Are they for you? Why or why not?
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It’s all I use. I feel like there’s less risk and they’re way more organized.
The organization and typical submission requirements are what really put them over public trackers for me.
Public tracker: It’s this big and this many files. Figure it out.*
Private tracker: All the metadata* Experience may vary. Post is overly dramatic for comedic effect
Same. Plus the quality encodes are a lot easier to find and more abundant (assuming you care about such things of course)
If you are forced to disable your vpn there is more risk. I’m not sure if some permit a vpn but I wouldn’t be trusting any of them without one.
Usually they want only your IP while signing up to be able to see if they had already banned you and you try to evade it.
Most times there was the rule that once signed up, you can turn it back on for both torrenting and browsing.I use a VPN and it’s on a kill switch, so if it gets disconnected for whatever reason, the machine can’t reach the internet at all.
I can’t imagine why a private tracker would disallow you from using a VPN
MAM used to be quite anti-VPN but I haven’t used it in years, so no idea what their take is now. They tracked quotas and stuff through your IP and required you to be online on IRC. Great content and community, but a lot of hoops to jump through.
There used to be issues with tracking ratios when using a VPN. And since many private trackers require users to maintain a specific ratio, it meant that many private trackers effectively banned VPNs. Because if you were using a VPN, you’d be stuck at a 0.00 ratio and quickly get banned.
I use a VPN and maintain a ratio. They must use something other than IP address as a unique identifier.
Even with VPN, ultimately you’re still storing everything at your house. Seedbox, preferably in the Netherlands is the way to go.
I can find most everything I want/need on public trackers, so I’ve never felt the need to jump through their hoops; however easy that would be.
If i wanted to jump through complicated hoops, I’d try paid streaming services!
I tried signing up for a few but they want me to disable my VPN … nope.
Those ones aren’t worth having.
I think I’m on a tracker with that rule too but I just ignore it. Not like they can tell.
Unless you’re on a self-hosted VPN (defeating the whole purpose), it’s not especially hard to identify VPN connections. All of the common ones are known, and many use IP ranges and reverse lookups that clearly identify the VPN/seedbox provider.
It’s a bit harder when you are connected to one that resolves to a residential-looking hostname. But again, unless it’s truly unique (defeating the purpose), simply sorting users by IP will reveal almost all of them.
Some trackers used to do this to weed out people with multiple accounts. Some of the big ones still actively detect and block (or punish) anyone connecting to their website with a VPN (torrent traffic is still generally allowed, though)
I think it depends on why you pirate. Are you doing it because you don’t want to pay? Then services like usenet and private trackers, where there is some expectation of payment (be it monetary or bandwidth) are probably not for you.
Do you pirate because you hate DRM and want to self host a robust media library that you can curate without fear of media being removed because of an expired license or something? Then you might be more into private trackers and Usenet. I spend almost as much on hard drives and Usenet subscriptions and PT donations as a Netflix account.
Or if you want films or série in a specific languages with decent quality and not too big file size
Only because I was randomly invited to one by a friend, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered with it.
I’ve only been part of one private tracker, and I got kicked from them after not logging in for a month despite meeting ratios. haven’t bothered since then
iptorrents ig lol
nah, it was digitalcore
I love my privates :)
I love your privates too 😘
I just don’t have the time for it or well, I do, but I don’t wanna put effort into mantaining ratios and whatnot. I have stuff to do that I enjoy more than be part of a internet club.
But that’s just me.
Out of curiosity, what effort is needed to maintain ratio?
At the very least, you need to keep an eye on it. Just seeding can be insufficent because of speeds, competition and popularity of things you download.
Is it a lot of effort? Probably no but in my case any effort is too much effort. Is just not my thing. I admire the spirit but I don’t have it in me.
My experience is that just seeding what you like indefinitely is not useful. You have to be proactive and find popular torrents to seed and accrue any meaningful upload amount.
The tracker I use has a bonus point system to encourage all seeders even of unpopular releases but it’s slow.
I found that the perfect solution for my use case (music) ended up being Soulseek. I don’t have much money for seedboxes or buying extra storage so I feel like I’m priced out of private trackers.
I switched to only private trackers 5 or 6 years ago and haven’t looked back.
Childish and against the spirit of piracy. Always have been.
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Public trackers are shit because of freeloaders and Stremio. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Stremio is bad?
it doesn’t seed the torrent back, only leeches
Edit: an alternative to stremio is using sequential download in qbit. that way, you can seed too
This is how I feel about people on soulseek who lock files, even more so the cunts that want things like bandcamp vouchers in return for accessing something they have. Cunts.
Being open to all and then shut down by police after 6 months doesn’t help piracy either. The upside to closed trackers is that stuff can be archived for years.
Until it gets nuked by pigs stealing everything. A decentralised pirate catalogue based on Musicbrainz is something I want to see before I die. People diverted their efforts into vulnerable private trackers instead.
I guess you never heard of what.cd
I have. It was a cult.
Great as long as it’s easy to maintain ratio. And by “easy” I mean basically not having to do anything that can’t be automated. I also don’t care enough about the harder-to-get-in trackers that I would spend a lot of time sending in screenshots of profiles of other trackers I’m on or whatever. I’m not trying to get internet points for being on the very “coolest” private trackers.
The good thing is that decent private trackers have a well maintained catalog and most content usually has at least one or two seeders even months/years after the torrent was created, and these seeders often have a ton of bandwidth.
In contrast, public trackers often falsely advertise the amount of peers in the swarm (so a torrent that’s supposedly alive is often dead). I’d say I’m grabbing about 80/20 from private/public trackers, and I seed each torrent for around 30 days. Public torrents are often so starved for somewhat decent seeders that I regularly have a ratio of 20+ after the 30 days I’m seeding for. And that’s without a seedbox, just a normal Internet connection.
In the end, both are fine. When you setup your *arr tools correctly, they usually choose a decent release automatically, whether from private or public trackers.
They’re extremely good for higher quality content such as 4K REMUX files. I have access to a private tracker that I use regularly. I only search public trackers if what I want isn’t available in the private one…which is rare.
To me it’s not about price or openness or anything. Piracy is a service issue. Private trackers have better service than public trackers. Better curated content, better seeders, and fewer (if any) shit quality re-encodes by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
They’re basically the RC Cola of Usenet. Instead of messing around with torrents and private trackers, just move on to the grownup option.
Finding public torrents for audio books is utter bullshit in my experience. Myanonamouse has a massive selection, is friendly and well organised and doesn’t have absurd rules, just reasonable ones.
I love the place.
For anything else not audio book related public trackers work just fine for me.
I really want to join them, but “sign up with your actual IP” is an unconditional dealbreaker as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t consider a VPN optional for regular web browsing. I’m definitely not turning it off for something that’s actually Illegal.
I also mainly use public trackers id love to get some good German films and so on but they are all behind a private tracker but I learned that after I setup by *arr sadly
We talking German films or German films?
The language German 😅 If you have any clue where and how I could get them without a private tracker you would make my day
Without private trackers the best way to get German content would probably be through Usenet. Scenenzbs.com would probably be the best indexer there.
Getting into some of the larger German private Torrent trackers isn’t that hard though.
Not a clue, sorry. I use Kodi and real debrid for movies/shows. I was just trying to make a scat joke.
My experience precisely. If I can’t find it on mobilism.org, off to myanonymouse. Btw they’re amazing and the servers cost a ton, small donations make a huge difference
I’ve never been unable to find films etc that I wanted on public trackers, especially with the search function on Qbittorrent. Don’t see the need for elitist wanks on private trackers
I doubt they’d even have the obscure stuff that won’t download… Hold on…
The only one sitting at 0% is “Vacuuming Completely Nude In Paradise”, an odd British film. I doubt even a private tracker would have that
Many private trackers, and even a few public ones, have a request forum. The private ones reward users that fill these requests, so they are often effective.
There are some very accessible private trackers (sometimes referred to as semi-private) that meet these requirements. Once you get set up, they can be very set-and-forget. Just avoid the forums.
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Yay, one film in the last two years that I could’ve obtained if I had a private tracker instead of public ones
Think I’ll survive, thanks! 😁
Replying to say that I will check mine tomorrow. Too late tonight.
Edit: Mine did not have this film. :(
It is diverting the content from public torrents for the sole reason that no one can be bothered to make decentralised cataloguing work better than in the early 1990s in my very biased opinion.
