I recognize this is probably similar to asking about how to get into fight club, but any tips on how to find a private tracker? I assume it involves becoming part of a community, but I don’t even know where to start looking for the communities!
Been so long since I've even been in the community that I don't know any of the smaller forums but check out https://filesharingtalk.com/content/. Get known for being active and if there is still an IRC pop by there. The key once you're past the standard ones like TL, is to not be that hungry for invites, the less hungry you are the more places you get to. Maybe check out https://thepiratesociety.org/ which used to be a solid community 10 years ago but I dunno how it is nowadays.
Or you can just buy one. https://www.ebay.com/itm/143939358334 for example is $2 and is the private (semi public - all the benefits of private but easy to get). It's the one I use. Buying invites can lead to getting banned but if you're just chilling out on TL then you'll be fine.
A tip for private trackers. Only download new things and freeleech until you build up a buffer (You've uploaded more than you've downloaded)
Personally, I would suggest this. Use the seedbox for the first month downloading new freeleech torrents and build up a few TB buffer and use it worry free for years.
This is why I gave the cavet that it's only worth doing if you're just going to use TL. If you're not into the whole tracker ladder thing then buying TL is kinda a safe bet, it's semi public. TL just care about money, I wouldn't be shocked to find out that TL has been sold a few times.
Previously, when I was really into torrenting I climbed the ladder really well, I was in the forum sections where staff would share the details of banned users. They mostly cared about cheaters, unless it was a small site trying to be exclusive. I knew people who would go to tracker staff and out people for trading and selling and nothing would happen.
But overall if you want to get into the torrent community buying and trading isn't worth it. But if you just want a single solid torrent site and are willing to pay TL is the one to do it with.
whats is the best way to get access to the better sites? i've been on IPT for years with great ratio but no idea where to even begin to look for getting into top tier ones
The advice gioo gave about going to RED and going through the interviews is a solid way to get started in that community.
IPT is solid from my memory so there won't be many that are better as a general torrent site. But for niche obivously there are tons.
But since you're already in a torrent community, Check out the IPT forums back in my day they had recruitment threads in the forums. Hang out on their chat and be friendly, don't ask for invites just be friendly after a while people will start offering invites especially if you say you aren't there yet.
IPT is a fine tracker but because of their scummy behaviour [1] you are very unlikely to climb the tracker ladder from there. You can try following that_guy_iain's advice under for sure, but if you feel stuck go for RED 100% (regardless of your feelings about collecting music).
Remember that user invites carry the risk that if someone in your invite tree breaks a golden rule (trading/selling invites) you will be banned too. Always prefer official recruitement.
This doesn't answer your question directly but it might help anyway. Usenet is an excellent (paid) alternative to climbing the private tracker ladder. All traffic is secure and effectively anonymous. Download is lightning fast. If you're on the right backbone there is an ocean of content. It's only missing very old, obscure stuff. It's MUCH easier than climbing that ladder and worrying about ratios.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
You seem to be thinking that movie studios can only operate as singular entities and in system-legible ways.
What I'm imagining: someone who is mildly connected to execs at various studios/labels starting a company that participates in private trackers, and then passes information about infringement/infringers onto studios. They would only need one or two studios as clients to prove the concept and (informally) prove the idea to the rest of the industry. Their agreement with client studios includes an agreement that they won't be sued for infringement that occurs in the process of finding (other) infringers, doesn't include any license to works, and certainly doesn't include the ability to sublicense!
Sure it's possible that when this eventually goes to court, a chain of "activist" judges might go against the status quo of a company taking steps to protect its "property" - discard corporate veils, call the investigator's uploading an implicit sublicense, etc. It's just not likely, and the failure mode still would be individual licenses for the specific downloaders that were in the swarm at the time, not blanket rights to redistribute indefinitely.
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.
Private trackers moderate torrents, and peers can use this to their benefit. Formats and naming are more standardized, software has less chance of malware.
there are a few subreddits that people offer invites/ask for them
otherwise many have open signups randomly throughout the year
the better ones are harder and often expect proof of previous seeding, like i've been in IPT for years with 7TB/2TB ratio but still not managed to find an invite to some of the more renowned ones.
