I decided to share this here too since sailors don’t seem to visit !opensignups@lemmy.ml and the murky waters of the orange sea should be seldom visited anymore.

Site stats as of 2024-01-06

Links to more info about private trackers here:

for the brave

if you dare a journey that might lead you to the Davy Jones’ locker, the once locked down waters of r/OpenSignups and a newcomer r/trackersignups are places for the brave to check out

Taken from the orange seas wiki which we don’t seem to have here?

► What is a private tracker?

Private trackers are loosely defined as private torrent sites where a membership is required in order to download their torrents. An accurate description would separate private trackers into 2 parts: the tracker itself and the website that accompanies it. A torrent tracker is a server that tracks peers in a torrent swarm and assigns/connects peers to each other based on its own internal criteria. The tracker then reports to the website which, on top of providing a download link to the torrent file, will display all relevant info for that torrent, including peer/seed counts and optionally a peer list if the website operator chooses to include it.

Unlike public trackers, these are not a free-for-all buffet. You need to contribute back (by uploading) a certain amount proportional to the amount you have “taken” from the tracker. This arrangement can vary a lot from tracker to tracker. Private trackers track this balance of contribution by a “ratio”, which is simply a ratio of uploaded data, divided by your downloaded data. If you downloaded a total of 2GB and uploaded a total of 4GB, that would make your ratio a 2.0. Trackers will sometimes have different methods of maintaining an acceptable ratio, either by offering bonuses the longer you keep your torrents seeding, to providing “half-leech” or “freeleech” content. Freelech content is the most commonly used method, which means the torrent that is marked as freeleech is free to download, meaning it does not count against your Download stats, giving you an opportunity to gain upload from it without sacrificing any “download buffer”. Some torrent trackers are “ratioless”, meaning they don’t require you to maintain any sort of ratio in order to keep using the site, they just require a minimum seed-time on all downloaded torrents (which is usually also a requirement on ratio pure trackers, but typically the seed-time isn’t as lengthy as on ratioless trackers).

  • spiritedpause@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    Now that DHT makes trackers unnecessary in order to find torrents, what’s the point of private trackers other than gatekeeping?

    • SchizoDenji@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      DHT is asked to be disabled in most private trackers. Also the retention is quite good, you can find obscure stuff easily and you can request if you don’t find something.

    • hottari@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Choice. You’ll find some torrents you fancy on public trackers with 2 seeders uploading at 15kBs. Also no more New_Spiderman_CAM_1XBet.avi torrents.

    • aStonedSanta@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I’m confused by this but have minimal knowledge. I have a lot of trouble with my radarr/sonarr downloading files is there a way I can use DHT to help?

      • spiritedpause@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Which search indexers are you using in radarr/sonarr?

        DHT allows discovery of torrents by pinging the IP addresses from an existing torrent, and asking them what other files they’re sharing. It then pings the other IP addresses seeding those files, and asks them what they’re sharing, and so on.

        You can either use a torrent search index site (many of them use DHT to create their database) or you can self host your own DHT crawler and have your own personal torrent search index, but the downside is it uses a decent amount of space to store the index.

        BitMagnet is the best self hosted DHT indexer if you’re interested: https://github.com/bitmagnet-io/bitmagnet