Apologies if this is a basic question, but I am curious to know what I am missing out on by not having access to private torrents? I have been able to find everything I wanted using public ones.
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Better speeds, better access to niche content, arguably better privacy.
You mean private trackers, yeah? The advantage is obviously they are not open to the public, which means copyright trolls need an account on the tracker to view the IP address of torrent participants. Secondly users are vetted for quality so the torrents on them are well seeded and trusted.
The advantage of a private tracker is also its disadvantage. You need to get through the vetting process. An invite and history are required to join which can be kind of a chicken and egg thing. It all takes some effort and facility.
If you don’t have your own full time torrent server with high upload bandwidth, it’s going to be difficult to get the seed ratios you need. Best thing there is to contract a seedbox. Even so you have to put the effort into working your way up to the ladder by getting a history of tracker accounts.
If you don’t have your own full time torrent server with high upload bandwidth, it’s going to be difficult to get the seed ratios you need.
I agree with this for some trackers, but many give bonus points based on passive seeding as well, which can then be exchanged to contribute to your upload ratio. Just having a large drive to use for seeding should be enough - that’s what I’ve done at least for nearly 8 years now.
Private torrents are faster and safer. The downside is you typically have to maintain an upload ratio, which can be very hard to achieve without a seedbox.
The downside is you typically have to maintain an upload ratio, which can be very hard to achieve without a seedbox.
That’s not a downside - the whole point is to promote seeding. Rent a seedbox for £5 a month and fill it with freeleech torrents and let it seed before you dive into downloading and you should easily be able to build a healthy ratio.
I understand the point, I have like 30TB uploaded on public trackers. It’s a down side for the average user that does not have a seedbox or wants one.
Yeah - if your needs are met by public, then thats great. My seedbox is also my plex server, so for £10 a month I get an all in one solution - no risk of copyright hits, almost instant downloads that appear right on my plex server almost as soon as I add them. Funnily enough, the seedbox I use doesn’t allow seeding on public trackers, only on private ones.
That’s not just downside, that’s two downsides - first is paying for seedbox, second is ever bothering with building ratio with freeleech torrents (meaning downloading stuff you don’t need) 😉
The seedbox is well worth the investment. For the same price as some VPNs you have total protection from copyright trolls, and usually the option to use it as VPN anyway. As for downloading stuff you don’t want - it doesn’t matter - it’s seeding for someone else. Just leave it on your seedbox and forget about it.
So choose if those downsides outweigh the upsides.
Some trackers have exclusive content, or at least have content sooner than other places.
I was using different private trackers but in the end dropped them and went back to public ones. One thing that private trackers may offer is the forum or the discussion board and plenty of user generated content. But in general there are many negative points:
- the drama: lots of users feel entitled and there is a very negative attitude towards newcomers
- less security: there was a time when an italian private tracker was caught and ended up giving the name and data of few active users. I don’t buy that you have to use a legit email and no vpn.
- you have to pay for a seedbox and always track your ratio: I seed forever most stuff (4k+ torrents) but I don’t want this to become a time sink
Counterpoint to these is that you don’t have to participate in the drama, many allow you to use a VPN, and seedboxes aren’t mandatory and you can just as easily permaseed to build ratio (via bonus points). What you say is true of some trackers but not with any that I’ve joined.
Skip the drama, just download and seed the torrents
What was the italian tracker?
I am having troubles recalling the name right now. It was many years ago. I remember it was famous for having english subbed movies with italian subtitles, most of the time weeks before the title landed in the cinemas
You also get access to a broad repository of the history of a particular torrent. Like ever preferred a really obscure version of your favorite torrent? Probably impossible to find unless it was a really popular Vidya game and there’s a legacy torrent still seeding.
I’ve still got a Myanonamouse (Private Book Tracker) account purely because there are certain editions of books that quite literally don’t exist in print except as a used copy on Amazon. But because some degenerate decided to commit all their scans to a Seedbox, ebook versions of obscure early science fiction now exist.
Very niche, but also incredibly useful if you come across something that you just can’t find elsewhere.
For me:
- Lifetime of torrents, honestly I rarely have dead torrents on private trackers. Also, most of them send an alert to previous seeders telling them one torrent needs some seeds. So for that it’s WAY better than public.
- Niche contents, I’m into rare movies and some movies are only available on private trackers (unfortunately), so yeah, for me no choice. Though I really miss VXT releases on RARBG :(.
Except that… Not much. I think I still would keep my seedbox if I was on public trackers. Private or public, we all have to do our jobs and participate in seeding what we got :)
Content you may not be able to find elsewhere (for example, MySpleen has tons of old discontinued/out of print content), as well as you aren’t going to find copyright holders in private tracker swarms monitoring for IP’s to have infringement notices sent to.
Downside: If you don’t like seeding, you get to fuck yourself and get used to liking seeding or you lose your account.
- they are properly moderated so no fake torrents or malware (and anyone trying to upload those is immediately banned)
- many have rules about formats, nfo files - another guarantee that your file is what it says it is
- duplicates are not usually allowed - eg if an album already exists in FLAC format, you can’t upload another one
- ratio requirements mean people almost always seed, and many use seed boxes which means speed is much faster. Movies download to my seed box in a couple of seconds typically.
The main thing for me is that Private Trackers, because they incentivise continued seeding, will maintain greater activity for older torrents. People are even given bonus incentives for seeding content that has few seeders. As a result, older content and torrents that would be long dead in public trackers are still alive and well in the private ones, and when they become relevant again can be brought back to the public trackers.
In short, more privacy and a curated library of content.
If you get in really exclusive ones you can bring it up in conversations as an icebreaker and put it on your resume
If you are able to get all the content you need from public trackers and you don’t worry about copyright agancies tracking you than there’s no reason for you at all to bother with private trackers.
I agree and went with the same route. One thing that private trackers may offer is the forum or the discussion board and plenty of user generated content
The main benefits of private trackers are:
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Download speed. Many users of these trackers will use seedboxes to build ratio. This generally results in a faster download speed for peers.
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Security. Many (but not all) private trackers have strict entry barriers, such as invite only or application based signups. This keeps copyright trolls out of their swarms, which eliminates the need for a vpn or other method of masking your identity. Depending on where you live this can range from a nicety to a necessity.
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Longevity. Torrents generally live longer on private trackers.
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Community. Some private trackers have a forum or IRC channel where you can interact with other community members.
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Availability. Many private trackers will have a wider range of releases of a single media.
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Quality. You will generally find higer quality releases on private trackers. That’s not to say that high quality releases don’t make it to public trackers, some do and some don’t.
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Faster releases. Releases will typically come to private trackers first. May torrents originate on these trackers or come from scene groups and trickle down.
If you’re finding everything you want on public trackers then you probably aren’t missing anything. You could test the waters on TL or something next time they open.
Chat gpt wrote this.
i’m not entirely sure if it is but i’m inclined to agree with you, it’s almost verbatim to chatgpt 3.0’s writing style
I wrote it lol. Fuck do I really sound that much like a bot?
As a non-AI Learning Model, I cannot conclude one way or the other with any certainty. What I can say is that ChatGPT responses tend to follow a similar pattern:
- Consistent and clear responses: ChatGPT will often respond to prompts with very readable, well-formatted bulleted lists
- Socratic reasoning: Items in those lists will have a logical structure from beginning to end
Finally, ChatGPT responses tend to end those lists with a summarizing statement that restates the previous ideas - that ChatGPT will often respond in lists, use a formal and logical writing style, and end with a concise summary of the previous statements.
As we consume more “AI” generated content, I think us humans are going to write and talk similar to an AI generated style in future
It’s too bad I already wrote like that before ChatGPT was public. For fun I put in an essay of mine from a couple of years back into a detector that told me parts were generated by AI ☠️
Basically ChatGPT is very good at conveying information in an easy to read and helpful way. Unlike most people on the internet.
Fuck, apparently I write like ChatGPT. I didn’t think anything was off about the original comment because I write in a very similar way. Information is always structured under headers or in bulleted lists.
A more charitable interpretation is that the text that people thought would best train ChatGPT tended to be thoughtful and well-written posts like yours. Maybe you don’t write like ChatGPT, but ChatGPT writes like you.
Aw thats such asweet sentiment
If you did write it, my apologies then. Take my comment as a compliment
No, people are just saying this whenever a comment has bullet points lol. You didn’t have a tone similar to any LLM I know.
When you bot-people take over, please remember I love bots and was always on your side
I frankly disagree. If I were to write a list of benefits of using private trackers (ergo, actually directly answer OP’s question), that’s exactly how I would write it and I’d very likely use a similar writing style.
Further, ChatGPT doesn’t use the “<Topic>. <Further elaboration on topic>” format from what I’ve seen, and IMO wouldn’t finish out the post with a recommendation to OP how they could get their feet wet with a particular private tracker.
I dunno man, it’s more-or-less correct and that’s not something I’ve come to expect from LLM’s.
I disagree, chatgpt would never write something like that last two sentences
This is all good info. I still use a VPN with my private tracker though. You never know.
These are all great points, but I just wanted to add to the point about security that private trackers are typically very good about managing/minimizing the prevalence of malware on their platforms, whereas public trackers can have all sorts of fun surprises depending on what you’re searching for.
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Public trackers’ public nature means they’re more likely to result in your activity being seen / tracked by entities you don’t want it tracked by, for one. Ever gotten one of those letters from your ISP warning you not to download pirated shit? My understanding is that that’s usually the result of using an insecure tracker.
Or the lack of a VPN (specifically one that has a kill switch activated and to which the bittorrent client is bound).
