPN
MAM used to be quite anti-VPN but I haven’t used it in years, so no idea what their take is now. They tracked quotas and stuff through your IP and required you to be online on IRC. Great content and community, but a lot of hoops to jump through.
There used to be issues with tracking ratios when using a VPN. And since many private trackers require users to maintain a specific ratio, it meant that many private trackers effectively banned VPNs. Because if you were using a VPN, you’d be stuck at a 0.00 ratio and quickly get banned.
I use a VPN and maintain a ratio. They must use something other than IP address as a unique identifier.
Even with VPN, ultimately you’re still storing everything at your house. Seedbox, preferably in the Netherlands is the way to go.
I’ve been in about half a dozen so far and none have cared about VPN usage.
Usually they want only your IP while signing up to be able to see if they had already banned you and you try to evade it.
Most times there was the rule that once signed up, you can turn it back on for both torrenting and browsing.
Same. Plus the quality encodes are a lot easier to find and more abundant (assuming you care about such things of course)
I tried signing up for a few but they want me to disable my VPN … nope.
Those ones aren’t worth having.
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.
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
We talking German films or German films?
The language German 😅 If you have any clue where and how I could get them without a private tracker you would make my day
Not a clue, sorry. I use Kodi and real debrid for movies/shows. I was just trying to make a scat joke.
Without private trackers the best way to get German content would probably be through Usenet. Scenenzbs.com would probably be the best indexer there.
Getting into some of the larger German private Torrent trackers isn’t that hard though.
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.
My experience precisely. If I can’t find it on mobilism.org, off to myanonymouse. Btw they’re amazing and the servers cost a ton, small donations make a huge difference
I’ve never been unable to find films etc that I wanted on public trackers, especially with the search function on Qbittorrent. Don’t see the need for elitist wanks on private trackers
I doubt they’d even have the obscure stuff that won’t download… Hold on…
The only one sitting at 0% is “Vacuuming Completely Nude In Paradise”, an odd British film. I doubt even a private tracker would have that
Many private trackers, and even a few public ones, have a request forum. The private ones reward users that fill these requests, so they are often effective.
There are some very accessible private trackers (sometimes referred to as semi-private) that meet these requirements. Once you get set up, they can be very set-and-forget. Just avoid the forums.
Replying to say that I will check mine tomorrow. Too late tonight.
Edit: Mine did not have this film. :(
I don’t even look anywhere else any more for book related content, straight there, I really like it there. Haven’t been using it for long but already donated and will be doing so again when I am able to for sure!
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 feel this way too, and the only people I’ve ever seen talk about private trackers have always had a weird chip on their shoulder. It has very “secret club” vibes. I know the stuff on public trackers only comes out because of scene leaks, but the scene wouldn’t vanish if there weren’t any more private trackers. Bittorrent was made for widespread public sharing without risk of censorship or takedowns, you don’t need to keep it hushed, it’s already protected against that. So private trackers have always just seemed like social clubs to me (I mean that in a bad way)
Yep, that and the fact that private trackers have buy-in or subscription fees and mandatory upload ratios.
I value the anonymity of a public tracker that doesn’t tie me down with any means of fund transfer or prolonged upload through which I could be exposed if my VPN dropped or the payment channel got compromised, crypto or not.
The ones that cost money aren’t worth using.
Childish and against the spirit of piracy. Always have been.
Public trackers are shit because of freeloaders and Stremio. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Stremio is bad?
it doesn’t seed the torrent back, only leeches
Edit: an alternative to stremio is using sequential download in qbit. that way, you can seed too
This is how I feel about people on soulseek who lock files, even more so the cunts that want things like bandcamp vouchers in return for accessing something they have. Cunts.
Being open to all and then shut down by police after 6 months doesn’t help piracy either. The upside to closed trackers is that stuff can be archived for years.
Until it gets nuked by pigs stealing everything. A decentralised pirate catalogue based on Musicbrainz is something I want to see before I die. People diverted their efforts into vulnerable private trackers instead.
I guess you never heard of what.cd
I have. It was a cult.
Single point of failure also. What.CD was the best vaccine against them: those naive idealists had hosting in France…
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
If you’re going to Torrent you need to keep one in your pocket at a minimum.
Public or private,you should be running hiding your ass through a VPN or seed box.
Private trackers run ratios to make sure that content stays available. Well you can find most of what you want on public trackers there are always a few things here and there that are much easier to find in private.
Security-wise I don’t really think there’s much of a difference. Private trackers get infiltrated and shut down they’re just much smaller when it happens so you don’t hear about as much.
I always wonder how IPtorrents is still running. It’s a bit bigger and has a less than savory reputation, so I figure it would draw more attention.
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How do you get membership to a private tracker when they are always invite only?
Making friends on sites like this can sometimes yield invites. There are also usually communities specifically dedicated to giving out invites. And if all else fails, some trackers have open invitations (either time-limited or with some kind of interview).
A common method is to get your feet wet with an easier to get into private tracker and use the invitation threads in it to get into the ones you want.
And how do you make friends on these sites?
Some sometimes open up for a time.
A lot of them have interviews in their IRC channel. That’s how I got into MAM.
there are trackers which has interviews for invites. from there you can start using, gain ranks and get invited to other trackers.
Probably not a very practical answer, but I moved to a city known for being full of tech bros, then went to a bunch of general interest meetups organized mostly by tech bros, where I made friends with tech bros, and one of them randomly offered me an invite.
It’s mainly all I use. The consistent quality is super nice. Though when PTP was down for a month or two I ended up back on Usenet too.
BTN and PTP aren’t hard to maintain ratio on.
Redacted can be a bit of a pain, and I’ve had to fix my ratio there a few times. But I had a few CDs from some small local bands I’m using Usenet more for music at the moment so lidarr doesn’t tank my ratio so quick.
They’re extremely good for higher quality content such as 4K REMUX files. I have access to a private tracker that I use regularly. I only search public trackers if what I want isn’t available in the private one…which is rare.
To me it’s not about price or openness or anything. Piracy is a service issue. Private trackers have better service than public trackers. Better curated content, better seeders, and fewer (if any) shit quality re-encodes by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
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 anyone has invites to a decent tracker, hmu.
Just shamelessly begging, I haven’t been on a private tracker in over a decade but I should probably step up my game again with the way that streaming services are headed.
My previous experience was that I was completely incapable of maintaining a decent seed ratio on my home connection. I felt that many users were using seedboxes with really high upload speeds and hogging all the seeding. But I still felt it was quite a valuable community because, as people have already mentioned, the organization and quality of the torrents is infinitely better. So I basically used it sparingly for stuff that was hard to find. They also had a bunch of free-leech torrents that didn’t affect your ratio, which was a really nice feature. Honestly can’t remember the name of the site though.
Same, also looking for private tracker invites, ideally where you’re rewarded for both seed ratio and time kept alive.
I just built a 24 TB NAS (expandable to 432 TB over time) with arrr services. I also tend to take existing content and add complete metadata for higher quality files (mostly FLAC audio files).
24 TB NAS (expandable to 432 TB over time)
Damn, nice! I’ll let you know if an invite comes my way, sounds like you would get better use out of it than me
