Comment by gioo
3 years ago
The common advice is to start out on RED (Redacted) by doing the interview, and climbing the pyramid from there. Use official recruitement to join other trackers, and with some patience you'll eventually have everything you need.
What really bugs me about these popular private trackers' interview processes is they too discriminate against VPNs. Like I know they think they have some private community of completely trustworthy angels, but I'm still not going to stick my non-anonymized neck out.
So then what, find public Wifi somewhere to do their "interview" from, that they'll pass for a non-shared IP address? And then hang around there all day until your turn for the interview comes up? That's the conclusion I came to last time I looked at Red's requirements years ago.
Also I just assume the interview processes have gotten much more competitive and inhuman due to the popularity, like everything these days. I got my Oink account by joining the IRC channel, and just asking nicely in a way that demonstrated a modicum of technical knowledge and reasonableness.
It's all by design, invite selling/trading is a big problem in the tracker world and tracker staff often force people to use their home IP to register for this reason. By having your home IP they can easily ban all your accounts if you are caught breaking some golden rule.
The interview process is not bad, it's just particularly slow in the case of RED. Especially frustating for europeans because most volunteers are in an american timezone and so interviews often happen in the middle of the night (in Europe). OPS has faster interviews but you want to join RED if you want to climb the tracker ladder, so passing through OPS basically just adds some delay.
Anyway, if you value your anonymity this much, maybe private trackers aren't for you.
> invite selling/trading is a big problem in the tracker world and tracker staff often force people to use their home IP to register for this reason.
It really isn't that much of a problem. Hell even ratio cheats aren't actually a problem. If you have a ratio based torrent site fundamentally someone has to have negative ratio for the site to function. Ratio cheats basically add download to others because they download. I'm of the opinion a lot of tracker staff are just nerds who power trip. And honestly, from my experience it's largely true. Simply, torrent sites have gotten away with power tripping and creating this image that people who buy and trade torrent accounts are a problem when you can literally talk you way up the chain within 6-12 months. It's really not that hard if someone wanted to infriate them, just say you're willing to code for them and boom you got yourself a staff position with access to the database and servers. Do that well, you'll get yourself a few more, you'll get friendly with staff at other trackers they'll invite you. Literally, it would be the easiest uncover role within the cyber world. And there probably aren't that many that are easier overall.
> Anyway, if you value your anonymity this much, maybe private trackers aren't for you.
This is sure a valid point. Your data 100% is not save with private trackers. Nothing is safe with then. They act all high and mighty but holy shit will they share you data like no ones business and publically out you, steal money from the "server fund" (personally I never had a problem with it but it was always drama ScT's exit was funny), etc.
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The interviews are not too difficult if you know your digital audio well and can memorize/look up a few facts. The hard part is waiting in the queue...
I'm not sure if they will allow public wifi either if it doesn't look like a residential IP. It's unfortunate... I too wish many trackers didn't do this. Totally worth it for me though. I'll just hope future me doesn't have to suffer the consequences :)
They can probably build quite a specific profile based on my searches and snatchlists, lol. There's no privacy in private trackers for the user.
Can I ask, what do people download via those private trackers? I never had problems finding anything I wanted using public tpb proxies etc.
For me, it's generally the same as private trackers but a few differences. Very little - almost zero chance of viruses in the apps. The speeds are way faster, this is very noticable on older stuff. There is no bait and switch.
For niche stuff you can even find the super hard to find. Want to find the tv version of episode 12 of season 3 of Flashpoint, there is a site where that is possible.
Some have communities which are super useful if you're into those. But if you just want to download and get good speeds, a general tracker like TorrentLeech is pretty much all you need.
Reliable source for movies and TV-Shows - even rare ones.
And zero chance of being picked up by copyright watchdogs who download the whole swarm's IP addresses and send legal notices to each one fishing for ISPs that will give their user's data without a warrant.
“Zero chance” is bullshit, they could easily join a private tracker and look for IPs, they just don’t currently because private trackers are not widely known.
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Well, depending on your tastes some stuff can be hard to find especially if you want lossless copies. Other nice features are the user collages, comments, and great organisation which are pros over something similar like Soulseek.
in the case of What.CD there was a community of music makers that released exclusively or very close to the tracker community.
One of the great losses from the shutdown of that site was the destruction of that creative community.
Private trackers moderate torrents, and peers can use this to their benefit. Formats and naming are more standardized, software has less chance of malware.