Notes on Private Trackers | Hacker News Reader

Notes on Private Trackers

jenn.site

68 pointssurprisetalk59 comments

> Friends in other private trackers, including RED, inform me that actually maintaining ratio isn't that hard! I'm not sure why this would be the case, so I don't really believe them.

I don't know how public the data would be, but it sounds like it'd be interesting to check! Looking at myanonamouse they demand a global seed ratio of 1 [0]. Naively that seems like it'd be logically impossible to maintain. What if some altruist with a powerful connection decides to make a habit of maintaining a ratio of 2? They're going to crowd someone out to a ratio of lower than 1 by the pidgeonhole principle; the aggregate number of downloads should match the number of uploads.

So either everyone has to hit a ratio of 1 which seems like it'd be hard to coordinate, or there have to be free riders.

[0] https://www.myanonamouse.net/rules.php

Some trackers solve this by having certain torrents not count towards your download, only towards upload. Usually older torrents, or those in need of being seeded.

This, coupled with other rules, such as that you need to seed a torrent at least X amount of time after finishing it, helps to maintain a healthy site.

I know from using myanonamouse that you only need to seed for about 3 weeks after downloading to satisfy their rules, I think they artificially grant you an upload amount of whatever you downloaded.

72 hours with one month.

You can buy upload credit with seeding bonus on some trackers, and there are nearly always freeleech downloads that don’t count against your downloads, but do count for uploads. It’s usually quite easy to maintain a ratio.

In practice this is less of a concern for a few reasons:

- They often designate items as "freeleech," which means that downloading does not cost you ratio, but uploading still credits you.

- They often provide free credits at various times, especially for new members.

- They tend to have a soft cap, so the automated warning systems don't even start until users dip below 0.9-0.95.

- As much as these sites have, there is always something they don't have, and providing it will get you a relatively high share of the total upload.

Bear in mind that the primary driver for the site is ensuring access to everything that is available.

Almost every private tracker has a bonus point system: you are awarded bonus points for seeding (usually non-linearly, where the longer you seed the more points you earn for that torrent per hour) and can exchange them for upload credit.

There's also often various situations where downloading a file costs less for you than the upload credit it gives to others. Most commonly this is via freeleech where a download is not credited (but the corresponding upload credit still is awarded).

I would say that maintaining ratio is not actually a big deal these days in the world of private trackers writ large. These days bandwidth is cheap, storage is (or used to be) cheap, the communities are older and more long term oriented. On many of the best trackers the ratio system is essentially symbolic. RED (from the OP) is a notable exception and one of the only notable trackers where maintaining a ratio actually requires some work--their ratio system is much closer to zero sum.

For MAM specifically, FTA:

> Also they give you credit for seeding as long as you keep the file available, which is very generous. (Most other places count seeding the standard way, which means your upload number only goes up when someone else actually grabs file pieces from you. This can make it difficult to maintain "ratio" - for your uploads to be equivalent or higher than your downloads.)

In practice, my "real" ratio (the actual uploaded bytes / downloaded bytes) is 0.2, but after my credits it is 7.0 (far above the recommended 2.0). It's basically impossible to not meet the ratio requirement for MAM if you're putting a small amount of thought into it.

Other trackers have different rules. On TorrentLeech for instance, every torrent above 10 GB in size is "FreeLeech" (doesn't count as a download). Since that site is intended for movies, TV, and games (which are usually always above 10 GB in size anyway) it basically means you never have to worry about ratio.

I am not on RED but I imagine most people use automation software like autobrr to "race" (to download a new torrent as quickly as possible after creation so everyone else has to download from you).

Autobrr just got a lot of people banned (at least temporarily) on TL due to a bug that flooded them.

Yep, I saw that too -- about a week after I set it up for myself. Thankfully the default settings are aligned with the rules so I was not affected. I guess it just demonstrates that if you are using automation and you're not using the default settings you better completely understand what you're doing.

Due to how BitTorrent tracker (the actual tracker part, as defined in BEP-3) works, you can cheat your reported upload. There is way to detect obvious cheater (if you claimed that you uploaded 1Tb on Torrent XYZ but the cumulative download on XYZ on the same period doesn't add up, that's sus), but due to the self-report nature of stats and potential loss and inaccuracy in the stats tracking (a legit client can report more upload than upload due to packet loss on the receiving end, how when the client stops counting, for example if a process was killed before sending the stats to the tracker). And due to the fact that it's p2p, you usually need to track and analyze behavior over several torrents to be sure. If torrent XYZ has 300Go download reported over a day, but over the same day seeder1 report 200Go uploaded and seeder2 report 150Go, you know it's likely that one of them is lying, but you don't know each one.

Here is an open secret : A lot of private tracker operator are not dev. Some of them just know how to host a phpBB and one of the open-source tracker and administer it, and that's it. Many private trackers have little to no custom dev done to them. So most of them don't have elaborate cheating detection.

Cheating will get you ban, but if you are subtle about it and don't try to claim enormous amount over little time, you can get away with it.

The proper way to cheat is to not leave a trace on the tracker where a tracker staff may or may not make correct judgement. It's called "ghost leeching." Basically you directly connect to known peers' IPs (e.g. from some heavy seedbox users) and never even report anything back to the tracker.

Of course, those peers where you ghost leech of then would correctly report the upload they generate (making THEM look suspicious of cheating by "over-reporting" upload.) It's impossible for any tracker staff to properly detect and attribute proper cheating in such cases, unless they can detect a pattern. The tracker staff objectively can only catch people that do really stupid things.

That's just the way BitTorrent and private tracker economics work. A "private" tracker is more like a social contract between its users to do the honourable thing, but you'll always have some idiots that do not get that, of course.

The limitation with ghost leeching is that it won't help raise your ratio. It's a way to avoid decreasing it (by never reporting download). If your ratio is bad and for reasons you want to increase it, you will have to generate upload one way or another. You can ghost leech and then seed the torrent you downloaded, but it can also look weird that you are now seeding a torrent that you never downloaded. But due to the nature of torrent, it is also possible.

But that's what I find fascinating. BitTorrent is a very cool tech, and not that hard to understand. It uses a lot of simple idea that works very well together. It's really fun to hack on it. And I add an obsession with findings 'cheating' methods a few years back. Overall, as you said, it's more of a social contract. None cared unless it was stupidly obvious.

This is almost never worth it with most sites and generous bonus points.

If you see a few TBs on a Seedbox or your server for a year, you are pretty setup for life on most sites.

It isn't hard to work out that it's impossible for a forum to maintain a true 1:1 ratio based solely on reported byte counts. First, you have the obvious bootstrapping problem, which is that on day 1, no matter what is uploaded, nobody has any right to download anything because everyone has only uploaded zero bytes.

So you may think "ah, I'll start with an allowance". Just count everyone as having uploaded, let's say for concreteness, 1GB. The next problem is that each file transfer means moving that around like it's money; 1000 bytes downloaded for me is exactly 1000 bytes uploaded by you. But then, again for concreteness, let's say someone puts up a popular torrent and everybody downloads their 1GB directly from this guy. (Imagine they do it in sequence and then don't seed themselves or whatever.) The person with the popular torrent now has all the credit in the system. Then they walk away. Everyone who leaves the system and never comes back, or is just generally unavailable, is taking credit out of the system with them. This is the ongoing problem with the system.

So you must have some sort of mechanism for acquiring "ratio" other than actually uploading something. Fortunately, simply rewarding people for seeding is pretty good. It incentivizes people to seed things that otherwise would be left behind. Even better is to give even more reward for things others aren't seeding. This tends to turn your tracker into a persistent library, with even old things still available, rather than a competition to beat everyone to the popular torrents so that we can download things before everyone else so hopefully we can upload more than we downloaded. I'm sure this isn't perfect but it's a lot better than a rigid ratio system. You just have to deal with people who think it's not "fair" to give out ratio for just hosting things that nobody downloads.

It depends on the "ratio economy" of the tracker.

Some are very hard: Bibliotik offers very few opportunities to build ratio. Very few people download any given random book, and there is no source of free credit. The economy is very feudal with no real inflation.

Some are easy: the ratio requirement on btn is nominal, and the real requirement is that you seed single shows for at least a day and seasons for a week. The system especially penalizes 'Hit and Run' downloads (i.e., not seeding for the required amount of time) rather than overall ratio. This acknowledges the ephemeral interest of a given TV show, and that each new show release is effectively a 'holiday' event.

MAM credits you with points that can be used to buy upload credit or to make downloading a given torrent not count against your total bytes downloaded (freeleech)

Torrentleech has a point system as well and also automatically makes torrents above a certain size freeleech.

For both, the accumulation of points is so generous that you'll really only run into ratio issues if you go looking for them. Hell, MAM has so many people that are perpetually sitting with the maximum amount of points available and fantastic ratios that they have lotteries where users with more points than they could ever spend can spend them gambling on upload credit, but with the ability to spend more on a ticket to increase the prize (but not increase the odds of them winning). The practical upshot of this is that users who don't increase the prize get a much higher expected value for an entry than users that do, and those users i talked about that have more points than they can spend essentially use those points to buy other users download credits.

You're absolutely right that the base torrenting system is one where someone has to upload every byte that's downloaded and vice versa but these trackers are designed to ensure that basically anyone who makes a good

In Hungary the biggest private tracker, which is a vocation to use here, solved this by abolishing the ratio system. When you download something you have to seed it for a net 48 hours inside 1 month OR until you seed it back to 1.0 ratio. In each month you can download 10 torrents w/o following this rule. There is no regular ratio system, no freelech torrents etc.

385k users, 750k torrents, 2,6 petabyte of data, 8.6m seeders out of 9.1m connections. Simple as that. https://files.catbox.moe/ogcrpl.png

I've never sat down and read how seeding/bonus point/etc rules work at MAM, never uploaded my own content, or otherwise tried to optimise anything. I open the site, download what I want, close it, and every so often when I'm running out of hard drive space I clear out everything super old.

I still have 569 freeleech tokens and bonus points are always capped at 99999. It's a very easy site to maintain ratio (mine is 13) on.

so simply then ratio isn't just dl/up

bibliotek is an interesting one, and one of the most exclusive trackers around.

They have very high requirements as their entire purpose is archival. You can't download anything without uploading new content first.

It's probably the most complete archive of niche books in existence - it's a librarian's wet dream. No wonder LLM training used it, and probably paid a lot of money to someone for access.

A Faustian library, containing every book known but you aren't allowed to read them all without being evicted from the library.

I'll actually contradict you on this, while certainly bibliotek is one of those harder to get into and "survive" private tracker is nothing compared to "The* Network" with trackers like TheOccult, TheVault and so on... on these trackers you are actually required to take a interview with some of the staff members, if you ever manage to even get into one of them your activity will be heavily monitored by admins and moderators with god complex and they will decide if you are fit enough to be appart of that community... especially the admins of TheOccult they are extraordinarily strict and insane.. But again they actually host and share some very very rare books, but you need to contribute heavily to even access them...

It's funny that private trackers are now more about ensuring uploads are high quality and properly labeled, and that people actually seed, than they are about dodging copyright enforcement.

Reflective of the times. Most people on the internet don't know how to install a torrent client, or even download a file. (Because most people on the internet are on a phone. I don't even know if it's possible to torrent on a phone.) And the stuff people download is mostly "free" anyway via Netflix, Spotify and other content streaming services. A download no longer represents a lost $50 Blu-ray or $20 CD sale to the bean counters, it represents a lost $0.01 streaming royalty. It seems like the only time copyright enforcement bares its teeth these days is for live sports matches.

> I don't even know if it's possible to torrent on a phone.

Very possible for over a decade.

> that private trackers are now

This has always been the case for, or at least has been for as far back as I remember. Maybe you’re mixing up public and private trackers?

> Friends in other private trackers, including RED, inform me that actually maintaining ratio isn't that hard! I'm not sure why this would be the case, so I don't really believe them.

If, say, you have tons of torrents seeding all the time, and you don't download very often, how is that hard to believe?

The easiest way to get upload on trackers is to upload your own content, on Red that's not very complicated if you have access to a library or another more obscure source of CDs that might not exist on the site yet.

The other way that requires more storage and longer term commitment is just to seed everything you download forever, including things that you grab on freeleech events or with tokens (A "bonus" given out on Red that you can redeem for a free download).

Unlike public trackers, private trackers are largely filled with seeders with very few leechers. If 50 people have a file and one person goes to download you are only getting a tiny slice of that at best and for small files there may not even be enough chunks to get anything at all.

It makes no sense to me since bandwidth is so cheap compared to 20+ years ago and I think the incentives should instead encourage variety and availability like a distributed, highly-available, P2P archive.

> .. I think the incentives should instead encourage variety and availability like a distributed, highly-available, P2P archive.

Which is exactly what it is like for many trackers these days. They have an "economy" where some type of bonus point system allows you to buy upload credits. You often acquire this by either simply seeding over time, or by uploading special torrents with rewards, eg double upload credits, etc.

Some trackers even double down on this concept and basically only care about long term seeding. Ratio doesn't matter as much if you're seeding 24/7.

I haven't tried to join any in the last 2-3 years but I can see changes within some of the more progressive private trackers I can access. Hopefully the trend continues.

Protip: Orpheus exists for those who don't want to bother with Red's antiquated system that forces people to "play the game/economy" instead of just downloading what you want, uploading a little and seeding ad vitam eternam.

The only downside is that it's missing some stuff (which you can find elsewhere, usually) but you can be part of the solution.

> The only downside is that it's missing some stuff

Which is literally the reason why trackers that aim at variety use the "antiquated system". Trackers that don't care about the long tail so much because they aim for popular content and accept that old torrents will get stale / unseeded can easily be ratioless. It's a simple case of "can't have it both ways".

Not really. See AB and its generous system yet very well furnished selection. Orpheus is simply less popular.

I take issues with you calling it "antiquated", when it's just a different approach and both are valid and depend on a lot of factors if they are the right one for the specific community.

I guess you're right. Still, hate the kind of system that forces people to upload random garbage instead of rewarding long term seeding (especially of stuff with no or a single other seed), it's not a healthy relation with music. Mind you, I also find Orpheus too easy.

Still, if there's at least one thing that deserves the "antiquated" qualifier on both Orpheus and (I think?) Red, it's the FLAC-doesn't-trump-MP3 garbage rule that make people litter the sites with crap just to gain ratio.

That rule is always polarizing, but there's many people who don't like to download FLAC as it's too large, or they don't want to keep seeding FLAC forever if they just convert it to V0 or 320 right away anyway. I'd agree that we don't need that many lossy formats though.

As a longtime RED user, I can say I've not done anything other than just download what I want and let it sit for a while, uploading maybe a couple dozen items, and I've never come close to having a problem.

I think you're fighting ghosts that don't exist if you just let stuff seed for a while after downloading, a.k.a. just being a decent tracker member.

Rest in peace What . C D

Stupid question, but what are trackers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_tracker

Torrent trackers. Basically the index that let's your search for and find torrents, private ones are invite only. Common for rare music or better sources of films, and so on.

A "private tracker" is basically a speakeasy for media piracy.

It's BitTorrent, so it's peer-to-peer, but it's exclusive and secretive to avoid letting in surveillance bots that get everyone threatening letters from their ISPs.

Not that stupid, considering the word Torrent doesn't appear above the fold. Took me a while to figure out as well.

I wish there was a good way for uncool people like me to score an invite to such things...

As mentioned in the article, myanonamouse has been the easy entry point into these trackers for a while now. They have an invite window opening up in a couple of days: https://www.myanonamouse.net/inviteapp.php

Can anyone help me understand the benefits of joining a private tracker? I get it for music, or ebooks, etc. More niche stuff can be hard to find (even less niche stuff, in fact). But for TV or movies I don’t think I’ve ever really had trouble finding something. Always able to find something high quality, always with plenty of seeders. Even old obscure British shows, etc.

Also, unrelated, but I set up Claude with some tools for searching for torrents and managing my downloads. It’s interesting. If I word my request bluntly, it’ll refuse on copyright grounds, but if I ease it in and get it to search for info about the show first, “does there happen to be a good download available for this”, etc, then it’ll happily suggest the best rip, the source with the most seeders, even “the one it would pick”.

Are you american?

Here in the balkans, if you want anything local, you must find some private sharing site/tracker/forum with magnet links/etc., since no one really leaves stuff seeding on eg. piratebay for a long time (private trackers force you in a way), so much of the stuff becomes unavailable very soon.

The new avengers movie or whatever "globally popular" will always be available on every public tracker, but trying to find a good quality version of "Hajde da se volimo" is a pain :)

British, living in Canada :) but close enough.

And ok, fair. But to be clear I’m not just downloading avengers-tier stuff! e.g. I’ve been downloading some French films from the 70s recently and had no trouble at all. But yes I can imagine that it’ll differ a lot by region. Thanks.

There's a lot of content on private trackers that's not available on the public internet, especially when it's more local or obscure content. You'll always find the latest US tv shows or Hollywood movies everywhere, and will for many years but when you want to look for things like Austrian movies from the 80s, a specific country edition of a given CD or a vinyl ripped with a specific turntable and needle you'll need to be on a private tracker or private forum.

If that's not what you are after, it's not worth it. It's just a very specific hobby.

Movies? If you want Blu-Ray remuxes or ISOs (you do, cf 2nd paragraph) of non-mainstream stuff, it can be a bit hard on public trackers.

But I do somewhat agree with you that you get less for you effort with TV/movies, since in my experience, there's less focus on quality: encoders really don't know what they're doing compared to the anime world and metadata is often partial/absent (I rarely see the BD provenance and almost never internally hosted screenshots).

For TV or movies the benefits of a private tracker are minimal. You can definitely get by with only a public tracker.

The slight advantages are:

- On average I find the download speeds faster and the seeders more reliable. Say for example a torrent has 2 seeders 0 leechers -- on a public tracker I might not even attempt it, but on a private tracker that has a good chance of being a very fast download.

- A bit more selection if you're picky about formats, size, etc. If you're trying to download The Godfather Pt. 1 for instance, you can find that anywhere. But if you want a specific file format of a specific size to quality ratio, you're more likely to find that on a private tracker.

- Private trackers usually have some sort of request system if you really can't find something anywhere. Presumably someone will eventually satisfy that request. This can be hit or miss though since not every tracker has appropriate incentives to request fulfillers.

I mostly only torrent ebooks/audiobooks, and I use MAM. I haven't run into anything on MAM that I couldn't find on Anna's Archive or a public tracker like AudiobookBay. But I still use MAM since it has a higher chance of having the specific file format I prefer (m4b), and being a very fast download.

I recently downloaded all 10 seasons of The French Chef. I doubt it would have been possible to find them in consistent quality, or at all. They are from the 1960s.

Please don’t bring normie attention to our communities.

The private tracker elitism really needs to stop. The sheer amount of mod power trips and fake elitism is really quite annoying.

The site staff work for free. You can imagine the sheer number of ignorant entitled users and organized bad actors they have to deal with every day. Can't really blame them for not getting it right 100% of the time. I think a healthy dose of elitism is good to protect the community.

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