[gioo]

The common advice is to start out on RED (Redacted) by doing the interview, and climbing the pyramid from there. Use official recruitement to join other trackers, and with some patience you'll eventually have everything you need.

[mindslight]

What really bugs me about these popular private trackers' interview processes is they too discriminate against VPNs. Like I know they think they have some private community of completely trustworthy angels, but I'm still not going to stick my non-anonymized neck out.

So then what, find public Wifi somewhere to do their "interview" from, that they'll pass for a non-shared IP address? And then hang around there all day until your turn for the interview comes up? That's the conclusion I came to last time I looked at Red's requirements years ago.

Also I just assume the interview processes have gotten much more competitive and inhuman due to the popularity, like everything these days. I got my Oink account by joining the IRC channel, and just asking nicely in a way that demonstrated a modicum of technical knowledge and reasonableness.

[gioo]

It's all by design, invite selling/trading is a big problem in the tracker world and tracker staff often force people to use their home IP to register for this reason. By having your home IP they can easily ban all your accounts if you are caught breaking some golden rule.

The interview process is not bad, it's just particularly slow in the case of RED. Especially frustating for europeans because most volunteers are in an american timezone and so interviews often happen in the middle of the night (in Europe). OPS has faster interviews but you want to join RED if you want to climb the tracker ladder, so passing through OPS basically just adds some delay.

Anyway, if you value your anonymity this much, maybe private trackers aren't for you.

[that_guy_iain]

> invite selling/trading is a big problem in the tracker world and tracker staff often force people to use their home IP to register for this reason.

It really isn't that much of a problem. Hell even ratio cheats aren't actually a problem. If you have a ratio based torrent site fundamentally someone has to have negative ratio for the site to function. Ratio cheats basically add download to others because they download. I'm of the opinion a lot of tracker staff are just nerds who power trip. And honestly, from my experience it's largely true. Simply, torrent sites have gotten away with power tripping and creating this image that people who buy and trade torrent accounts are a problem when you can literally talk you way up the chain within 6-12 months. It's really not that hard if someone wanted to infriate them, just say you're willing to code for them and boom you got yourself a staff position with access to the database and servers. Do that well, you'll get yourself a few more, you'll get friendly with staff at other trackers they'll invite you. Literally, it would be the easiest uncover role within the cyber world. And there probably aren't that many that are easier overall.

> Anyway, if you value your anonymity this much, maybe private trackers aren't for you.

This is sure a valid point. Your data 100% is not save with private trackers. Nothing is safe with then. They act all high and mighty but holy shit will they share you data like no ones business and publically out you, steal money from the "server fund" (personally I never had a problem with it but it was always drama ScT's exit was funny), etc.

[gioo]

It's not really a problem because they don't want people joining the tracker in general. It's about accountability, exclusivity and the quality of the user base. Invites being for sale means any random person could join, hindering the exclusivity and likely the quality of the userbase (a good user is already in other trackers and could join with other means). And of course, it also means that the user who bought the invite is more likely to break the golden rules because them getting tree banned is of no concern to them.

From the staff's POV it is very much a problem and some trackers are famous to drop the hammer at the slightest violation of the golden rules.

[that_guy_iain]

> a good user is already in other trackers and could join with other means

Actually, these users are generally deadbeat users. They're good at providing upload and buffering accounts but that is it. They don't make your community any better, they're spread out over multiple communities.

For example, back in the day I was on UK-T, SCC, ScT, FSC, FTN, BTN, HDBit, etc. I didn't really download much from any of them specifically. I created buffers and what not and kept my accounts alive. Like FTN I never used, for me it was actually not that good. But when I started out I just had LeechersLair, I was very active in the community, very active with comments, very active downloading and seeding because it was only account. So the good users for these sites are actually people who end up on my accidentally, aren't active in the generaly torrent scene and aren't looking for anything else. They'll make the forums better by being active there with unique content, they'll make the chat unique instead of conversations that carry on over from other chats (Been there done that), they'll file requests, etc. They'll be more active. The people who are all over the place are often deadbeats in terms of community value, if that makes sense.

> some trackers are famous to drop the hammer at the slightest violation of the golden rules.

So true, I once rejected from a so-called high level tracker FTWR (follow the white rabbit) because one guy was pissed I once said on a forum "Torrent trackers should be happy we use them." they're soo up themselves. Imagine thinking your users owe you something. The aim is to get users and get good users.

[gioo]

> Actually, these users are generally deadbeat users. They're good at providing upload and buffering accounts but that is it. They don't make your community any better, they're spread out over multiple communities.

You do have a point, I guess it boils down to the definition of a 'good user'. Like you said, someone joining from an invite they bought is likely gonna be more active. From the staff's POV the activity of an account is of secondary importance though, and the respect of golden rules is paramount. Tree-bans often end up banning users with high userclasses and (very) active accounts.

From my POV as a normal user, I like the tracker being active but I don't like the web of trust being broken. An invite-only club is good because everyone was invited by a trusted member; if you can just buy your way in it's different.

Anyway, the TL;DR is that at the end of the day your personal interests change depending on what position you're in (staff, normal user, etc.) and while you as an user may not mind people buying invites because of passive benefits, the tracker staff has different priorities and definitely does mind.

[fruitreunion1]

The interviews are not too difficult if you know your digital audio well and can memorize/look up a few facts. The hard part is waiting in the queue...

I'm not sure if they will allow public wifi either if it doesn't look like a residential IP. It's unfortunate... I too wish many trackers didn't do this. Totally worth it for me though. I'll just hope future me doesn't have to suffer the consequences :)

They can probably build quite a specific profile based on my searches and snatchlists, lol. There's no privacy in private trackers for the user.

[Roark66]

Can I ask, what do people download via those private trackers? I never had problems finding anything I wanted using public tpb proxies etc.

[that_guy_iain]

For me, it's generally the same as private trackers but a few differences. Very little - almost zero chance of viruses in the apps. The speeds are way faster, this is very noticable on older stuff. There is no bait and switch.

For niche stuff you can even find the super hard to find. Want to find the tv version of episode 12 of season 3 of Flashpoint, there is a site where that is possible.

Some have communities which are super useful if you're into those. But if you just want to download and get good speeds, a general tracker like TorrentLeech is pretty much all you need.

[theshrike79]

Reliable source for movies and TV-Shows - even rare ones.

And zero chance of being picked up by copyright watchdogs who download the whole swarm's IP addresses and send legal notices to each one fishing for ISPs that will give their user's data without a warrant.

[symlinkk]

“Zero chance” is bullshit, they could easily join a private tracker and look for IPs, they just don’t currently because private trackers are not widely known.

[akiselev]

They’re widely known enough to have their own wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_sit...

One site on that list, for example, TorrentLeech.org has been around for almost 18 years and has hundreds of thousands of active users. In fifteen years I’ve never had an issue.

There are also foreign language trackers that are largely immune like rutracker.org - you just have to make sure to download the English versions

[suddenclarity]

Is TL really the same site it used to be? I have a vague memory of losing my account and the site shutting down 10+ years ago. When they came back, they offered open sign-up now and then. Made me avoid it.

[that_guy_iain]

Well my account has been active for 15 years. I've never had any period where I can remember that it wasn't working.

[katbyte]

last they had open signups checked it out and i didn't find it to be anything special or give me a reason to move away from IPT (which is from what i understand mid tier?)

so of course i didn't use it enough and was banned for inactivity

[miki123211]

It's actually harder than it sounds. To scrape IPs from a public tracker, all you need to do is to download the torrent, pretend to the tracker that you want to join the swarm (without actually sharing any content) and you get a nice list. On a private tracker, all your activity is linked to an account and the tracker knows how much you upload / download. If you are a copyright owner, actually seeding content is probably a terrible idea for legal reasons, and you'll quickly run afoul of ratio requirements and get banned if you do not do so. Besides, if users report which torrents they're getting copyright complaints on, it won't be hard for staff to figure out which account tried downloading all of those and has 0 upload activity on them.

[mindslight]

Copyright trolls not being able to upload chunks seems like a myth along the lines of "if you ask a cop if they're a cop, they have to say yes". It's easy enough to create a separate legal entity that doesn't have any rights to distribute a work, and then sign an indemnification agreement for any copyright violation that happens in the course of investigation. And if you wanted to be real paranoid, mod the client to never transmit say 20% of chunks, so even if some court finds that participating in a swarm at the behest of a copyright holder is constructive distribution, that last 20% is still actionable.

[miki123211]

Even if this is true, there are several difficulties with this approach, you'd need to figure out a way to refuse clients from countries where you have exclusivity deals and aren't allowed to distribute, which would quickly be noticed. Besides, if the problem got big enough, tracker staff could require users to seed a few different torrents from different studios before having their accounts fully unlocked, and studios would never seed others' copyrighted content. Sure, you could defeat that with studios having contract between each other and so on, but that's yet another difficult problem for them to solve.

The risk and effort is probably not worth the reward, considering how many public tracker users are there.

[Dylan16807]

Both of those sound like the kind of shenanigans a judge wouldn't look kindly on.

[theshrike79]

Close (enough) to zero then.

Most good private trackers have an invite system, you can't just join one on a whim and get access.

Their process is profitable enough just by scanning the well known ones so they don't need to bother with trying to get access to private trackers.

[fruitreunion1]

Well, depending on your tastes some stuff can be hard to find especially if you want lossless copies. Other nice features are the user collages, comments, and great organisation which are pros over something similar like Soulseek.

[serf]

in the case of What.CD there was a community of music makers that released exclusively or very close to the tracker community.

One of the great losses from the shutdown of that site was the destruction of that creative community.

[npteljes]

Private trackers moderate torrents, and peers can use this to their benefit. Formats and naming are more standardized, software has less chance of malware.