How I Joined a Private Tracker

If you’ve been on the internet for a decade or so, you’ve probably heard of torrents. Maybe you used The Pirate Bay or KAT or remember when uTorrent wasn’t malware.

I grew up post-internet but prior to modern streaming services really taking over. I was never a huge fan of torrenting but I did occasionally and remember uploading my own torrent to TPB.

Today, torrenting has fallen off. With the popularity of Steam and streaming services, and the disposable “you will own nothing” mentality, nobody really cares. Torrents of films only a few years old have 0 seeders and there’s a bajillion mirrors of torrent sites with no obvious way to tell which one you should use first.

What made me dive into the world of private trackers was this problem. I am a fan of preserving media and I like offline, no-strings-attached access to media. I don’t want to log in, I don’t want to block ads, I don’t want to enable DRM, etc.

So I researched and came upon Avistaz. I had actually seen the ninja icon years before but wasn’t willing to jump through hoops to get in. It was risky because I didn’t know if they had what I wanted and the service is completely locked away from public view. Luckily, they’re advertising that if you pay for a seedbox, you can get in!

I looked at the two options and decided RapidSeedbox was better. They hide the cheapest plan during purchase so you have to click around. In total I paid $6 with PayPal. Then I disabled automatic PayPal billing as I only want to pay for one month. Care must be taken to not actually cancel the service as you’ll get banned if you do that.

I tinkered with the different torrent clients they offered and settled on Deluge because it appeared the most functional. Some more Googling indicated one needs to disable Local Peer Discovery, DHT and PEX for private trackers. The transmission web interface wasn’t letting me into the settings menu but I had no problem with Deluge. I also realized if I wanted to move this whole setup locally when the month ends, it makes sense to run two different clients instead of two transmission instances so that I don’t mess anything up.

OK! What next?

The internet tells me I need to look for “free download/free leach” torrents to build “ratio” on the tracker. So I started out by downloading some awards show which I have no interest in. The reason I chose this was that the seeders/leachers ratio was good (not 1:1, but not extreme either) and it was a substantial size, 130GB.

Basically, we want to become a seeder as fast as possible and start seeding to the other leachers to build our own ratio. Everyone else wants to do this as well, especially with new releases so you will see many torrents like 13 seeders, 1-3 leachers. These are bad because we won’t have much opportunity. We should also avoid the “1 seeder 14 leachers” type as this could be a trap. It could be the 1 seeder does not have the entire file, his internet is terrible or he’s intentionally trolling by setting his upload speed to zero. If we start downloading and then stop we could be punished with a Hit and Run which is bad for our account.

After a while, this random torrent finished. Even as I was downloading, my client seeded to another user which made my ratio in the thousands (free download = 0 download.) I decided to look for the kdramas I actually wanted and to my surprise, they were all free download! I sorted by size and read through comments to make sure each torrent was the best of its kind. Because I care about preservation, I want the highest quality, which is either going to be a BluRay raw (includes disk menus,) a remux (probably includes BluRay quality footage,) a Web DL/Rip or a DVD rip, in that order.

Apparently remuxes can offer better quality than even BluRays because people painstakingly piece together the best parts from multiple sources. If one scene looks better on a DVD release, or the subtitles are better on a streaming service, they can put these together to create the “ultimate” viewing experience. This isn’t always the case and some remuxes can just be the BluRay footage stripped of padding and disc menus/features/other unneeded content which greatly reduces the filesize and complexity of playing the media.

As of writing, 3 out of 4 of the dramas I wanted have finished downloading. The last one is a hefty 100GB BluRay rip with one seeder that seemingly does not want to seed to me. I still appreciate him for keeping the torrent alive even if it takes a year to download. There are a few other users who pop in and out which seed but not the 8MB/s download speed I would like. This last one is a dying torrent so seeding it gives you “double upload” which encourages those who have it to share it. By uploading, you’re increasing your buffer which is like an allowance of file size you can download before your ratio goes down.

Moving them off the seedbox is a little cumbersome. I mounted the seedbox drive with SFTP which is supported in KDE’s Dolphin file manager with no additional tweaks. Even though RapidSeedbox provides root access, Dolphin wasn’t letting me open a terminal in the directory so I had no way to run md5sum on the files there to compare with the ones I copied to my machine. There’s probably some way to do this I just haven’t bothered and as long as the size matches on remote and local, it probably copied OK.

My end goal is to make the files on these private trackers accessible on public trackers. I have to be careful not to share the original torrent file or magnet as it is uniquely tied to me and would get me banned for doing so. I need to make a new torrent with the same content and without the private tracker added.

Provided I don’t make any mistakes, I now have 83GB of buffer, highest possible ratio and I’m on track to gain “member” status which would allow me to… download torrents that are brand new. I don’t really care, but it’s cool that I did it I guess.

So what’s the verdict? It’s great and I really like it. I will need to log in once every n days and download something every n days to prevent my account from being deleted, so it does take up a bit of headspace to keep the setup alive, and moving everything to my desktop might be fiddly. But if you can get into a private tracker without too much trouble and you want to propagate or collect media, this is the way to do it.

Update… moving files to my desktop was easy. I did a little research and found that differing filesizes from the SFTP mount and my local HDD is apparently not a problem as long as Deluge checks it and it seeds fine after. It is annoying that the cheap plans do not offer SSH access to the seedbox so there’s no way to get md5sums of the remote files, nor use something like rclone/rsync for faster and safer transfers.

The process is to pause the torrent on the seedbox, add the torrent file to local, let it check/start seeding, then delete/remove the torrent on the seedbox. In this way, you avoid seeding from two places at one time which is prohibited by the rules.

I am a little nervous about using this random old hard drive so I will back up these dramas to my yandex disk.