I never understood why people prefer private trackers.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Because they think it's fairer and less wasteful of the resources End result, fulled up hard drives with copies of things nobody downloads while the bandwidth goes unused
Meanwhile on public trackers I push out terabytes per months of data....
It's just a mismatch between how they imagine a system should work and how it actually works. They cannot believe someone would do the right thing without coercion, enforcement and manipulative economic compensation(ratio and rules)
Just one reason better retainability and wider content selection. Idk what tracker OP is talking about but most good trackers nowadays have a Bonus Points system that benefits long term seeders. Yeah the problem of people downloading new freeleech torrents and deleting thing right after they are clear of HnR is still a thing is most if not all trackers but the good ones don't get affected much by it.
Hmmm I never had a problem finding what I want with public sources. Maybe my tastes in media are not refined enough.
There is no incentive but I also seed everything I download until at least ratio 2 but mostly without a cap especially obscure stuff.
I also like to not even use public trackers instead relying solely on the mighty distributed hash table (DHT) to find peers.
Most private trackers now implement a credit system that rewards for making seed available as well. Even without users downloading from you, you accrue credit just for keeping it alive and available.
If you are impatient, this won't really help, but it works well enough if you actually plan to join the community instead of hit and run.
You said it the best. Also most private trackers have a minimum required ratio that’s less 1 at 0.6 or something.
Some don’t even have ratios, minimum 72 hours seeding and you’re done.
What is the standard duration to net back the investment expense of thedown?
Have any trackers realized past a certain point, more seeds do nothing and the last seed is the most important?
Have any implemented a system where downloading from overseeded torrents doesn't add to your ratio burden while still crediting the used bandwidth for the seed?
It seems to me a lot of private trackers just had zero sum economies that just fall apart and all the resources to idleness whenever there is an overabundance of space or bandwidth.
A kind of ratio deflation where nobody downloads anything while seeding from large ssd and fast connection to nobody dowloading anything
Makes the idea of hit and run and bandwidth economy entirely farcical and ulterior motives such as selling ratio to the users.
Of "joining the community" means building ratio by waiting for leech days to download things I don't need and spending hours gaming the system or courting favour or moderators, that's going to be a pass from me.
I have 100gb ssd and 4tb traffic a month, and last time I wasted my time with private trackers, many years ago, over ten, this just sat idle all day.
EDIT:
Meanwhile here is how it is going on public trackers
It sounds like perhaps torrents aren't the right solution for you. Perhaps invest in a newsgroup service instead?
You can argue what makes more sense to you as much as you like, but things work just fine for many of us.
And as to the past month or so:
That's without the credit system, but using those same torrents that you expect to just sit on. I don't use autobrr or anything like that, just basics like sonarr etc.
Last time I tried NNTP, it was an endless maze of piecing back together hundreds of binary messages, never finding the things I wanted.
What does your workflow look like ?
Because as far as the downloading, deluge running on a seedbox works great, it even automatically uploads to my real server and put the stuff in the right place automatically and piratebay does have nearly everything I ever search for.
I tried IPFS and didn't find a single file to download, I'm not against trying something else, I just don't want another time sucking hobby of sorting files and writing scripts again.
And I don't want to use any proprietary software.
I don't use it anymore myself, but a small cost nntp service and the Arr stacks automate away the piece hunting for the most part.
I'd recommend looking over things at this link for an idea on the tools. They are great and take most of the pain out of all this. It's all open source as well.
You would still want to find an indexer (like a tracker but for Usenet information on what files to grab) and a Usenet service, but I've been away from that side long enough I'd suggest getting suggestions on those from someone else.
It's just books, but MaM has a seed time to points which let's you buy radio. No money involved, they just want things seeded for longer, and it works for that community. I might have 100 things seeding right now with no bandwidth used, racking up points.
Is this a time per torrent or time per GB system ?
How does it work ? What's the return on investment for leaving this hardware and bandwidth sit idle ?
MAM has, effectively, no ratio requirements at all since it's so easy to get points. There's some system to reward seeding low-seed torrents and large-file-size torrents, and to stay in good standing you only need to seed for 72h. Hell, they give out freeleech tokens like candy, too.
If you start by downloading some low-seed books to keep the swarm alive, you'll have enough points to buy VIP status indefinitely. And because of that system, basically everything on the site is available and downloads in seconds. It takes me longer to transfer audiobook files to a phone than it takes to download.
Thanks I'll check that one out. Last time I tried private trackers, it was like trying to get into a club, jumping hoops, wasting time and then getting in and figuring "wow, I'm never going to log-in here again"
They are for books only, so keep that in mind before jumping through their hoops. (Books, audiobooks, and related).
Popular TV shows usually get over 10:1 on TL within an hour if you use autodl-irssi to download them the second they are added.
That sounds like the pump and dump I described.
I have space and bandwidth, not time to waste
I want to pick the stuff I want and absolutely everything else 100% automatic
Is this "autodl-irssi" going to handle that so I don't waste my time jumping hoops ?
You just set filters and autodl-irssi will download anything new that matches the filters.
Oh well I had stuff like sonarr and radarr setup that I think takes care of that.
I thought this autodl-irssi was going to build ratio downloading stuff I don't want, just to seed and auto-delete afterwards And do so in some kind of way that ensures it always upload more than the download cost to the ratio
If you have sonarr and radarr setup, then you would probably want to use autobrr instead of autodl-irssi since they work well together. They both watch the IRC announce channel from the tracker so the torrent is loaded within a few seconds of being uploaded. Sonarr and radarr on their own are too slow to get into the initial swarm.
HDD space is cheap, just add more.