Have any of the successors rebuilt that?
I've never seen anything like this. I understand that raising the bar to entry is good for a community. What ever happened to having a seedbox and provable good ratios elsewhere.
Is the community/content exceptional?
The content was probably taken wholesale from the original What.CD interview. I think What.CD wanted to ensure that people uploading new content (a core part of a private tracker) were able to distinguish obvious FLAC>MP3>FLAC conversions, since most lossy codecs have a lowpass filter which would be quite obvious with spectral analysis.
Turning off VPN etc is probably to allow the tracker to fingerprint you, and make sure that rule-breakers aren't blatantly attempting to register for a new account.
> Is the community/content exceptional?
I think many people treated What.CD's interview and progression as a stepping stone into other private trackers, since their invite forums (available once you upload enough content) were exceptional.
What's successors (RED and Orpheus) are carrying on in the same fashion.
Might be easier to try to find an acquaintance with invites though.
I wish that was the case; we all moved on to streaming services. Now though I want to return and backup everything I've paid for over the decades, as well as hunt down some rarities.