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How do I go about getting access to a private tracker? (hexbear.net)
submitted 3 days ago by CupcakeOfSpice@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net
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If this is too much like fedposting, I can delete it. I currently have a *arr+Jellyfin on a remote server that uses public trackers, but I'd like to set up a home server and not get letters from my ISP telling me to stop pirating. I've heard private trackers mostly don't suffer from this issue, so I was wondering how to get on one or who to contact or what I need.

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[–] dead@hexbear.net 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Getting into the best private trackers is not easy and it can take over a year to get into the best websites.

Whatever you you do, Do not join IPT (or the 5 websites owned by the same dude). IPT extorts people for money and has attacked other torrent websites.

The easiest way to get into the best private trackers is to take the IRC interview for red (redacted) and then you have to contribute to the website to gain user ranks. Once you ranked up your account by uploading new torrents to the website, you are given access to a recruitment forum to other websites. There are guides on the website on how to upload new torrents.

RED is like the new What.CD . RED is for music. PTP is for movies. BTN is television. These website have like an incomparable amount of content to what is available publicly. Each website has like 4+ petabytes of content. The top filesharing groups upload their releases directly to these websites.

The people who run these websites are mostly redditors and there is a subreddit ( /r/trackers ) for private tracker news. There are also guides on 4chan (yuck, I know) on how to get into private trackers. The private tracker admins hate 4chan.

I know it sounds ridiculous and a waste of time. It is what it is. It's made difficult to join because they want to maintain a community that promotes sharing.

https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html

[–] bigpharmasutra@hexbear.net 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Private or public has nothing to do with your ISP flagging you. You need to be on a VPN and make sure your torrent program is bound to the VPN program. On Mac using qBittorrent it looks like this:

[–] dead@hexbear.net 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is partly true. The way that you get flagged for pirating by your ISP is through copyright troll companies. In the US, the ISP shouldn't monitor your internet traffic for torrent activity. There are legal torrents, Linux ISOs as example. Also certain game clients use peer-to-peer downloading. Websites like Peertube (tankietube) uses peer-to-peer file sharing.

The copyright holders pay copyright troll companies to track public torrent peer lists. Then the copyright troll sends a notice to your ISP and your ISP either forwards you the notice or throws it into the trash.

The way that a private torrent works is that the .torrent files you download from the private tracker contains your user hash key. The private tracker only gives peer lists to valid user hash keys. If the torrent client doesn't send your user hash key to the tracker, then the tracker does not give the torrent client a peer list.

Hypothetically, it should be safe to use private torrent without VPN. For copyright troll to collect the peer list from a private tracker, the copyright troll would have to have a user account on the peer list. If a copyright troll did send notices to users of the private tracker, and this has happened before, then it would be pretty simple for the the website admins to locate and ban the user.

A second possibility is that a malicious user leaks the peer list to the public. This happened to me in 2014. A malicious person took the peer list from the private torrent site on and injected the peer list into KickAssTorrents public website, which exposed some users to the copyright trolls.

[–] bigpharmasutra@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago

Fair point but with a VPN and protections from above you wouldn't have to worry about any of that and just grab what you want off the public trackers.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What kind of stuff are you looking for? A lot of the top tier private trackers are focused on a particular type of thing (music, books, movies, tv, etc). https://www.myanonamouse.net/ is a great place to start, it's very easy to get an invite after passing a test, and it's primarily for books. Once you're on there and build up ratio, you can start getting invites to other private trackers.

[–] CupcakeOfSpice@hexbear.net 7 points 3 days ago

Great! I'm looking mostly at TV shows (including anime) and movies, but books are also a thing I look for.

[–] LemmyFeed@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

How do you feel about seeding? Are you prone to hit and runs? I'm a member of a popular private tracker and they have strict seeding requirements. If you're not ready to abide by ratio rules (seeding as much or more than you download) then don't bother looking for invites until you can accommodate long term seeding.

Also be aware there are client configuration requirements too, like disabling DHT.

In order to get invited, an existing member has to invite you and that comes with risks for the existing member. If you get invited and end up being shitty it reflects poorly on the inviter and they could possibly be banned themselves.

[–] CupcakeOfSpice@hexbear.net 5 points 3 days ago

I try to seed as much as I can. On my remote server I've got every torrent I've downloaded still seeding. My home internet is decent enough, so I don't see why I would stop seeding.

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

https://www.torrentleech.org/ regularly does open invites. It looks like they did one last year for the holidays from dec 6th to the 9th. So if you just check once a day for the next few weeks you should hopefully be able to snag one.

[–] CupcakeOfSpice@hexbear.net 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Cool! I'll watch that.

[–] LeylaLove@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago

I have invites to torrentleach, pm me and I got you when I get home

[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

There is this subreddit that has posts when a private tracker opens up for signups: https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenSignups/

You can watch the sub's rss feed if you want to get notified. Places like torrentleech, seedpool, etc. allow signups often. I like seedpool a lot since it is hard to maintain a ratio on torrentleech.

[–] octobob@lemmy.ml 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Torrentleech is pretty easy in my experience to maintain ratio. There's so much freeleech stuff on there. Between seeding that and using their points system, I'm already up to like 3 TB seeded in a couple years. I've only "leeched" like 100 GB but I've gotten soooo much freeleech that the actual number is probably over my 3TB seeded number

[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 7 hours ago

My problem is that they freeleech mostly for large torrents. I think the min is 14GB or something like that (maybe lower). I have limited storage so I prefer smaller encodes.

[–] HexReplyBot@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago

A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.

[–] towhee@hexbear.net 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

Question from someone who hasn't torrented since the limewire days: if I torrent directly from my home am I guaranteed to get a legal nastygram/shakedown in the mail?

[–] musicpostingonly@hexbear.net 8 points 3 days ago

Depends.

Older media, less likely. Less popular media, less likely. Utilizing private trackers, less likely. Using a VPN greatly increases the odds of not getting love letters from your ISP.

I torrent from my home, I use a mix of public and private trackers but always w a VPN. I tend to seek out less popular or older stuff just because that's how I am, so I think that helps out but only so much.

[–] adhocfungus@midwest.social 4 points 3 days ago

Most likely (in the US, at least), yes. With a VPN, no. I stopped torrenting for many years because if I could afford a VPN I could afford to pay for Netflix. Now Netflix is double that price and everything has fractured into a half dozen evil services that cancel the shows I watch for tax breaks whether I pay them or not.

Then with the descent into fascism in this country I decided I wanted a VPN regardless.

[–] redsteel@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 days ago

Not guaranteed, no. It depends solely on whether the torrent in question is monitored by a copyright troll firm, in which case they'll catch your IP in their regular sweeps and fire off automated complaint letters to the ISP, who then forward it on to you. The ISP itself doesn't monitor your traffic in that way.

Not all torrents are watched by these firms, not even close, and ISPs often forward the complaints along without taking any action against the subscriber. Some ISPs, however, were successfully sued by the copyright mafia over not doing enough to "fight piracy" or whatever, and now will cut you off the internet entirely and close your account after some stupidly low number of complaints.

[–] musicpostingonly@hexbear.net 7 points 3 days ago

You also need to invest in a VPN.

I use air airvpn for torrenting. That'll go a really long way towards preventing ISP love letters.

[–] segfault11@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

do most private trackers require high bandwidth? I don't have great internet and i use wifi, so when i seed public torrents it maxes out at like 800kB/s, and i cap it at 512kB/s during the daytime so there's still enough bandwidth for me and everyone else on the network to do internet things. i'm able to get an all time ratio on public trackers around 4 rn because i seed for as long as i can and i leave my computer on 24/7 though

[–] boboblaw@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago

Nah, most of them also have a system that awards points for seedtime, that can be exchanged for upload credit. So even if you fail to upload much or any, simply continuing to seed and be available gets you some upload credit.

[–] stupid_asshole69@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago

No you’ll be fine

[–] deforestgump@hexbear.net 5 points 3 days ago

https://fmhy.net/torrenting#private-trackers

[–] LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins@hexbear.net 4 points 3 days ago

fellow-kids how do you do fellow pirates

[–] corgiwithalaptop@hexbear.net 4 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I can invite to Revolution.tt or whatever the latest rebrand is. I just logged in for the first time in years and saw my ratio is still good.

[–] CupcakeOfSpice@hexbear.net 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'd appreciate it, if you're willing. You can DM me or however it works with rules and whatever that entails.

[–] corgiwithalaptop@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Are you familiar with the general rules of a private tracker? I've been on a few over the past 2 decades or so, and this one is nothing special. Keep your ratio up and you're golden.

[–] CupcakeOfSpice@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago

Sounds good, I'll keep that in mind.

[–] tactical_trans_karen@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Also broken link for me. What's the specialty?

[–] corgiwithalaptop@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Movies and shows, but they have games and books and stuff. I don't know what the URL is so if you want an invite I gotta dig thru my emails

[–] tactical_trans_karen@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago

Omg yes please!!

[–] bigpharmasutra@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I get server not found for that link.

[–] corgiwithalaptop@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They rebranded to something a few years ago. I haven't regularly used it in ages, but got some admin side stuff emails from them a few weeks ago and confirmed my login still works, and my ratio is still good, so if you want to check it out ill send an invite next time I fire up my torrenting pc

[–] bigpharmasutra@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago

Sure, I can keep it in the back pocket. I'm stuck being a dirty leecher until ProtonVPN gets port-forwarding fixed on the Mac.