for something specific, just go to rutracker (rutracker.org). Yes,
it's entirely in Russian, but who cares? All registration forms look
the same, and you weren't going to post in the forums anyway, right?
(More on that later). Rutracker is really nice because it's
comprehensive, well-seeded and has high standards despite having
very few ratio restrictions. In fact, 99% of the needs of most users
are met there. If you are looking for porn, it is recommended to
open pornolab (pornolab.net). Yes, it's in Russian too. Here's a
guide from a Russian speaker to rutracker.
- Pay2Pirate: Some trackers will invite you for a fee. The idea is to
prevent potential cheaters from abusing the system (in ways defined
at the discretion of the staff) since any fuck-up would cost them
their account, and thus their money. Generally pay2pirate trackers
are considered low tier, since they are run for-profit and several,
notably IPT, have a history of shitty behaviour. There are *NO*
trackers worth paying to join, at all. Almost without exception they
can be joined for free with easy to obtain user invites. The content
that paid trackers offer is rarely if ever better than what is
offered by the good public trackers.
- Application: Some trackers have a special page with an application
form in one way or another. Their goal is to keep a moderate influx
of new members they can control by assessing your willingness to
join and what you have to offer. Different trackers have different
requirements: some will require proof of good ratio on other
trackers, some will only require that you show genuine interest and
good will in your application form even if you are new to the
tracker scene. Some mostly care about what material you have to
offer to the site. Try to be sincere, honest, lengthy and don't
forget to provide an email address so they can notify you of their
response.
- Interview: A few trackers have an interview system; it means that
you are going to join an IRC channel and answer questions to their
staff. It's mostly a way to control members' origin as almost all of
them will ask that you join from your home connection.
+ Redacted interview: READ THIS GUIDE FOR REDACTED.CH and THIS ONE
TOO before interviewing. Generally, the best way to get into good
trackers. The interview is extensive and similar to what.cd
(easier because the spectral analysis section appears to have
been toned down). You can fail if you don't take this seriously.
Currently, the most reputed tracker known to maintain an
interview system (essentially the new what.cd)
+ Myanonamouse interview: This is more of a chat, questions are
mostly about the rules, you will not pass or fail so there is no
need to worry.
+ Oppaitime: more of a chat, and questions are mostly about the rules.
+ Bakabt interview: More of a 3-minute chat about whether or not
you understand the rules.
- Invite forums: Once you've established a good standing on one of the
aforementioned trackers you've hopefully managed to get in, you will
be able to move on to more restrictive ones. Most top trackers
require new users to have a past of good standing (i.e. Power User
or Elite user class) such as one that can be shown on a tracker
whose staff they trust - the tracker scene is a small world, and
tracker staff often cooperate (or fight) with each other. As such,
there are recruitment threads on various trackers so they can
exchange good-standing users for the benefit of all.
- Super Exclusive Sekrit Klub: Once you've made it to the big ones,
the rest is up to you - you may try to join some of the ultra-closed
trackers such as EXIGO or HDBits but at this point your needs should
be pretty much covered unless you are looking for something really
specific or just doing it for epeen.
Generally speaking open signup trackers will not offer you a pathway
into more desirable trackers. Some trackers have application signups
and you can progress from there, but you'll be taking months if not
years longer to climb the pyramid if you do this. It's even harder to
remain /pure/ as well. The standard method of progressing is to join
RED, regardless of your feelings on a music tracker. You can join via
an IRC interview and it offers the best invite forum for new users.
The RED interview is conducted like an online exam, they ask you to
close everything except for IRC and then send thema screenshot of your
desktop. You aren't supposed to look at the prep material. They
monitor the prep website and if your IP address shows up connecting to
it they'll stop the interview and ask you to admit to cheating. If you
fess up you can try again the next day. If you lie they'll permaban
you, this is like a cabal ban as well so it can make life much harder
for you. What you can do is cheat by saving the prep as a pdf. it's
all fairly simple stuff to remember anyway and you'll need to know it
if when you start uploading anyway.
Next up is reaching the elite userclass to unlock the invite forums.
You actually get access at power user, but better trackers require you
to be elite before asking for an invite. Some will have even more
requirements, like a 6 month old account or more. The requirements for
elite userclass are 50 uploads, 3 months of account age and 100GB of
upload. The first two are easy, you can just upload shit from deezer,
or transcode FLAC's with no mp3 version. Getting 100GB is tricky.
Without a seedbox you'll likely get 1.00 ratio on your uploaded
torrents so it will take considerably more than 50 FLACs. You can seed
your initial uploads with a seedbox, which should get your better
returns. You could also race by autosnatching. RED is very competitive
however, so do this only if you have some experience using a seedbox
and configuring it correctly. pay2win is an option, you can usually
get 5-10GB filling a request for an album from bandcamp or similar.
Another option is to use the "premier" plugin for Deluge, which
manipulates the swarm and piece distribution to only upload a new
piece once everyone in the swarm has the previous one, which means you
upload 100% of the torrent to every single user. Proceed with extreme
caution though, this plugin is not specifically banned on RED, but if
autonstachers notice they are getting 0 upload from you they may add
you to a blackl-, sorry, BLOCKlist. If no one autosnatches from you at
all you will only ever get upload from permaseeding or requests.
**** What not to do
- Cheating: The cardinal rule of thumb is that most cheaters end up
with their account and their entire invite tree banned. Beware of
any anon which recommends cheating. Cheating doesn't just mean using
some dodgy client to fake ratio. If you "seed" 1000 torrents and
throttle them all to 1kb/s in order to farm bonus points without
using up badnwidth you will probably be in trouble if anyone ever
notices. Any actions like this that are not in good faith will not
be looked upon kindly.
- Beg for invites: Autists on /ptg/ have taken it upon themselves to
report every single email they see in /ptg/ threads to various
tracker staff and spam crawlers (they've gone as far as combing the
archives for emails in past threads and reporting those too).
Tracker staff are known to lurk /ptg/ and will ban anyone they catch
sending an invite to an email posted there. If you accept an invite
you begged for, you will be found out and lose any chance of
acquiring a legitimate account. Especially watch out for PTP staff
as they will revoke invite privileges and ban you for the smallest
of transgressions (such as, but not limited to, accidentally posting
IP lists in screenshots, posting the email you use for trackers).
Tracker staff have been known to autistically pore over /mu/, /g/
and /ptg/ threads (archived and live) for the express purposes of
finding and banning inviters/ees.
- Trade for invites: Tracker staff really, really hate this. If you
are caught trading (and you eventually will be) they will go out of
their way to ban you, your entire invite tree and will cooperate
with other tracker's staff so as to disable as many of your accounts
on other trackers as they can. Don't go to tracker trading forums
such as torrent-invites and the like, even having an account there
(especially with the same username) may count as a red flag to some
staff. It is reported that sites such as What.CD formerly abused
bugs in the browser's web history to determine whether or not users
were visiting sites such as torrent-invites and to ban people based
on this activity. Site staff are also known to pose as invite
sellers to trap and ban naive users.
- Buy invites: You'll lose money along with the chances of getting in
legitimately. Some staff will be lenient if you ditch your seller
though, probably because they want to get at the source first.
Invites are usually free (and easy enough) to get from gateway
trackers so it's not even worth buying invites.
Generally speaking, you should avoid invites from random dudes on the
internet if you can; you most likely have no idea of their standing
and they could very well fuck up later, resulting in an entire treeban
and you getting banned through no fault of your own. It's unfair, it
sucks. Stick to official invites (interview, application, recruitment
threads) and no one will bother you.
- Posting on the forums: Every post you make on the forum is an
occasion of getting someone riled up, and that someone may very well
be staff. You're here for downloading and uploading stuff, not
chitchat. Don't use the forums.
- Talking to staff more than necessary: Same reason as above. Don't
give them any reason to ban you. If you rustle a staff member in any
way, causing them to ban you, the entire staff will rally behind
them even if they wouldn't have personally banned you themselves.
It's the mod's word against yours, you can never win.
- Being confrontational with staff: Simply assume they are always
right, even (and especially) when you point out that they are wrong.
In short, either keep a low profile or suck staff's dick, as with all sites.
**** Cabal is so hard to join, I just want some content. What do I do?
A brand new user is looking at potentially years before they get into
the desirable trackers such as PTP for movies and BTN for TV. These
trackers are not the sole sources of content however, they are merely
the most convenient since they have the largest archives. To get the
best coverage of content a new user should look to join a few decent
HD trackers, as well as a few general trackers. The more the merrier.
Staff don't appreciate people collecting trackers they will rarely
use. Fuck 'em. Join any tracker that you feel has interesting content
or will compliment your ability to find the content you are after.
Some decent and more importantly accessible HD trackers a new user
could join would be Blutopia, BeyondHD and UHDbits. Couple this with
IPT, or TorrentLeech as your general tracker to fill the gaps.
SecretCinema is an excellent tracker for people with a genuine
interest in obscure/arthouse/weird cinema, as it has an active
requests section with users filling from KG/PTP/TiK and so on. TVV
will supplement your general/HD trackers for older or obscure TV
content, if you can find an invite in the wild. Avistaz or ACM will
fill your asian media needs. Don't count out public trackers either.
RuTracker especially is a top general tracker despite being public.
BakaBT has IRC signups and it's old archive will fills the gaps of
obscure content you can't find on Nyaa. RED should be your first port
of call and is the top music tracker, so that's covered right away.
MaM is also arguably the best book tracker and has IRC signups as
well.
**** Getting acquainted with rules and maintaining your ratio
Okay, now we're going to assume you made it to a couple of private
trackers - if you haven't yet, please read above part (TL;DR: get into
an entry-level tracker; work you way up from there on either tracker's
PU forums; if that's too much bother for you, use rutracker/pornolab
and stop reading this). This is a guide intended to help those who
already made their first steps in the elitist, restricted and highly
autismal private tracker world. As you can see, things are quite
different here. Rules, ratio, buffer, seeding, userclasses... what the
fuck's all this? Things were much simpler on ThePirateBay where you
could just search, click and have your stuff right there, right?
And you know what? You're right. Most folks on /ptg/ and elsewhere
will tell you stories about how they did a kind gesture and invited a
friend of theirs (or even a fellow Anon) only to see them log on twice
into the site before never using it again, no matter how hard they
begged and how convincing they sounded. In all likelihood, these
people first logged on, their excitement faded when they saw that they
couldn't just start downloading everything before signing off, found
the rules too complicated, lost interest in the whole thing and
settled for more accessible alternatives (which are, again, not
necessarily bad, depending on what one wants). Since you're reading
this, It is assumed that you're not one of these people and that you
actually want to use the trackers you're on. Are they worth it? Well,
that's for you to find out. Before you decide, here's a few tips
that'll show you it's not that hard, if you can read that is. First
things first
- Read the rules. Seriously, do it. Tracker staff are autistic, you
get one account per lifetime and you don't want to start playing
cat-and-mouse games with the admins that early. Most tracker rules
are similar, and go on the lines of "Suck our dicks at all
occasions; don't leak invites or torrent files to public places;
don't trade or sell invites; don't be inactive" followed by
specifics on content rules (what you may upload) and ratio rules
(more on that later). Read all the details as there may be some
specifics on each tracker. Some have exclusive content that you
can't upload elsewhere; some prohibit the use of Tor or VPNs, or
even expressively forbid that you log on from anywhere else than
your home connection; and so on. Read it all so you don't get caught
unawares on some autistic peculiarity.
**** Ratio issues and tracker economy
Now let's assume you're familiar with the rules, how about you
download some shit? The only problem is that ratio thingy: surprise,
when you're done downloading something, no one ever downloads it back
from you, ever. That's because, unless you joined a low-tier tracker,
the seeder-to-leecher ratio is extremely high, with everyone
permaseeding everything while only leeching occasionally. This brings
us to our main point: tracker economy. Trackers can be roughly sorted
into three categories: those with no economy, those with a soft
economy, and those with a hard economy. Some of the most
forward-thinking trackers do away with ratio altogether, though
keeping seedpoints as the sole currency of their site. These are
neither soft or hard economies as the economic levers are created by
and adjusted solely at the discretion of the respective tracker.
- No economy: trackers with no economy are essentially ratioless.
Torrent retention is achieved by imposing seeding requirements or
individual ratio requirements ("you must seed with a 1:1 ratio OR
for 72 hours"), and people get an incentive for seeding by acquiring
bonus points that can be used for transcending userclasses. The most
prominent example of a ratioless tracker is BTN. You won't have any
problem there as long as you seed. A tracker being ratioless does
not give users leave to go on Hit n' Run rampages however. These
kinds of trackers will routinely keep tabs on users with low average
seedtimes how appear to be taking advantage of the economy.
- Soft economy: tracker with a soft economy use a ratio-based system
complemented by bonus points. These points are typically earned by
doing specific actions, the most common of which seeding for an X
amount of GBs, regardless of whether someone is actually downloading
it from you. Some trackers will reward you for uploading torrents,
idling on IRC or doing any kind of activity that contributes to the
tracker and the site as a whole. Most trackers have a soft economy,
from AHD to PTP, from MAM to bB or AB. Another kind of soft economy
is a ratio-based system with a large amount of freeleech torrents,
i.e. torrents whose download stats aren't counted but still earn you
upload credits. Such trackers include SHD, SCC or bB, AB and MAM
(again). You won't have many problems if you don't download
everything like a retard: just grab some freeleech or small
torrents, wait for your amount of bonus points to passively
increase, get upload credit when you can, use that upload credit to
download more, etc. The more you snatch, the more you seed, the more
points you earn, and eventually you'll have enough buffer to freely
download what you want.
- Hard economy: trackers with a hard economy are ratio-based but
provide little to no means of complementing one's upload amount,
like bonus points or freeleech sections. As a result, there's only a
limited amount of upload credit (which acts as tracker currency,
there are whole academic papers about it if you're into that kind of
stuff) in the whole tracker, and whatever credits you earn, someone
else has to spend. Getting upload credit is quite hard and you might
have to work on your ratio before being able to download whatever
you want without hindrance. On the other hand, since nearly everyone
is as tight on ratio as you are, everyone will be permaseeding
everything and torrents will have an excellent retention.
Trackers such as Bibliotik have a hard economy, and most struggles you
hear about getting one's ratio up will typically be on one of those
trackers. There are four main methods to get upload credit, on top of
permaseeding everything (which you should do in every tracker anyway -
you're doing that, right?): getting a seedbox, filling requests,
uploading your own content and jumping on popular torrent swarms
early.
+ Getting a seedbox: Basically pay2win but you might end up doing that if you don't want to bother too much and have money to spend. A surefire way to build a ratio on any tracker. They also alleviate the risk for users in countries who hand out DDMCA notices. Seedboxes can also server as media servers and much more.
+ Abusing the fuck out of freeleech: /ptg/ers like to preference the most active torrents especially staff picks and the top 10 most active on freeleech days.
+ Filling requests: Can be tricky as people will obviously request stuff they can't find elsewhere, so unless they're particularly inept at googling and people didn't catch on you won't have any luck. If you consider the request to be worth it and you like the content requested you could also buy it, a less cheesy pay2win since you still end up with the physical medium as opposed to imaginary points on a website that might get busted at any moment, on top of the warm fuzzy feeling that you made someone you don't know on the other side of the globe happy. Looking for requested material on other related trackers also works, though the process can be tedious.
+ Uploading your own content: A reliable way to get upload credit AND satisfy the usual userclass promotion requirements; however, unless you're operating from a seedbox or a very fast connection, you'll have a hard time achieving a ratio much above 1:1. That's because seedboxes usually snatch your stuff (especially if it's recent or matches certain tags) before taking priority to distribute it across the swarm, since the BitTorrent protocol favors peers with a faster upload speed. You'll still get upload of at least equal to your torrent size though, so you could survive on uploading stuff alone (also, if you keep uploading consistently good stuff, users will eventually "subscribe" to you and snatch everything you upload). On sites like Bibliotik uploading enough content makes the entire site freeleech. You might also be able to get extra bonus points for uploading content.
+ /pyramid/: And finally, jumping onto popular swarms (aka /pyramid/ on /ptg/) is a risky though exciting activity that rewards those who catch on early and get to upload to everyone, while those who joined in on a later date only get a fraction of the original seeders' credit, thus creating a pyramid scheme. Popular torrents include those about to become freeleech or the newest content from popular artists. /ptg/ regulars will often post about /pyramid/ tips, which means you could download from that torrent in the hope that it'll grow and eventually get you a ratio above 1. If you have a seedbox or any kind of dedicated server, automatic tools such as autodl-irrsi will snatch stuff based on relevant information (such as tags, year etc.), however you run the risk of downloading too much stuff you can't afford, even if some of it pays off. Use at your own discretion and beware, your upload speed and peering has an enormous impact on what ratio you will end up with.
- Other economy: economies that have no ratio requirements, but
maintain a semblance of order and structure by relying solely on
seedpoints, or bonus points, to function in a similar way to 'hard'
ratio-only trackers. Rewarding long term seeding while at the same
time disincentivizing pump-and-dump autosnatchers, seedpoints are
used in ways other than to simply download torrents depending on the
tracker. Voting on requests, ascending the user class ladder and
purchasing goodies in a bonus points store are a few ways that
seedpoints can be used. It is worth noting that many ratioless
trackers use points to purchase optional functionality. BTN is an
example of this. By changing the requirements for maintaining a
ratio to that of spending seedpoints to download a torrent is what
separates this category from the ratioless variety.
**** "Help, I've been cabal banned!"
I can just turn my router off and on again to get a new IP and start
over, r-right? Wrong. The private tracker community is small, so
unless you live near a large population center there's a real chance
you are the only person in your town or city using private trackers.
Which means it'll be obvious when staff cabal ban a rural Danish IP
and the next day a rural Danish IP is in the RED interview channel.
Consider what exchange you use and what IP range range your ISP uses.
As well as other data like the torrent client you have, browser
version and so on. If you ever do get banned and want to get back in
it's best to wait a few weeks, or better yet a few months. If you are
creating a new identity, remember, DO NOT check your old profile,
especially just after joining the tracker. Some paranoid sysops are
checking every new account's activity for weeks, even for months. DO
NOT act the same as you were before, especially if you were an active
user on forums and were uploading a lot. And obviously, don't use a
similar nickname. Also, don't use the password you used to have,
because they can see every users hashed password. Generally speaking,
just don't draw attention on you and stay /pure/ by not inviting
anyone nor donate to your trackers, ever (by the way, what kind of
cuck would you be, giving a donation to a tracker that cabaled you?).
If you are ever cabal banned consider all accounts linked to be
tainted, even if if you can still access them. If you plan on starting
over from the beginning you will have to burn all of the accounts that
could be traced to your cabal banned account, including the accounts
that you think are not part of the cabal (i.e morethantv,
torrentleech, iptorrents, foreign tracker and so on).
*** TODO
Source ? tracker privati? ? software? ? critica ai
