Instead of schlocking out tiny individual articles that pertain to obscurish news tidbits from your favorite (and not-so favorite) private trackers, we figured it would make for a more enjoyable read to roll ‘em all together into one main monthly format. Without further ado, here’s our inaugural edition to recap the world of private trackers, torrent forums & anything else we could scrounge up.
FatalTracker.com Closes; Blames ‘Legal’ Issues
On or about May 11th 2010, private BitTorrent’s oldest tracker FatalTracker.com succumbed to their own fatality and folded up shop. Was such a closure really a “legal issue” that finally took this living legend offline - or was it simply a lack of funds? Who knows, but it’s hard to fathom that MAFIAA is still going after unpopular oldtimers to set a hard-nosed precedence against a future generation of private trackers. Sure, right. Take down the oldest one, and the rest will fall. Excerpt from FatalTracker:
Due to a legal issue fatal must close. We are not sure if this will be permanent or temporary at this point.
Our sister site has opened its doors to any and all who wish to join.
You can Use this link for an added bonus
(broken link removed*)
Any info as it comes will be relayed there, thank you for your understanding.
Online for more than 7 years, most torrenters have never even heard of this dinosaur. No wonder; you probably haven’t heard of SuprNova, EliteTorrents or LokiTorrent either. Tracker history suggests being ‘long in the tooth’ doesn’t necessarily assure sustained longevity - just look to TorrentIT (TiT), a once very well-respected tracker from the same golden era as FatalTracker and ET - TiT was recently wiped out mainly due to unpopularity. Which translates to a smaller member base, which in turn means fewer donations to keep it all going. As Bob Dylan once sang, The Times They Are a-Changin’.
*Moreover, FatalTracker in its announcement points to The-Scene-Nation as a sister site. We’re not denouncing Scene-Nation here; but rather, the choices for which FT had affiliated with. One might assume the longest-running private tracker to have connections with sceners, topsites, nukenets, scene trackers. Apparently not.
Good news is: You might be able to buy (or bid on) the FatalTracker.com domain name once it expires on 19-11-2010. For nostalgic purposes only.
SceneTorrents - 6 Months Later
Time flies. It’s been half a year since ScT yanked out its own power cord (May 29th marked the six month anniversary for ScT’s closure). Arrests, tax troubles, legal woes, an elaborate cabal to run off with donations, or perhaps The Man just got a little too close for comfort. Which theory you believe, the truth may never surface at a public level. An 11-minute YouTube clip containing ScT’s final IRC moments doesn’t seem to offer any insight, either. One thing that’s crystal clear is that ScT never asked for donations; lack of funds didn’t sink this ship.
According to ScT’s own NFO release (their last torrent) - ”Members of our staff were arrested and will be undergoing the entire length of the judicial process…”. We’re not suggesting this is balderdash, but where are the news reports to support this? Surely something this big would have emerged by now, if it were true.
In any event, private BitTorrent’s own little scene hasn’t really changed all that much since ScT’s demise. Reports of a “Sct v2” have been dismissed as more hype, and there have been no new scene trackers that could possibly take their place (to indicate a valid ScT side-project is truly in the works). SctCommunity.org (a forum for ScT members to discuss all-things ScT related) has become a ghost town, virtually abandoned by its 4,654 members.
Bottom line is: Don’t expect a SceneTorrents resurrection anytime soon, although they’ve been sharing their special tracker sourcecode dubbed ”ScTBDev” with a few close alliances. When or if this will be released to the public (GNU Public License v3) is anyone’s guess. RIP ScT - and naturally the world of BitTorrent has moved on.
IPTorrents - Cracking Down on Banned Clients, Cheaters
Who would have suspected IPTorrents to become a safe haven for cheaters using modified clients to inflate ratio. Certainly not yours truly - IPT has to be one of the easiest trackers to seed on (seedbox not required). In fact, I refuse to load their torrents locally in uTorrent since they consume too much upload bandwidth - it’s nearly on par with public trackers. But widespread ratio-whoring on IPT? Will an impeccable share ratio on IPT finally land you an invite to coveted FtN once you take that pretty screenshot to prove you’re an irreplacable asset to the BT community? Likely not.
Below is a short excerpt from IPT’s recent announcement on May 15th, regarding “modified clients”:
Dear Users
Recently we are seeing more and more instances of ’suspect’ information sent to our tracker.
We believe this is due to an increased usage of modified torrent clients.
These modified clients have been changed with the specific intention of sending false information to trackers in an attempt to inflate the upload amount recorded and increase the users ratio.
Whilst it is possible to use these modified clients without cheating, the fact that you have a modified client means you have the ability to cheat should you so choose.
We have updated our ‘Anti Cheater’ routines to identify all instances of modifed client useage.
On a serious note, IPT (as easy as it is to seed on) is rife with cheaters from India, Israel, Egypt, certain Romanian IPs, and wherever else that many trackers are already wise to. It’s good to see that IPT finally updated their allowable BitTorrent client list; something that hadn’t been done in what seems like years. Just a hunch, but cheaters and the ilk will have to mosy on over to TorrentDay then, since there’s yet to be a similar announcement.
IPTorrents/TorrentDay Connected?
Perhaps I’m talking out of my ass, but I’m suspicious that TD and IPT are run by the same company (as opposed to traditional private trackers that have real sysops & staff - “company” being the keyword here). Read on.
IPT and TD have uncanny similarities - both are hosted in Russia with IPs next door to each other (IPT @ 95.128.242.250, and TD @ 95.128.242.230). Coincidentally, on or about March 18th both sites went offline at the same time, and when they resurfaced both had simultaneously relocated to PRQ hosting in Sweden (in the same datacenter - again, side by side with nearly identical IPs). For reasons unexplained, this relocation didn’t last long; both IPT and TD have now returned to Russian hosting using the exact same IPs before the switch to PRQ. That, and other coincidences.
BTRACS - No More Selling/Buying Tracker Invites, Accounts (But Trading is Still OK)
UPDATE: 2010-09-21The following never happened, it was an attempt to make the forum seem more friendly. We were ‘had’ by Slevin.
It’s better to eventually see the light than never at all, I suppose. Merely 4 days after FSF wrote a ‘[mini-review](../../../04/26/find-private-trackers-with-open-signups-a-review-of-tracker-checker-sites/ “Find Private Trackers with Open Signups: A Review of ‘Tracker Checker’ Sites”)‘ about BTRACS last month, we were contacted by one of their staffers to amend the article. Evidently BTRACS has now added a list of “no movement” trackers that cannot be traded, sold, offered or requested. If you’re a tracker owner or admin, you might want to get yourself included on the list.
Another recent update is that tracker accounts & invites can no longer be sold. To quote a staff member who contacted us, ”we used to be known for allowing buying/selling; all that has been abolished and is no longer accepted”. Better late than never.
However, trading of accounts & invites is still an acceptable practice - at least for the time being. We’ve been tipped off that BTRACS will soon be phasing out trading altogether, but we can’t conclusively confirm that these plans are set in stone, or provide a timeframe.
GFT Offers IRC ‘Tracer’ Channel (for Donators, VIP)
Just three short days after GFT announced a major PayPal donation meltdown that possibly even threatened the site’s very existence, they’ve regrouped to promote even more donations by offering an exclusive IRC “Tracer” (torrent racer) channel to donators & VIPs.
Hes [sic] some good news.
GFT has its own tracers channel which is available to VIP’s/Donators*
The main channel is on ST51 which monitors and notifies on race wins and new torrent releases. Also available is a channel that enables you to check statistics of other private trackers.
*Conditions Apply - See Staff for details
Aside from the above news item posted May 14th on their homepage, there’s no other reference to this in their *Announcements & News
- forum area. It’s assumed that the fine print - *conditions apply
- would suggest that members will need to contact staff in advance in order to gain access to the tracer channel. Now, I’m not against donation drives to keep trackers running (quite the opposite, actually). It just seems a little dubious that GFT fights hard to keep itself out of other tracers (especially public ones), yet launches its own. Can these internal stats be deemed trustworthy; is there bias? How many trackers are listed? Is RevTT included? (for those who don’t know, RevTT prefers to stay out of these). More info, please.
And even if I possessed screenshots of the GFTTracers channel(s) in action, I surely wouldn’t post them here. One attempted global BitTorrent “scene-ban” was enough for a lifetime, thank you very much.
NTorrents.net - Moving Away From Just Nintendo/Wii
NTorrents.net - the first ‘other’ site ever to use What.CD’s Gazelle codebase (aside from What, naturally) always enjoyed modest success as BitTorrent’s #1 “Nintendo” tracker. But to really make it as a go-to games & console tracker, you need to broaden your horizons a Wii bit. Well, that’s exactly what the nTorrents team has done. Extended plans for a spinoff site containing XBOX releases, “Xtorrents” has been phased out in favour of a collaborated effort with the original NT. Called PwnNetwork.net, members should expect Gazelle RC2 under the hood (we hope). A recent announcement at NT on May 29th sums it up nicely:
Ladies and gentlemen, the big news. NTorrents is closing, our xbox sister-site XTorrents is not going to be released. We’re simply combining resources into a powerful gaming tracker instead. All your favorite staffers, a few new ones, and a fresher (less buggy) gazelle code. Combine this with a new look, including a few modifications, along with our reputation of an outstanding community. We welcome you to PWNnetwork.net.
Why is this happening you ask? Easy, we want to advance beyond the constraints of offering one company’s games, and we don’t want to split our userbase among two sites to do it. This will be a gradual process instead of an instantaneous action though, NTorrents will stay open as an archive until we get our most dedicated users to switch over to PWNnetwork. Sign up with PWN will be separate from NT, so yes, you will lose all of your stats. Don’t worry too much though, for an undetermined amount of time after the site goes live, we will support an integration processes where we will transfer your upload and download stats from NT to PWN. Everything else will be lost.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I have more news. After our raffle is closed, and we’ve gotten the prizes to the winners sent out, we will also be issuing beta access to PWN to every person who purchased a ticket in the raffle. This will be a beta period, in order for a decent amount of users to test the site, pitch ideas, and help work out issues before PWN officially goes live. So, if you don’t want to wait until we launch the site to check out what PWN has to offer, go buy that ticket! Not only will you get into PWN early, but you will have a chance to win one of those great prizes.
We appreciate everyone in our community, and we hope, even though the NT journey will be ending, that we will continue being awesome through PWN.
As has always been the case with nTorrents, don’t expect open registration at PWN to occur regularly, if at all.
Random Music Tracker News…
Tracker.Elektronik.ro - Going Offline
For reasons still unclear, it appears that Elektronik will be closing its doors. On June 4th (yesterday) they made this announcement:
STMusic.org Merged With SuperTorrents
On or about May 5th, STMusic joined forces with sister site SuperTorrents.org. With more than 30,000 members and 90,000 torrents, ST is not directly open for registration but recruitment can be found in this What.CD thread here (open to PUs and above).
“ST (formerly known as SuperTorrents) has merged its music sister-site (STMusic) with the main site, in hopes of providing its users with as much content as possible. We have been around since ‘05 and plan on upgrading to ST2.0 this year with a new look, upgraded backend, and more features for our users.”
Libble.com Moved to Libble.me
In the middle of May 2010, Libble.com switched over to the Libble.me domain. Everything else remains the same (user stats, accounts, torrents) as old Libble.com members are able to login at the new location. Libble currently indexes 13,272 active torrents and 6,084 members. (TIP: We’ve recently noticed Libble to be occasionally open for signups here.)
As you may have noticed we’ve moved to our new home at Libble.me! Unfortunately this was forced upon us due to issues with our old hosts. However this means we’ve been able to move to a faster, more reliable server!
One downside of this move is that we have to change our tracker url. This means you’ll have to update your torrents to use this new tracker url. We’ve been working on some guides to make this process easier, available here. We’ll be trying to add as many as possible to cover every torrent client and make things easy for you. Don’t get into too much of a panic though, as we’re running both trackers in parallel for the time being so you’ll have at least two weeks until you might start having issues with the old tracker.
In addition to this move we’ve got a new batch of features in, courtesy of keepahold! We have a new community XP system which gives you the recognition you deserve for contributions to the libble community with badges! More info on this coming soon, in the meantime you can check your progress by checking out your profile page.
An Update to Waffles ‘Donate to Haiti’ Drive
It’s somewhat older news, but Waffles wrapped up their donate to Haiti charity drive back on March 19th (two months after it began), and what a success it was! Members helped raise $84,012 for victims of Haiti’s devastating earthquake.
Other Waffles News — They’ve recently announced on 2010-05-11 that random freeleeches will take place (said to be 24-hour - although we’ve yet to witness any), as well as an overhaul of the ratio system (which has been reported to perhaps resemble something similar to What.CD’s new ratio rules, although this cannot be confirmed).
From this point forward, site-wide free leeches will be based entirely on the total download of all users combined. We will not disclose the triggers, but it’s safe to say that the faster stuff is downloaded, the faster you’ll see a site-wide free leech. This does NOT apply to free leeches bought from shop.
Additionally, we will be massively changing the ratio system in the next couple of months. Stay tuned for more information.
Torrent Forum Updates…
• KidVision.me, a forum with a focus on development of tracker source codes, mods, etc - moved to BTSkins.net.
• Neonscene.net switched over to Neonscene.org. At last check, signups were not open.
• VoiceThe.Net - a new torrent forum from the Etiv.in team. More info on VoiceThe.net can be found here.
• InviteNation switched over to The-Nation.org back on May 25th. Stats: Threads - 4,498 | Posts - 46,705 | Members - 579. Signups are open.
• PeerAccess.info is a new multi-purpose forum for tracker invites, DDLs, movie release dates, and more. Registration is currently open to all.
Torrentinvites.org Says:
Really disappointing that electronic is closed now, it was really a great tracker! R.I.P.
VoiceThe.Net Says:
VoiceThe.Net is teh best community
Torrentday knob Says:
Torrentday has the worst attitude towards its customers. I couldn’t care less if it closed…
Let me know if there is any site that doesn’t have an attitude towards it’s customers….
Random Says:
“Members helped raise $84,012 for victims of Haiti’s devastating earthquake.”
Robin hoods of p2p!
pantherking Says:
was expecting an excerpt on ptp
ah well
HDFan Says:
I’m surprised there was nothing mentioned about the move of HD encoding group FraMeSToR as internal encoders from bit-hdtv to HDME
life Says:
InviteNation switched over to The-Nation.org
but for sign up neeed invite
Felix Says:
Torrentday is the best and don’t compare torrentday with IPTorrents lol
Torrentday have nothing like IPTorrents.
TD is 100 times better and faster and friendly.
Torrentday must be located in the same datacenter as IPTorrents and in months ago IPTorrents was in the same datacenter as revolutiontt, so it means RevTT and IPTorrents have connection ?
about same layout LoL, RevTT/TL/IPT/TD all of them are using TBDev source which is all the same and same functions are there
TD <3 FTW!!!
Fantazy Says:
“IPT has to be one of the easiest trackers to seed on (seedbox not required). In fact, I refuse to load their torrents locally in uTorrent since they consume too much upload bandwidth”
Then you must do the same with Torrent-Leech because it’s the exact same thing, TL is even much much more faster than iPT, download and upload, with or without seedbox.
“But widespread ratio-whoring on IPT? Will an impeccable share ratio on IPT finally land you an invite to coveted FtN once you take that pretty screenshot to prove you’re an irreplacable asset to the BT community? Likely not.”
I’ve rarely seen so much bullshit..Seriously…Widespread, LoL, what’s widespread is your imagination or your hate for iPT, what’s wrong? Did they refuse you an interview or something like that?
SHOW US THE PROOFS, it’s like if I tell people about the crazy sex night we had, you, me and that dog last saturday night, without showing even the shadow of a proof people should be really dumb to believe me, and you.
And the allegations about iPT and TorrentDay…They look similar : true, like many others… they share the same hosting company : probably true, like a lot of other trackers do, and when the servers fail, all trackers are down, you should know better, it happens very often, sometimes there are like 6 trackers down at the same time, and they also have the same backup hosting companies, classic, if you know a P2P friendly host wouldn’t you share it with your fellow trackers?…. And the IPs, it’s like 2 guys owning seedboxes on OVH, it’s very likely that they will have very similar IP adresses because each hosting Cie servers have very similar IPs, it’s well known, but it doesn’t mean that they are living under the same roof !
Dreamer Says:
tell you what, IPT staff are fucking n000bs lmao
Leester Says:
Yes, PWN will be running Gazelle RC2.
LOVING IT Says:
Sharky….this is a great feature!
If we miss-out on something,we can always read it in summary!
Yeah…keep up the good work!
LT Says:
Finally an useful topic from sharky
annoy Says:
anybody know what happened to HD-space.org can’t log in
abs0lut3 Says:
I like this kind of articles. Well done.
Jess Says:
Does anybody know what happened to SceneSound.org?
doodoo stain Says:
yeah sharky.. I, too like this column, please keep it up. Kinda like TMZ of the torrent community
Ermmm Says:
@ # 8
TorrentDay does NOT use the TBDEV source, it uses that pile of shit Templateshares source which is a paid for, rip off of TBDEV and is insecure as a tracker source code.
autotron Says:
Well, dont count on buying our name just yet, we may have had a minor upset but cant keep us down forever. We are back, just as strong and just as good as we always have, the legal issues where real, but taken care of. the issue was not site related more a staff related issue but tto ensure safety of our users we took fatal down and relocated.
We are Invite only but am sure you may now some one with an invite if your a good user
autotron Says:
Fataltracker.com lives on and will never die
brent Says:
great article sharky
David Says:
IPT FTWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW and F*CK the REST !!!
Tracker Checker Says:
Let it be known that the scrapetorrent http://scrapetorrent.com/TrackerChecker/ trackerchecker is under constant improvement, and now includes cell phone text message notification on tracker signup openings
Dirkie123 Says:
we PWN you mhoeahahaha
ipt FTFW Says:
what are you talking about
”it’s nearly on par with public trackers”
when is the last time you visit the sit
speed is amazing many things to find and people care about it so they seed and comment
MKZ Says:
Nice recap sharky
sign ups actually weren’t open at The Nation at the time this was posted but we are having open registrations right now until friday the 11th
registration link - http://www.the-nation.org/forum/register.php
bored Says:
gfts tracer is legit. you could match it to any other out there with a few hiccupps here and there accounting for normal lag when races are mere seconds apart.
Anon Says:
Regarding IPT - IPT advertise lookpic and lookpic advertise torrentday. It’s blatantly obvious that they’re run by the same person.
SIL3NTPIR8 Says:
http://www.cherrytorrents.com
marwell Says:
“An 11-minute YouTube clip containing ScT’s final IRC moments”
mahah thats mine video