• 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
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    6 months ago

    Are those the trackers which demand you have accounts with other private trackers before you join or the ones which demand everyone have a >1 ratio to download anything which is impossible by definition, so everyone either gets huge seedboxes, cheats the ratio or has to download niche but big files from other sites and switch out the tracker to artificially up the ratio?

    I’m sure there are actually good private trackers, but I’ve found there are open/effectively open (sign up only with no verification/requirements) trackers with better communities than any restricted one I’ve found

    • Omgboom@lemmy.zip
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      6 months ago

      I mean some of them are less good than others, and the economies on them vary. Most decent ones these days though use a points system where you earn points based on how long you’ve seeded torrents. You use points to purchase upload credit which artificially raises your ratio. Not all of them require you to have accounts on other trackers, some of them have an interview process that after you’ve passed you can create an account, I’m not sure if this is what you mean by “open/effectively open”. These are still private trackers, and from them you can get access to invite only trackers. There’s several avenues you can take to get onto different private trackers, it’s not hard it just takes time (and seeding!)

      • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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        6 months ago

        I got in one private tracker and I like that system a lot. I seed my torrents for years because I don’t do a ton of very popular stuff, and I like some older shows. Like The Mentalist season packs on TG are at like a 30:1 for me because not many others seed them.

        However, the private tracker doesn’t use standard naming which sometimes fucks up searches and *arr, also, there are barely any seeders or leechers so a lot of media is hit or miss both downloading and uploading. Of the 50 or so things that I downloaded since I got on, 1 has a positive seed ratio, so thank mods for duration seed points…

    • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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      6 months ago

      have a >1 ratio to download anything which is impossible by definition

      They give you a bit of leniency after you first sign up. All that share ratio means is that you leave your computer seeding for a while after your download finishes, and when your torrent client has uploaded the file you got from them to e.g. 5 other people you can stop seeding it. They’re asking you to give back, is all. If you download a 3GB file from other people in the swarm and then immediately close the torrent before anybody can download it from you, after enough repeat times of you doing that, they’ll stop letting you download new files.

      Trackers cannot read, and are not interested in, the number at the bottom of your torrent client, or your history with other trackers. They just care that you seed their torrents after you’ve finished downloading them so other people can download them too.

      • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
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        6 months ago

        I was referring to ones which explicitly require you to have a >1 ratio to download files, which do absolutely have leniency when you sign up, but the average ratio is 1 by definition assuming a closed system and so it’s infeasible for the majority to get >1. Often they have freeleach days but that requires you to be around on that day and also download stuff you don’t want to seed it, rather than just slightly reducing the required ratio (also IMO having a required ratio of any form is bad as it encourages people to turn off seeding after that point, generally I’ll seed stuff which has <5 seeders or low availability of parts I have, as seeding them to 100x is way more valuable than seeding 1000 files which have hundreds of seeders all with 100% availability to 1x)

        I accept they want to keep leaches out though, so if they required a ratio of 0.5-0.75 that’d be fine, but from my experience most “entry level” private ones don’t, and most non-entry level ones either have closed signups or a requirement to be signed up with an existing private tracker in which things are either ridiculously over or underseeded with no inbetween, so it’s hard to build up a ratio.

        • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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          6 months ago

          The system isn’t closed though. More people join the tracker all the time, and that’s to say nothing of the people who already have access to the tracker downloading a new file.

          • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
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            6 months ago

            I don’t think you understand how it works… An upload:download ratio must average (not simple mean, but that’s because ratios are nonlinear - I can’t recall the mean type but it’s the nth root of multiplying them all together) 1 in a system where all uploads and downloads are logged in the same tracker. It doesn’t matter who the uploader or downloader is or how recently they made their account. That’s what I meant by a closed system.

            An open system would be where you download parts or all of a given torrent via another tracker, and the same with upload. The private tracker only logs what you downloaded and uploaded though it, so your ratio from the perspective of that tracker is different to in reality.

            Even if you ignore the first 5 files or 15GB or whatever for new users, if you have those files then great but do you really want to turn it into a betting game of seeding supply and leeching demand?