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unnouinceput

1 - Pirate bay still exists and is very much alive.

2 - Rarbg was a margin note in torrent community. There are others very much alive and better.

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> Rarbg was a margin note in torrent community

It was the 4th largest according to TorrentFreak: https://torrentfreak.com/top-torrent-sites/

Rarbg was also notable because it was public, you didn't need an account, and it was a lot more accessible (and safer) than other sites. Even TPB eventually required a bunch of JS just to see anything and they'd use that JS for shady things like crypto mining.

I wonder why there's no LimeTorrent on this list.

"Better" is a matter of opinion, but it certainly isn't a "margin note". Rarbg was one of the most popular torrent sites in the world. Torrent Freak puts it as #4 most popular in the world, ahead of The Pirate Bay, though I am not sure of their methodology.

https://torrentfreak.com/top-torrent-sites/

Of those most popular sites, I think it was by far the best. It offered consistently good encodes, with about the best achievable quality for a given file size, in a variety of formats and resolutions. Its files were well-organized with a user-friendly browser and a wealth of metadata. It was possible to quickly find a good version of anything not too obscure.

Compare to TPB, where searches just vomit a page of often-mislabeled files the user must comb through manually. Compare to YIFY/YTS, which uploads bitrate-starved "HD" schlock that looks worse than rarbg's 480p.

You could search using the IMDB ID/url suffix, which almost always gave you exactly what you wanted. RIP.

> Compare to YIFY/YTS, which uploads bitrate-starved "HD" schlock that looks worse than rarbg's 480p.

YES. I have always wondered why YTS is popular, as the quality is always overstated and always garbage. sorry but 1 MBPS is not "HD", no matter what codec you are using.

Because HD literally means 1280×720, and there are no guarantees of quality ?

> Rarbg was a margin note in torrent community

really?

i very much preferred it over pb or kat

Please indicate which is better. Where can I click on "top 100" or similar, and instantly see a page full of recent releases with screenshots, synopsis, and comments one click away?

Rutracker is the best. You need to understand some russian. But everything is there.

Google Translate is your friend here. RUTracker has excellent quality music - often complete label discographies too.

1337x is a very good alternative.

Use Usenet tbh. NZBGeek offers many of the same features that RARBG did.

You can try cloudtorrents.com

> There are others very much alive and better.

Can you please tell me which ones or point me to a place that does?

Yes, you just have to join a certain private tracker that makes you wait for an interview. Then, once you're in, you have to seed for a bunch of time or fulfill requests that others have. Once you have gained enough reputation (which will be tracked with some weird point system), you are given access to a forum where people give out invites to their cooler secret clubs. Rinse and repeat this a couple of times and you can be in the cool kids club private trackers.

check the sidebar of r/trackers

Better? Which ones?

Private ones that are invite only, like PTP, BTN, RED, Bib, etc.—the public tracker community really pales in comparison.

Public trackers have the advantage that they often don't even require accounts. If a private site ever gets raided, they'll have a ton of records like everything you've ever seeded, every IP you've used, the email address you signed up with, anything in your profile or comments that could be used to identify you etc. Way more risky than accessing a public website where all they ever see is a random IP address that viewed a page or made a search. If magnet links are available the site won't even have a record of what you actually downloaded.

Yeah and private trackers often ban VPN IPs because it would allow their 'enemies' to get in more easily.

But indeed it means that you are very exposed if the site ever gets taken down. And what we've seen in the netherlands: The site owners often hand everything over when they're caught because they're threatened with huge fines.

so... unless you can send us invites, your suggestions are not really useful to us

Let the kid flex, will ya

The top tier ones are hard to get into, but plenty of good ones open up from time to time for signups, e.g. TorrentLeech is open now: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenSignups/comments/13wwg7w/torren...

There are still pathways into these trackers, which usually require luck or some amount of work on feeder trackers before you get an invite. I got in through the unofficial Reddit tracker BaconBits (RIP) back in the day—YMMV, but it doesn't change the fact that there are better trackers out there.

Unless I've known someone for a decade, they're not getting an invite.

Thanks for the confirmation that "you're not really useful to us" remains a valid statement.

good thing I wasn't asking you then :)

1337x

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