Comment by Roark66
3 years ago
Can I ask, what do people download via those private trackers? I never had problems finding anything I wanted using public tpb proxies etc.
3 years ago
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.
They’re widely known enough to have their own wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_sit...
One site on that list, for example, TorrentLeech.org has been around for almost 18 years and has hundreds of thousands of active users. In fifteen years I’ve never had an issue.
There are also foreign language trackers that are largely immune like rutracker.org - you just have to make sure to download the English versions
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It's actually harder than it sounds. To scrape IPs from a public tracker, all you need to do is to download the torrent, pretend to the tracker that you want to join the swarm (without actually sharing any content) and you get a nice list. On a private tracker, all your activity is linked to an account and the tracker knows how much you upload / download. If you are a copyright owner, actually seeding content is probably a terrible idea for legal reasons, and you'll quickly run afoul of ratio requirements and get banned if you do not do so. Besides, if users report which torrents they're getting copyright complaints on, it won't be hard for staff to figure out which account tried downloading all of those and has 0 upload activity on them.
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Close (enough) to zero then.
Most good private trackers have an invite system, you can't just join one on a whim and get access.
Their process is profitable enough just by scanning the well known ones so they don't need to bother with trying to get access to private trackers.
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.