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[[File:NaagU4o.png|thumb|right|Private Tracker Flowchart]]
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{{TOCright|limit=2}}
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[[File:NaagU4o.png|thumb|right|Private Tracker Flowchart (outdated)]]
  
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==What is a private tracker?==
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In this article, you will be guided on how to get into (and survive) the world of private trackers.
  
−
A private tracker is a torrent website that provides the same functionality as a public tracker, but is generally invite-only. This means you need to be a member to view the contents of the site and download its torrents, but you cannot register to be a member without having been invited by an already existing member (who in turn must be authorized to give out invitations). Within a tracker, there is usually an extensive set of rules covering how much one can download, what kind of content one can upload, what precautions one must take when logging into the site, etc. Such rules and content vary from tracker to tracker, and go from rather liberal with little enforcement to ultra-paranoid and autistic. Advantages of private trackers include:
+
==Commonly asked questions that everyone is tired of hearing==
  
−
*'''Speed''': If you're familiar with torrents you probably know that the bigger the swarm, the faster you download. Private trackers encourage their members to seed torrents for as long as possible, thus guaranteeing bigger swarms for every torrent. Not only that, but many members use remote seedboxes with huge upload speeds, thus dramatically increasing the speed for many torrents, often making them available almost instantly.
+
===What is a private tracker?===
−
*'''Retention''': Similarly, private trackers usually enforce rules that encourage long-term seeding. Many torrents for obscure content that you wouldn't normally find any peers for on ThePirateBay or KAT will be still seeded by a few peers on private trackers.
 
−
*'''Selection''': Some content simply isn't available on any public site and will only be found on private trackers. Sometimes you can't even legally buy it at all, ironically. Some trackers even specialize in obscure or rare content, ensuring that it doesn't get lost from the Internet.
 
−
*'''Quality control''': A major asset of private trackers, albeit one that can vary a lot across trackers. Good private trackers have very strict rules on content format, quality and organization. Music trackers will ensure you don't get horrible 92kbps transcodes, movie trackers will ensure you only get good encodes, ebook trackers will ensure you get retail quality, etc. Members and staff review and approve each torrent. Trumping rules and the removal of duplicates ensure you only get one, community-approved source for the specific content and format. This, coupled with a decent site layout, makes private trackers much more orderly than public ones.
 
−
*'''Security''': There are two reasons private trackers are more secure, albeit they may not apply in the future. The first one is that most of them are obscure enough that no one really knows or cares about them (security by obscurity). The second one is that copyright trolls would rather focus on huge public sites that are easy to fish for peers rather than small communities that are hard to join. From a monetary point of view, it's more worthwhile to stop 10,000 casuals from downloading 2 torrents than to stop 2 neckbeards from downloading 10,000 torrents.
 
  
−
===How secure are private trackers?===
+
A private tracker is a torrent website that provides the same functionality as a public tracker but is invite-only. This means you need to be a member to view the contents of the site and download its torrents. A tracker can either be semiprivate, where you can create an account for free by just registering your details, or fully private, where another user has to invite you. Within a tracker, there is usually an extensive set of rules covering how much one can download, what kind of content one can upload, what precautions one must take when logging into the site, etc. Such rules and content vary from tracker to tracker, and go from rather liberal with little enforcement to ultra-paranoid and autistic. Advantages of private trackers include:
  
−
This depends entirely on the precautions of the operator. Some are shady and will use your information for profit, some are not. Two important precautions to take:
+
*'''Speed''': If you're familiar with torrents, you probably know that the bigger the swarm, the faster you download. Private trackers encourage their members to seed torrents for as long as possible, thus increasing the chances of a torrent having a healthy swarm for longer. Not only that, but many members use seedboxes, which are just servers based in data centers offering very high speeds and excellent peering. Enough to max out anyone's home connection.
−
*Never use the same password across multiple trackers. Operators of shady sites often use that common vulnerability among people to steal accounts to other trackers which they can then use to cause further harm (such as leaking peer lists to the public or selling the accounts and its invites on invite forums).
+
*'''Retention''': Similarly, private trackers usually enforce rules that encourage long-term seeding. A few peers on private trackers will perennially seed many torrents for obscure content that will have little or no seeders on a public tracker.
−
*Don't tie any personal information to your tracker accounts. This includes a non-throwaway email address or personally identifiable information of any kind. Information like that could be used to harm or track you down should it fall into the wrong hands. The tracker staff may be legitimate, but the site itself can be busted or defaced by hackers. Don't post about yourself in the forums and for fuck's sake, don't post in those "post a pic of you" threads. Torrent trackers aren't social networks.
+
*'''Selection''': Some content simply isn't available on any public site and will only be found on private trackers. Many private trackers are devoted to specific kinds of content, be it the format of the media, or the specific genre or region. Sometimes you can't even legally buy it at all, ironically. Some trackers specialize in obscure or rare content, ensuring that it doesn't get lost from the Internet.
 +
*'''Quality control''': A major asset of private trackers, albeit one that can vary a lot across trackers. Good private trackers have stringent rules on the content format, quality, and organization. Music trackers will ensure you don't get horrible 92kbps transcodes, movie trackers will ensure you only get good encodes, ebook trackers will ensure you get retail quality, etc. Members and staff review and approve each torrent. Trumping rules and the removal of duplicates ensure you only get one community-approved source for the specific content and format. This, coupled with a decent site layout, makes private trackers much more orderly than public ones.
 +
*'''Security''': There are two reasons private trackers are more secure, albeit they may not apply in the future. The first one is that most of them are obscure enough that no one really knows or cares about them (security through obscurity). The second one is that copyright trolls would rather focus on huge public sites that are easy to fish for peers rather than small communities that are hard to join. From a monetary point of view, it's more worthwhile to stop 10,000 casuals from downloading two torrents than to stop two neckbeards from downloading 10,000 torrents. There are some caveats to this though, copyright trolls will aggressively pursue the source of leaked pre-release media, such as screeners. As a result, many private trackers do not allow this content. Fortunately, leaked screeners are generally very popular and will be easily found on public trackers anyway. Large prolific piracy groups such as scene or well-known release groups are huge targets for copyright enforcement.
 +
 
 +
===How secure/safe are private trackers?===
 +
 
 +
There are two aspects to this: one is your own personal security, the other is the security of the tracker itself. Due to the nature of private trackers, they will often require you sign up for an account using your home IP address. In order to keep track of banned users, banned regions and so on, most private trackers will log everything you do on their platform and keep that data forever. Private trackers are all inherently illegal and you are trusting some unknown person or group with a pretty considerable amount of your data. You don't know if the staff have nefarious intentions and you don't know how competent they are with their own op-sec. There have been numerous cases of tracker security breaches over the years due to incompetent tracker developers. Many old trackers store your password in plaintext, don't have 2FA, don't secure their sites correctly or a host of other things. There are, however, a few things you can do to minimize the risk.
 +
 
 +
*Never use the same [[Passwords | password]] across multiple trackers. To be safe, don't use the same usernames either. This doesn't do a great deal but it will at least stop regular users from stalking you across trackers. Some tracker admins in the past have been known to use username/email and password combinations of users on their tracker to try to log in on other trackers and steal accounts. Using two-factor authentication is also advised, where available. A different email address for every tracker is maximum tinfoil but go for it if you want to. At a minimum, you should use a different username and password for every tracker and for God's sake don't put links to your other track profiles in your profile bios.
 +
*Don't tie any personal information to your tracker accounts. This includes a non-throwaway email address or personally identifiable information of any kind. Staff have said in the past that users have signed up for private trackers using their work email addresses, full name included and everything. Idiots. Information like that could be used to harm or track you down should it fall into the wrong hands. The tracker staff may be legitimate, but the site itself can be busted or defaced by hackers. Don't post about yourself in the forums and for fuck's sake don't post in any of those "post a pic of you" threads. Torrent trackers are not social networks.
 +
*Again, remember that you are entrusting your information to an unknown and effectively unaccountable second party. The email you use, your IP, your snatchlist, everything. Once you sign up for a tracker, you lose control over who has access to this data. It's simply a risk you must take if you wish to join the private tracker community.
  
 
===What are the best private trackers?===
 
===What are the best private trackers?===
−
There are two kinds of trackers, content-wise: specialized and general. /ptg/ frowns upon the regular use of general trackers as they tend to be a jack of all trades, lacking in all areas while only being good for mainstream shit. They can however be a good supplemental source of content as trackers often go down or get busted for various reasons. The following is a global consensus on what is considered the best tracker in their fields, namely: '''Music''', '''Movies''' (both mainstream and obscure), '''TV''', '''HD''' (yeah this gets a separate category), '''Games''', '''Books''', '''E-learning''', '''Porn''', '''Anime''', '''Scene''' and '''General'''. If you are a /ptg/ regular and disagree with this (especially the lower-tier ones), edit what you think is wrong.
+
There are two kinds of trackers, content-wise: specialized and general. General trackers will often serve the majority of your needs, while bigger general trackers will usually have plenty of niche content. Popular public trackers are general trackers: RARBG, RuTracker, ThePirateBay, etc. Due to their broad scope, they will still never match the niche trackers in their particular area of specialty.
 +
 
 +
The following is a global consensus on what is considered the best tracker in their fields, namely: '''Music''', '''Movies''' (both mainstream and obscure), '''TV''', '''HD''' (yes, this gets a separate category), '''Games''', '''Books''', '''E-learning''', '''Porn''', '''Anime''', '''Scene''' and '''General'''.  
  
−
*'''Green''' trackers are the cabal - essentially the holy trinity of PTP/BTN/WCD + HDB: the top, most reputed trackers in the torrent community who are objectively the best in their respective categories and rule the torrent world. Don't fuck with cabal staff as they ''will'' gang up against your ass to permaban you from all cabal trackers along with any trackers willing to cooperate with the cabal (and they often do).
+
*'''Green''' trackers are the cabal — the holy trinity of PTP, BTN and HDB + RED (This is known as the /ptg/ diamond). These are the best, most reputed trackers in the torrent community. They are objectively the best in their respective categories and rule the torrent world. Do not fuck with cabal staff as they ''will'' gang up on you and have you permabanned from all cabal trackers along with any other trackers willing to cooperate with them (and many often do).
−
*'''Yellow''' trackers are subject to the cabal; if you're banned from the cabal, you will get banned from these as well. On the other hand, a good ratio-proof on one of these will be well considered if you apply to another cabal-subjected tracker. Due to their niche or subpar content however, they don't get as much exposure as the cabal.
+
*'''Yellow''' trackers are subject to the cabal — if you're banned from the cabal, you will get banned from these as well. On the other hand, a good ratio proof on one of these will be well-considered if you apply to another cabal-subjected tracker. However, because of their niche or subpar content, they don't get as much exposure as the cabal.
−
*'''Red''' trackers are essentially shady - either the IPT mafia empire or other trackers run by staff known for shitty practices such as trading accounts, DDoSing other sites, encouraging pay2leech or storing passwords in plaintext. Worst enemies to the cabal, so don't expect ratio-proof on one of these sites to be taken into consideration on cabal sites. Since they may still have good content, they can be worth joining: just don't use the same password as that of a cabal site and avoid giving them money.
+
*'''Red''' trackers are primarily shady — they are either the IPT mafia empire or are run by staff known for shitty practices such as trading accounts, DDoSing other sites, encouraging pay2leech and storing passwords in plaintext. They are the cabal's worst enemies, so don't expect ratio proof on one of these trackers to be taken into consideration on cabal sites. They may still have good content and be worth joining, just don't give them any money for any reason whatsoever. Being in the cabal means you can afford to give little to no fucks about your account on one of these. For instance, if your IPT account gets purged, you can just get another one.
 
*'''White''' trackers are either open or not known to cooperate much with the cabal, but they aren't known for shitty practices either.  
 
*'''White''' trackers are either open or not known to cooperate much with the cabal, but they aren't known for shitty practices either.  
  
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| '''TV'''
 
| '''TV'''
 
| '''HD'''
 
| '''HD'''
−
| '''Movies (obscure)'''
+
| '''Films (obscure)'''
 
| '''Games'''
 
| '''Games'''
 
| '''Books'''
 
| '''Books'''
 +
| '''Anime'''
 +
| '''Porn'''
 
| '''E-learning'''
 
| '''E-learning'''
−
| '''Porn'''
 
−
| '''Anime'''
 
−
| '''Scene'''
 
 
| '''General'''
 
| '''General'''
  
 
|-
 
|-
−
| '''Tier 1 - Essentials'''
+
| '''Tier 1'''
−
|style="background-color:#99ff99"| [http://what.cd/ What.CD]
+
|style="background-color:#99ff99"| [https://redacted.ch/ RED]
−
|style="background-color:#99ff99"| [http://passthepopcorn.me/ PTP]
+
|style="background-color:#99ff99"| [https://passthepopcorn.me/ PTP]
−
|style="background-color:#99ff99"| [http://broadcasthe.net/ BTN]
+
|style="background-color:#99ff99"| [https://broadcasthe.net/ BTN]
−
|style="background-color:#99ff99"| [http://hdbits.org/ HDB]
+
|style="background-color:#99ff99"| [https://hdbits.org/ HDB]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [https://karagarga.in/ KG]
+
|style="background-color:#ffff99"| [https://karagarga.in/ KG]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [https://www.blackcats-games.net/ BCG]
+
|style="background-color:#ffff99"| [https://gazellegames.net/ GGN]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [https://bibliotik.org/ Bib]
+
|style="background-color:#ffff99"| [https://bibliotik.me/ BIB]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [http://www.bitme.org/ BitMe]
+
|style="background-color:#ffff99"| [https://animebytes.tv/ AB]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [http://www.empornium.sx/ Emp]
+
|style="background-color:#ffff99"| [https://empornium.is/ EMP]
−
|[https://animebytes.tv/ AB]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://thegeeks.click/ TG]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [https://www.digitalhive.org/ DH]
+
|style="background-color:#ff9999"| [https://iptorrents.com/ IPT]
−
|style="background-color:#ff9999"| [https://www.iptorrents.com/ IPT]
 
  
 
|-
 
|-
−
| '''Tier 2 - Alternatives'''
+
| '''Tier 2'''
−
|[http://rutracker.org/ RuTracker]
+
|style="background-color:#ffff99"| [https://orpheus.network/ OPS]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [https://tehconnection.eu/ TehConnection]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://anthelion.me/ ANT]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [https://www.morethan.tv/ MTV]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://tv-vault.me/ TVV]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [https://awesome-hd.me/ AHD]
+
|style="background-color:#ffff99"| [https://beyond-hd.me/ BHD]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [http://cinematik.net/ Cinematik]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://cinemageddon.net/ CG]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [https://gazellegames.net/ GGn]
+
|style="background-color:#ffff99"| [https://pixelcove.me/ PxC]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [http://www.myanonamouse.net/ MAM]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://myanonamouse.net/ MAM]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [http://bitspyder.net/ BitSpyder]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://bakabt.me/ BBT]
−
|[http://pornolab.net/ Pornolab]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://pornbay.org PB]
−
|[https://bakabt.me/ BakaBT]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://bitspyder.net/ BS]
−
|style="background-color:#ff9999"| [https://sceneaccess.eu SCC]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://www.torrentleech.org/ TL]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [https://baconbits.org/ bB]
 
  
 
|-
 
|-
−
| '''Tier 3 - Backups'''
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| '''Tier 3'''
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [https://waffles.fm/ Waffles]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://rutracker.org/ RUT*]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [http://piratethenet.org/ PTN]
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|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://hawke.uno/ HUNO]
−
|style="background-color:#ff9999"| [https://freshon.tv/ Freshon]
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|style="background-color:#ffff99"| [https://morethantv.me/ MTV]
−
|style="background-color:#ff9999"| [http://hd-torrents.org/ HD-T]
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|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://blutopia.xyz/ BLU]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [http://www.secret-cinema.net/ SecretCinema]
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|style="background-color:#ffff99"| [https://secret-cinema.pw/ SC]
−
|style="background-color:#ff9999"| [http://Bitgamer.ch BitGamer]
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|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://bitgamer.ch/ bG]
−
|style="background-color:#99ff99"| [http://what.cd/ What.CD]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://thegeeks.click/ TG]
−
|[http://thegeeks.bz/ TheGeeks]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://nyaa.si/ Nyaa*]
−
|[https://pornbay.org/ Pornbay]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://pornolab.net/ PL]
−
|[http://animetorrents.me/ AnimeTorrents]
+
|style="background-color:#ffffff"| [https://learnflakes.net/ LF]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [https://pretome.info/ PreToMe]
+
|style="background-color:#ffff99"| [https://filelist.io/ FL]
−
|style="background-color:#ffffbb"| [http://torrentshack.me/ TSH]
 
 
|}
 
|}
 +
<nowiki>*public tracker
 +
</nowiki>
  
−
*'''Audiobooks''': MyAnonamouse (note that the best GENERAL source of audiobooks is audiobookbay and occasionally rutracker/kat)
+
===For trackers that fill a specific niche===
−
*'''Piano sheets''': MyAnonamouse
+
 
−
*'''Comics''': 32pag.es
+
*'''JAV''': [https://www.m-team.cc/ M-team], [https://exoticaz.to/ ExoticaZ], [https://sukebei.nyaa.si/ Nyaa], [https://slitopen.me/ Sinderella (dead)]
−
*'''Recipes''': Deli.sh
+
*'''Hentai''': [https://animebytes.tv/ AnimeBytes], [https://sukebei.nyaa.si/ Nyaa]
−
*'''E-learning''': TheOccult (fringe), ThePlace and BitSeduce (seduction), TheVault (business)
+
*'''Asian Movies/TV''': [https://avistaz.to/ AvistaZ], [https://jptv.club/ JPTV], [https://asiancinema.me/ AsianCinema], [https://jptvts.us/ JPTVTS]
−
*'''90's TV''': MySpleen
+
*'''J-Pop/Idols''': [https://jpopsuki.eu/ Jpopsuki], [https://sugoimusic.me/ SugoiMusic] [https://aidoru-online.me/ Aidoru!Online]
−
*'''Documentaries''': ScienceHD
+
*'''Full Discs/RAWS''': [https://www.cinematik.net/ Cinematik], [https://u2.dmhy.org/ U2], [http://hdbits.org/ HDBits], [https://totheglory.im/ ToTheGlory], [http://chdbits.co/ CHDBits], [http://hdchina.org/ HDChina]
−
*'''B-movies''': Cinemageddon
+
*'''Scene''': [https://torrentseeds.org TorrentSeeds], [https://revolutiontt.me/ RevolutionTT], [https://www.torrentleech.org/ TorrentLeech], [https://alpharatio.cc/ AlphaRatio] 
−
*'''Older movies/TV''': ILoveClassics
+
*'''Older TV not available for purchase/Scans/WOC content''': [https://www.myspleen.org/ MySpleen], [https://www.cathode-ray.tube/ Cathode-RayTube],
−
*'''x264 media''': x264.me
+
*'''B-movies''': [https://cinemageddon.net/ Cinemageddon]
−
*'''Hentai''': oppaitime
+
*'''E-learning''': [https://theoccult.click/ TheOccult] (esoteric), [https://thevault.click/ TheVault] (business), [https://theshow.click/ TheShow] (entertainment), [https://theplace.click/ ThePlace] (seduction)
−
*'''Korean porn''': Sinderella
+
*'''3D software, graphic design, vfx, /ic/'s favourite permanently freeleech tracker''': [https://cgpeers.to/ CGpeers] (note that a lot of the content on CGpersia is not on CGpeers)
−
*'''JAV''': yourexotic
+
*'''Audiobooks''': [https://myanonamouse.net/ MyAnonamouse]  (note that the best ''general'' source of audiobooks is [https://audiobookbay.is/ AudioBook Bay] and occasionally [https://rutracker.org/ RuTracker])
−
*'''J-Pop''': Jpopsuki
+
*'''Magic''': [http://artofmisdirection.com/ ArtOfMisdirection], [https://magictorrents.com/ MagicTorrents], [https://magicis.me/ MiM]
−
*'''3D software, graphic design, vfx, /ic/'s favourite permanently freeleech tracker''': CGpeers (note that a lot of the content on CGpersia is not on CGpeers)
+
*'''Music Software''': [https://audionews.org/ Audionews], [https://proaudiotorrents.org/ ProAudioTorrents]
−
*'''Magic''': ArtOfMisdirection, MagicTorrents
+
*'''Piano sheets''': [https://myanonamouse.net/ MyAnonamouse]
−
*'''Weird shit''': SocietyGlitch
+
*'''Rhythm Games''': [https://bemaniso.ws/ Bemaniso], [https://onlyone.cab/ OnlyOneCab]
 +
*'''Weird shit''': [https://stalker.societyglitch.com/ SocietyGlitch]
  
 
==How to get into private trackers (and survive)==
 
==How to get into private trackers (and survive)==
  
−
The first thing you need to ask yourself is whether your needs are satisfied by what you currently have at your disposal (DHT/public trackers (TPB and KAT), DDL, newsgroups, streaming, Soulseek, Tribler, DC++, Kad/eDonkey, sneakernet...among other things), because private trackers may not be actually worth your time, depending on what you want. Joining private trackers isn't hard, but it takes time. Do you just want that one specific file you've been searching in vain for weeks? If so, you'd be better off asking someone on /ptg/ (or /r/trackers) to snatch it for you and call it a day. Do you want to build a comprehensive library with consistent and superior quality such as good encodes, proper music tagging, retail ebooks? Then you should try to join one of the specialized trackers. Do you live in a copyright-cucked shithole and are afraid to get raped by the MPAA/RIAA and associates, but care little about music or HD? Then a general tracker should suit you. Depending on your goals, whether they are long-term and short-term and whether they are currently satisfied, the amount of time you will have to invest will vary.
+
The first thing you need to ask yourself is whether your needs are satisfied by what you currently have at your disposal (DHT/public trackers (TPB and KAT), DDL, newsgroups, streaming, Soulseek, Tribler, DC++, Kad/eDonkey, sneakernet etc.) because private trackers may not be actually worth your time depending on what you want. Joining private trackers isn't hard, but it takes time. Do you just want that one specific file you've been searching in vain for weeks? If so, you'd be better off asking someone on /r/ to snatch it for you and call it a day. Do you want to build a comprehensive library with consistent and superior quality such as good encodes, proper music tagging, or retail ebooks? Then you should try to join one of the specialized trackers. Do you live in a copyright-cucked shithole and are afraid to get raped by the MPAA/RIAA and associates, but care little about music or HD? Then a general tracker should suit you. Depending on your goals, whether they are long-term or short-term and whether they are currently satisfied, the amount of time you will have to invest will vary.
 
   
 
   
−
*'''Open-signup trackers''': This is the easiest step. All trackers have to start small and build up a decent userbase before they can afford to limit entry, and thus a number of trackers are open to signup for a time. There are numerous websites that keep track of these (opentrackers.org, opentrackers.net, btracs.com, /r/OpenSignups), unless you're looking for something specific, just go to rutracker (rutracker.org). Yes, it's entirely in Russian, but who cares? All registration forms look the same and you weren't going to post in the forums anyway, right? (More on that later). Rutracker is really nice because it's comprehensive, well-seeded and has high standards despite having very few ratio restrictions. In fact, 99% of the needs of most users are met there. If you are looking for porn, it is recommmended to open pornolab (pornolab.net). Yes, it's in Russian too. [https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/2guivv/is_anyone_interested_in_a_rutrackerorg_tutorial/ Here]'s a guide from a Russian speaker to rutracker.
+
*'''Open-signup trackers''': This is the easiest step. All trackers have to start small and build up a decent userbase before they can afford to limit entry, and thus some trackers are open to signup for a time. Numerous websites keep track of these (opentrackers.org, opentrackers.net, btracs.com, /r/OpenSignups), unless you're looking for something specific, just go to RuTracker (rutracker.org). Yes, it's entirely in Russian, but who cares? All registration forms look the same, and you weren't going to post in the forums anyway, right? (More on that later.) RuTracker is really nice because it's comprehensive, well-seeded and has high standards despite having very few ratio restrictions. In fact, 99% of the needs of most users are met there. If you are looking for porn, it is recommended to open pornolab (pornolab.net). Yes, it's in Russian too. [http://archive.today/2016.07.31-011439/https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/2guivv/is_anyone_interested_in_a_rutrackerorg_tutorial/ Here's a guide] from a Russian speaker to RuTracker.
 
   
 
   
−
From now on, it is assumed that you are familiar with most top trackers in their respective niche; if you aren't, please consult the [https://imgur.com/a/v15zc flowchart] everyone's been passing around these days. Past this point, all trackers restrict random user registration to a limited number of cases, mostly invites from existing members and a few other special cases for some trackers:
+
*'''Pay2Pirate''': Some trackers will invite you for a fee. The idea is to prevent potential cheaters from abusing the system (in ways defined at the discretion of the staff) since any fuck-up would cost them their account, and thus their money. Pay2pirate trackers are generally considered low tier, since they are run for-profit and several, notably IPT, have a history of shitty behavior. There are ''no'' trackers worth paying to join, at all. Almost without exception, they can be joined for free with easy-to-obtain user invites. The content that paid trackers offer is rarely, if ever, better than what is offered by the good public trackers.
 +
 
 +
*'''Application''': Some trackers have a special page with an application form in one way or another. Their goal is to keep a moderate influx of new members they can control by assessing your willingness to join and what you have to offer. Different trackers have different requirements: some will require proof of good ratio on other trackers, some will only require that you show genuine interest and good will in your application form even if you are new to the tracker scene. Some mostly care about what material you have to offer to the site. Try to be sincere, honest, lengthy and don't forget to provide an email address so they can notify you of their response.
 
   
 
   
−
*'''Pay2Pirate''': Some trackers will invite you for a fee (most notably, IPTorrents). The idea is to prevent potential cheaters to abuse the system (in ways defined at the discretion of the staff) since any fuck-up would cost them their account, and thus their money. For reasons that would take too long to explain here, IPTorrents is generally despised by other reputed trackers and a proof of good ratio there won't open the way anywhere else. It is still a very large source of general content though.
+
*'''Interview''': A few trackers have an interview system; it means that you are going to join an IRC channel and answer questions to their staff. It's mostly a way to control members' origin as almost all of them will ask that you join from your home connection.
 +
 
 +
**'''Redacted interview''': You ''must'' read [[Redacted.ch|this guide]] as well as [https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html this one] before interviewing for Redacted.ch. Generally, this is the best way to get into good trackers. The interview is quite extensive and similar to what.cd (though easier because the spectral analysis section appears to have been toned down). You can fail if you don't take this seriously. Redacted.ch is currently the most reputed tracker known to maintain an interview system and is essentially the new what.cd.
 +
 
 +
**'''Myanonamouse interview''': This is more of a chat, questions are mostly about the rules, you will not pass or fail so there is no need to worry.
 +
 
 +
**'''Bakabt interview''': More of a 3-minute chat about whether or not you understand the rules.
 +
 
 +
*'''Invite forums''': Once you've established a good standing on one of the aforementioned trackers you've hopefully managed to get in, you will be able to move on to more restrictive ones. Most top trackers require new users to have a past of good standing (i.e. Power User or Elite userclass) such as one that can be shown on a tracker whose staff they trust - the tracker scene is a small world, and tracker staff often cooperate (or fight) with each other. As such, there are recruitment threads on various trackers so they can exchange good-standing users for the benefit of all.  
 
   
 
   
−
*'''Application''': Some trackers have a special page with an application form in one way or another (most notably, AnimeBytes, ScienceHD, PixelHD, PTFiles and even Pedro's lately - find it here: <strike > privatepaste.com/download/da91bbcb5c</strike> '''404'd'''). Their goal is to keep a moderate influx of new members they can control by assessing your willingness to join and what you have to offer. Different trackers have different requirements: some will require proof of good ratio on other trackers, some will only require that you show genuine interest and good will in your application form even if you are new to the tracker scene. Some mostly care about what you have to offer to the site (for instance, being an actual scientist with access to loads of books and articles will surely land you an invite at ScienceHD). Try to be sincere, honest, lengthy and don't forget to provide an email address so they can notify you of their response.
+
*'''Super Exclusive Sekrit Klub''': Once you've made it to the big ones, the rest is up to you - you may try to join some of the ultra-closed trackers such as EXIGO or HDBits but at this point your needs should be pretty much covered unless you are looking for something really specific or just doing it for e-peen.
−
+
 
−
*'''Interview''': A few trackers have an interview system; it means that you are going to join an IRC channel and answer questions to their staff. It's mostly a way to control members' origin as almost all of them will ask that you join from your home connection. The most reputed tracker known to maintain an interview system is What.CD, and the interview, while not hard, may catch you unaware if you are not prepared. Be sure to read all of the material on the What interview preparation site (www.whatinterviewprep.com) as the site does log each and everyone of your connections, even if they are years apart, and they will know if you did an sometime in 2009 with a similar IP range or username. MyAnonamouse also requires you to join their IRC but it's more of a friendly chat and questions are mostly about the rules. The hardest part in an interview system is getting enough free time to wait for an interviewer, then taking the interview itself. What.CD queues are known to last for hours, and the interview can take from 1 to 2 hours. MAM is much faster but only interviews twice a week. Also note that if you are fond of le Reddit upvotes, you may apply for an interview at Baconbits, Reddit's private tracker.
+
Generally speaking, open-signup trackers will not offer you a pathway into more desirable trackers. Some trackers have application signups and you can progress from there, but you'll be taking months if not years longer to climb the pyramid if you do this. It's even harder to remain /pure/ as well. The standard method of progressing is to join RED, regardless of your feelings on a music tracker. You can join via an IRC interview and it offers the best invite forum for new users. The RED interview is conducted like an online exam, they ask you to close everything except for IRC and then send them a screenshot of your desktop. You aren't supposed to look at the prep material. They monitor the prep website and if your IP address shows up connecting to it they'll stop the interview and ask you to admit to cheating. If you fess up you can try again the next day. If you lie they'll permaban you, this is like a cabal ban as well so it can make life much harder for you. What you can do is cheat by saving the prep as a pdf. It's all fairly simple stuff to remember and you'll need to know it if and when you start uploading anyway.
−
+
 
−
*'''Invite forums''': Once you've established a good standing on one of the aforementioned trackers you've hopefully managed to get in, you will be able to move on to more restrictive ones. Most top trackers require new users to have a past of good standing (i.e. Power User or Elite userclass) such as one that can be shown on a tracker whose staff they trust - the tracker scene is a small world, and tracker staff often cooperate (or fight) with each other. As such, there are recruitment threads on various trackers so they can exchange good-standing users for the benefit of all. What.CD is known for having the most comprehensive range of recruitment threads and will land you a place in all but the most restricted sites (HDBits et al). BaconBits is also known for being a good gateway to reputed trackers. For this reason, they are often cited as a "first step" for new users to the tracker scene. <strike>Surprisingly, even mutracker has a couple of good recruitment threads.</strike> '''RIP'''
+
Next up is reaching the Elite userclass to unlock the invite forums. You actually get access at Power User, but better trackers require you to be Elite before asking for an invite. Some will have even more requirements, like a 6-month-old account or more. The requirements for Elite userclass are 50 uploads, 4 weeks of account age and 100GB of upload. The first two are easy, you can just upload shit from deezer, or transcode FLACs with no MP3 version. Getting 100GB is tricky. Without a seedbox you'll likely get a 1.00 ratio on your uploaded torrents, so it will take considerably more than 50 FLACs. You can seed your initial uploads with a seedbox, which should get your better returns. You could also race by autosnatching. RED is very competitive however, so do this only if you have some experience using a seedbox and configuring it correctly. Pay2win is an option, you can usually get 5-10GB filling a request for an album from bandcamp or similar. Another option is to use the "premier" plugin for Deluge, which manipulates the swarm and piece distribution to only upload a new piece once everyone in the swarm has the previous one, which means you upload 100% of the torrent to every single user. Proceed with extreme caution though, this plugin is not specifically banned on RED, but if autosnatchers notice they are getting 0 upload from you they may add you to a blackl-, sorry, ''block''list. If no one autosnatches from you at all you will only ever get upload from permaseeding or requests.
−
+
 
−
*'''Super Exclusive Sekrit Klub''': Once you've made it to the big ones, the rest is up to you - you may try to join some of the ultra-closed trackers such as Exigo or HDBits (don't even try Art of Misdirection though) but at this point your needs should be pretty much covered unless you are looking for something really specific or just doing it for epeen.
+
===I have ratio proofs on tracker A, can this get me tracker B?===
 +
Forget about proofs for official recruitment. People asking for proofs are generally going to be regular users offering user invites (/impure/), or staff holding application signups (/pure/). All that should matter to you most of the time is getting the userclass required to access tracker A's invite forums. Next you read the recruitment thread for tracker B, the recruiter will list the requirements they need from people requesting an invite. These are not negotiable. Trying to haggle with recruiters will get your invite forum access revoked and/or you banned altogether. They don't give a shit if you have 100TB upload, they only care about the requirements they list.
 +
 
 +
===On being /pure/ and avoiding treebans===
 +
Your account is /pure/ when you have only been invited to trackers via official channels, such as staff-run applications, or official recruiting threads. Staff will virtually never treeban an official recruiter since it would wipe out too many innocent users along with them. The benefit of being /pure/ is the assured knowledge your account is safe today and ten years from now. Remember that once you are in someone's tree you are in it forever, you have no control over the other people they invite, or who those people invite. Your inviter might be a good dude, but if he invites someone who sells accounts you are now in a poisoned tree. Being /pure/ is not always easy.
 +
 
 +
*Official recruiting requirements might be high.  
 +
 
 +
*You might get an invite way faster from a buddy, this can be a good idea if you know and truly trust this person not to give out user invites willy nilly. You can sidestep potentially years of pyramid climbing if you have a friend in the right place who you can trust implicitly.
 +
 
 +
*Some trackers don't have official recruiting at all. TVV, for example. Joining these trackers doesn't really affect your accounts' /pure/ status as they are generally not cabal associated. Obviously, you can still get in some trouble if the wrong person invites you, just be prudent with how you get your invites.
 +
 
 +
*Some trackers are in no way associated with the cabal, so being /impure/ doesn't matter. IPT is an example of this.
  
−
==I have X account Y. Can I get an invite to tracker Z with it? I have ratio/upload/buffer A==
+
===On being /marked/===
−
Ask yourself, am I in a higher user class on a site that has access to an invite forum (usually unlocked by getting to power user or the equivalent, with requirements that vary)? If not, then no in 99.95% of cases because MOST RECRUITERS *ONLY* CARE ABOUT YOUR CLASS AND NOT YOUR XYZ RATIO/BUFFER/UPLOAD. (unless you have a friend/Good Samaritan who will invite you because of your ratio/buffer/upload which is not a feasible situation in most cases.)
+
Staff have [https://web.archive.org/web/20160423222149/https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/4fpzxd/can_you_be_banned_from_private_trackers_for/ confirmed] that browsing /ptg/ will result in your account being "marked". This does not mean that you will be disabled, but staff will be less lenient with you if you break the rules in the future.
  
−
==On Ratio Proofs and Seedboxes==
+
* Exhibit 1 - [https://archive.fo/pCDLf No Leniency for 4chan]
−
Ratio proofs tend to be demanded by regular users who are offering invites '''NOT OFFICIAL RECRUITERS''' so you should not worry yourself over not having 'sufficient ratio proof'. Official recruiters will often only require user class on the particular site that they are recruiting from (often PU+ or the equivalent). Though if you stumble upon a HDBits recruitment thread it doesn't hurt to have better stats than the minimum requirements.
 
  
−
Seedboxes are often unnecessary for most members. It is possible to do quite well even on hard sites like what.cd even on a 100 kb/s upload speed provided you upload. However, people who wish to use additional seedbox features (such as a VPN, Plex etc) or download extraordinary amounts (or are obsessed with HD/FLAC quality) or want to jump user classes will most likely want one.
+
* Exhibit 2 - [https://imgur.com/a/M9ABe No Leniency for 4chan Part II]
  
−
==On being /pure/==
+
* Exhibit 3 - [https://i.imgur.com/NgeHKiJ.png /PTG/ Users Getting Disabled]
−
/pure/fags argue the following
 
−
* getting your invites only from official recruiters will eliminate the chance of a treeban (because of your inviter) and therefore protect the sanctity of your account
 
−
* often it is quite easy and possible to get invites from official threads
 
  
−
anti /pure/fags argue the following
+
Avoid clicking on any links that are posted in /ptg/. If you have to click on a link, do it a day or two after it was posted. Avoid searching for any torrents that are posted on /ptg/. Staff members search the logs to find /ptg/ members. Keep a low profile and use your head.
−
* often invites are unavailable from official recruiters
 
−
* getting invites from your friends can be much more easy than waiting for official threads to reopen
 
  
 +
===Ghostleeching===
 +
Refer to the [[Ghostleech]] article. Unless you know what you're doing, ghostleeching is very obvious and will get you cabal banned.
  
 
==What NOT to do==
 
==What NOT to do==
  
−
*'''Cheating''': The cardinal rule of thumb is that most cheaters end up with their account and their entire invite tree banned. Beware any anon which recommends cheating, much like 'delete system 32' it's fun and we all get some laughs at your expense.
+
*'''Cheating''': The cardinal rule of thumb is that most cheaters end up with their account and their entire invite tree banned. Beware of any anon which recommends cheating. Cheating doesn't just mean using some dodgy client to fake ratio.  If you "seed" 1000 torrents and throttle them all to 1kb/s in order to farm bonus points without using up bandwidth, you will probably be in trouble if anyone ever notices. Any actions like this that are not in good faith will not be looked upon kindly.
 
   
 
   
−
*'''Beg for invites''': Autists on /ptg/ have taken upon themselves to report every single email they see on this general to various tracker staff and spam crawlers (they went as far as going though the archives and reporting emails they saw in past threads). There used to be a time where /g/entoomen helped each other out and many a /ptg/ resident got their HDBits invite from some Anon on 4chan in 2010 but those times are long gone. Tracker staff are known to lurk the threads and will ban anyone they catch sending an invite to an email posted there. If you accept an invite you begged for, you will be found out and lose any chance of acquiring a legitimate account. Especially watch out for What.cd and PTP staff as they will revoke invite privileges and ban you for the smallest of transgressions (such as, but not limited to, accidentally posting IP lists in screenshots, posting the email you use for trackers). They have been known to autistically read /mu/, /g/ and /ptg/ (archived and live) for the express purposes of finding and banning inviters/ees.
+
*'''Beg for invites''': Autists on /ptg/ have taken it upon themselves to report every single email they see in /ptg/ threads to various tracker staff and spam crawlers (they've gone as far as combing the archives for emails in past threads and reporting those too). Tracker staff are known to lurk /ptg/ and will ban anyone they catch sending an invite to an email posted there. If you accept an invite you begged for, you will be found out and lose any chance of acquiring a legitimate account. Especially watch out for PTP staff as they will revoke invite privileges and ban you over the smallest of transgressions (such as, but not limited to, accidentally posting IP lists in screenshots or posting the email you use for trackers). Tracker staff have been known to autistically pore over /mu/, /g/ and /ptg/ threads (archived and live) for the express purposes of finding and banning inviters/ees.
−
+
 
−
*'''Trade for invites''': Tracker staff really, really hate this. If you are caught trading (and you eventually will be) they will go out of their way to ban you, your entire invite tree and cooperate with other staff so as to disable as many of your accounts on other trackers as they can. Don't go to tracker trading forums such as torrent-invites and the like, even having an account there (especially with the same username) may count as a red flag to some staff. It is reported that sites such as what.cd formerly abused bugs in the browser's web history to determine whether or not users were visiting sites such as torrent-invites and to ban people based on this activity. Site staff are also known to pose as invite sellers to trap and ban naive users.  
+
*'''Trade for invites''': Tracker staff really, really hate this. If you are caught trading (and you eventually will be) they will go out of their way to ban you, your entire invite tree and will cooperate with other trackers' staff so as to disable as many of your accounts on other trackers as they can. Don't go on tracker trading forums such as torrent-invites and the like, even having an account there (especially with the same username) counts as a red flag to some staff. It is reported that [https://archive.fo/8koAG sites such as What.CD formerly abused bugs in the browser's web history to determine whether or not users were visiting sites such as torrent-invites and banned people based on this activity.] Site staff are also known to pose as invite sellers to trap and ban naive users.  
−
+
 
−
*'''Buy invites''': You'll lose money along with the chances of getting in legitimately. Some staff will be lenient if you ditch your seller though, probably because they want to get at the source first. Invites are usually free (and easy enough) to get from gateway trackers like what.cd so it is not worth buying invites.  
+
*'''Buy invites''': You'll lose money along with the chances of getting in legitimately. Some staff will be lenient if you ditch your seller though, probably because they want to get at the source first. Invites are usually free (and easy enough) to get from gateway trackers so it's not even worth buying invites.  
 
   
 
   
−
Generally speaking, you should avoid invites from random dudes on the internet if you can; the reason is you most likely have no idea of their standing and they could very well fuck up later, resulting in an entire treeban and you getting banned through no fault of your own. It's unfair, it sucks. Stick to official invites (interview, application, recruitment threads) and no one will bother you.
+
Generally speaking, you should avoid invites from random dudes on the internet if you can. You most likely have no idea of their standing and they could very well fuck up later, resulting in an entire treeban and you getting banned through no fault of your own. It's unfair, it sucks. Stick to official invites (interview, application, recruitment threads) and no one will bother you.
 
   
 
   
 
*'''Posting on the forums''': Every post you make on the forum is an occasion of getting someone riled up, and that someone may very well be staff. You're here for downloading and uploading stuff, not chitchat. ''Don't use the forums''.
 
*'''Posting on the forums''': Every post you make on the forum is an occasion of getting someone riled up, and that someone may very well be staff. You're here for downloading and uploading stuff, not chitchat. ''Don't use the forums''.
 
   
 
   
−
*'''Talking to staff more than necessary''': Same reason as above. Don't give them any reason to ban you. If you rustle a staff member in any way, causing them to ban you, the entire staff will rally behind them even though they wouldn't have personally banned you themselves. It's the mod's word against yours, you can never win.
+
*'''Talking to staff more than necessary''': Same reason as above, don't give them any reason to ban you. If you happen to annoy a staff member in any way, causing them to ban you, the entire staff will rally behind them even if they wouldn't have personally banned you themselves. It's the mods' word against yours, you can never win.
 
   
 
   
 
*'''Being confrontational with staff''': Simply assume they are always right, even (and especially) when you point out that they are wrong.  
 
*'''Being confrontational with staff''': Simply assume they are always right, even (and especially) when you point out that they are wrong.  
 
   
 
   
 
In short, either keep a low profile or suck staff's dick, as with all sites.
 
In short, either keep a low profile or suck staff's dick, as with all sites.
 +
 +
===Cabal is so hard to join, I just want some content. What do I do?===
 +
 +
A brand new user is looking at potentially years before they get into the desirable trackers such as PTP for movies and BTN for TV. These trackers are not the sole sources of content however, they are merely the most convenient since they have the largest archives. To get the best coverage of content, a new user should look to join a few decent HD trackers as well as a few general trackers. The more, the merrier. Staff don't appreciate people collecting trackers they will rarely use. Fuck 'em. Join any tracker that you feel has interesting content or will compliment your ability to find the content you are after. Some decent and more importantly accessible HD trackers a new user could join would be Blutopia, BeyondHD and UHDbits. Couple this with IPT or TorrentLeech as your general tracker to fill the gaps. SecretCinema is an excellent tracker for people with a genuine interest in obscure/arthouse/weird cinema, as it has an active requests section with users filling from KG/PTP/TiK and so on. TVV will supplement your general/HD trackers for older or obscure TV content, if you can find an invite in the wild. Avistaz or ACM will fill your asian media needs. Don't count out public trackers either: RuTracker especially is a top general tracker despite being public. BakaBT has IRC signups and its old archives will fill the gaps of obscure content you can't find on nyaa. RED is the top music tracker and should be your first port of call, so that's covered right away. MAM is also arguably the best book tracker and has IRC signups as well.
  
 
==Getting acquainted with rules and maintaining your ratio==
 
==Getting acquainted with rules and maintaining your ratio==
  
−
Okay, now we're going to assume you made it to a couple of private trackers - if you haven't yet, please read above part (TL;DR: interview at What.CD, baconBits, MyAnonamouse or (hah) mutracker; apply to ScienceHD or AnimeBytes; work you way up from there on either tracker's PU forums, What.CD's being the most varied; if that's too much bother for you, use rutracker/pornolab and stop reading this). This is a guide intended to help those who already made their first steps in the elitist, restricted and highly autismal private tracker world. As you can see, things are quite different here. Rules, ratio, buffer, seeding, userclasses... what the fuck's all this? Things were much simpler on ThePirateBay where you could just search, click and have your stuff right there, right?
+
Okay, now we're going to assume you made it to a couple of private trackers - if you haven't yet, please read above part (TL;DR: get into an entry-level tracker; work you way up from there on either tracker's PU forums; if that's too much bother for you, use RuTracker/pornolab and stop reading this). This is a guide intended to help those who already made their first steps in the elitist, restricted and highly autismal private tracker world. As you can see, things are quite different here. Rules, ratio, buffer, seeding, userclasses... what the fuck's all this? Things were much simpler on ThePirateBay where you could just search, click and have your stuff right there, right?
−
+
 
−
And you know what? You're right. Most folks on /ptg/ and elsewhere will tell you stories about how they did a kind gesture and invited a friend of theirs (or even a fellow Anon) only to see them log on twice into the site before never using it again, no matter how hard they begged and how convincing they sounded. In all likelihood, these people first logged on, their excitement faded when they saw that they couldn't just start downloading everything before signing off, found the rules too complicated, lost interest in the whole thing and settled for more accessible alternatives (which are, again, not necessarily bad, depending on what one wants). Since you're reading this, It is assumed that you're not one of these people and that you actually want to use the trackers you're on. Are they worth it? Well, that's for you to find out. Before you decide, here's a few tips that'll show you it's not that hard, if you can read that is.
+
And you know what? You're right. Most folks on /ptg/ and elsewhere will tell you stories about how they did a kind gesture and invited a friend of theirs (or even a fellow Anon) only to see them log in twice into the site before never using it again, no matter how hard they begged and how convincing they sounded. In all likelihood, these people first logged on, their excitement faded when they saw that they couldn't just start downloading everything before signing off, found the rules too complicated, lost interest in the whole thing and settled for more accessible alternatives (which are, again, not necessarily bad, depending on what one wants). Since you're reading this, It is assumed that you're not one of these people and that you actually want to use the trackers you're on. Are they worth it? Well, that's for you to find out. Before you decide, here's a few tips that'll show you it's not that hard, if you can read that is.
 
   
 
   
 
===First things first===  
 
===First things first===  
  
−
Read the rules. Seriously, do it. Tracker staff are autistic, you get one account per lifetime and you don't want to start playing cat-and-mouse games with the admins that early. Most tracker rules are similar, and go on the lines of "Suck our dicks at all occasions; don't leak invites or torrent files to public places; don't trade or sell invites; don't be inactive" followed by specifics on content rules (what you may upload) and ratio rules (more on that later). Read all the details as there may be some specifics on each tracker. Some have exclusive content that you can't upload elsewhere; some prohibit the use of Tor or VPNs, or even expressively forbid that you log on from anywhere else than your home connection; and so on. Read it all so you don't get caught unawares on some autistic peculiarity.
+
Read the rules. Seriously, do it. Tracker staff are autistic, you get one account per lifetime and you don't want to start playing cat-and-mouse games with the admins that early. Most tracker rules are similar, and go on the lines of "Suck our dicks at all occasions; don't leak invites or torrent files to public places; don't trade or sell invites; don't be inactive" followed by specifics on content rules (what you may upload) and ratio rules (more on that later). Read all the details as there may be some specifics on each tracker. Some have exclusive content that you can't upload elsewhere; some prohibit the use of Tor or VPNs, or even expressively forbid that you log in from anywhere else than your home connection; and so on. Read it all so you don't get caught unawares on some autistic peculiarity.
 
   
 
   
 
===Ratio issues and tracker economy===
 
===Ratio issues and tracker economy===
  
 
Now let's assume you're familiar with the rules, how about you download some shit? The only problem is that ratio thingy: surprise, when you're done downloading something, no one ever downloads it back from you, ever. That's because, unless you joined a low-tier tracker, the seeder-to-leecher ratio is extremely high, with everyone permaseeding everything while only leeching occasionally. This brings us to our main point: tracker economy. Trackers can be roughly sorted into three categories: those with no economy, those with a soft economy, and those with a hard economy.
 
Now let's assume you're familiar with the rules, how about you download some shit? The only problem is that ratio thingy: surprise, when you're done downloading something, no one ever downloads it back from you, ever. That's because, unless you joined a low-tier tracker, the seeder-to-leecher ratio is extremely high, with everyone permaseeding everything while only leeching occasionally. This brings us to our main point: tracker economy. Trackers can be roughly sorted into three categories: those with no economy, those with a soft economy, and those with a hard economy.
 +
Some of the most forward-thinking trackers do away with ratio altogether, though keeping seedpoints as the sole currency of their site. These are neither soft or hard economies as the economic levers are created by and adjusted solely at the discretion of the respective tracker.
  
 
====No economy====
 
====No economy====
  
−
Trackers with no economy are essentially ratioless. Torrent retention is achieved by imposing seeding requirements or individual ratio requirements ("you must seed with a 1:1 ratio OR for 72 hours"), and people get an incentive for seeding by acquiring bonus points that can be used for transcending userclasses. Example of ratioless trackers include BTN or /mu/tracker. You won't have any problem there as long as you seed.
+
Trackers with no economy are essentially ratioless. Torrent retention is achieved by imposing seeding requirements or individual ratio requirements ("you must seed with a 1:1 ratio OR for 72 hours"), and users get an incentive for seeding by acquiring bonus points that can be used to transcend userclasses. The most prominent example of a ratioless tracker is BTN, you won't have any problem there as long as you seed. A tracker being ratioless does not give users leave to go on Hit n' Run rampages however, as these kinds of trackers will routinely keep tabs on users with low average seedtimes who appear to be taking advantage of the economy.
  
 
====Soft economy====
 
====Soft economy====
  
−
Tracker with a soft economy use a ratio-based system complemented by bonus points. These points are typically earned by doing specific actions, the most common of which seeding for an X amount of GBs, regardless of whether someone is actually downloading it from you. Some trackers will reward you for uploading torrents, idling on IRC or doing any kind of activity that contributes to the tracker and the site as a whole. Most trackers have a soft economy, from AHD to PTP, from MAM to bB or AB. Another kind of soft economy is a ratio-based system with a large amount of freeleech torrents, i.e. torrents whose download stats aren't counted but still earn you upload credits. Such trackers include SHD, SCC or bB, AB and MAM (again). You won't have many problems if you don't download everything like a retard: just grab some freeleech or small torrents, wait for your amount of bonus points to passively increase, get upload credit when you can, use that upload credit to download more, etc. The more you snatch, the more you seed, the more points you earn, and eventually you'll have enough buffer to freely download what you want.
+
Trackers with a soft economy use a ratio-based system complemented by bonus points. These points are typically earned by doing specific actions, the most common of which is seeding for an X amount of GBs, regardless of whether someone is actually downloading it from you. Some trackers will reward you for uploading torrents, idling on IRC or doing any kind of activity that contributes to the tracker and the site as a whole. Most trackers have a soft economy, from AHD to PTP, from MAM to bB or AB. Another kind of soft economy is a ratio-based system with a large amount of freeleech torrents, i.e. torrents whose download stats aren't counted but still earn you upload credits. Such trackers include SHD, SCC or bB, AB and MAM (again). You won't have many problems if you don't download everything like a retard: just grab some freeleech or small torrents, wait for your amount of bonus points to passively increase, get upload credit when you can, use that upload credit to download more, etc. The more you snatch, the more you seed, the more points you earn, and eventually you'll have enough buffer to freely download what you want.
  
 
====Hard economy====
 
====Hard economy====
Line 187: Line 218:
 
Trackers with a hard economy are ratio-based but provide little to no means of complementing one's upload amount, like bonus points or freeleech sections. As a result, there's only a limited amount of upload credit (which acts as tracker currency, there are whole academic papers about it if you're into that kind of stuff) in the whole tracker, and whatever credits you earn, someone else has to spend. Getting upload credit is quite hard and you might have to work on your ratio before being able to download whatever you want without hindrance. On the other hand, since nearly everyone is as tight on ratio as you are, everyone will be permaseeding everything and torrents will have an excellent retention.  
 
Trackers with a hard economy are ratio-based but provide little to no means of complementing one's upload amount, like bonus points or freeleech sections. As a result, there's only a limited amount of upload credit (which acts as tracker currency, there are whole academic papers about it if you're into that kind of stuff) in the whole tracker, and whatever credits you earn, someone else has to spend. Getting upload credit is quite hard and you might have to work on your ratio before being able to download whatever you want without hindrance. On the other hand, since nearly everyone is as tight on ratio as you are, everyone will be permaseeding everything and torrents will have an excellent retention.  
  
−
Trackers such as What.CD or Bibliotik have a hard economy, and most struggles you hear about getting one's ratio up will typically be on one of those trackers. There are four main methods to get upload credit, on top of permaseeding everything (which you should do in every tracker anyway - you're doing that, right?): getting a seedbox, filling requests, uploading your own content and jumping on popular torrent swarms early.  
+
Trackers such as Bibliotik have a hard economy, and most struggles you hear about getting one's ratio up will typically be on one of those trackers. There are four main methods to get upload credit, on top of permaseeding everything (which you should do in every tracker anyway - you are doing that, right?): getting a seedbox, filling requests, uploading your own content and jumping on popular torrent swarms early.  
  
 +
*'''Getting a seedbox''': Basically pay2win but you might end up doing that if you don't want to bother too much and have money to spend. A surefire way to build a ratio on any tracker. They also alleviate the risk for users in countries who hand out DDMCA notices. Seedboxes can also serve as media servers and much more.
  
−
*'''Getting a seedbox''': Basically pay2win but you might end up doing that if you don't want to bother too much and have money to spend.  
+
*'''Abusing the fuck out of freeleech''': /ptg/ers like to preference the most active torrents (especially staff picks) and the top 10 most active on freeleech days.  
  
−
*'''Abusing the fuck out of freeleech''': /ptg/ers like to preference the most active torrents especially staff picks and the top 10 most active on freeleech days.  
+
*'''Filling requests''': Can be tricky as people will obviously request stuff they can't find elsewhere, so unless they're particularly inept at googling and people didn't catch on you won't have any luck. If you consider the request to be worth it and you like the content requested you could also buy it, a less cheesy pay2win since you still end up with the physical medium as opposed to imaginary points on a website that might get busted at any moment, on top of the warm fuzzy feeling that you made someone you don't know on the other side of the globe happy. Looking for requested material on other related trackers also works, though the process can be tedious.  
  
−
*'''Filling requests''': Can be tricky as people will obviously request stuff they can't find elsewhere, so unless they're particularly inept at googling and people didn't catch on you won't have any luck. If you consider the request to be worth it and you like the content requested you could also buy it, a less cheesy pay2win since you still end up with the physical medium as opposed to imaginary points on a website that might get busted at any moment, on top of the warm fuzzy feeling that you made someone you don't know on the other side of the globe happy. Looking for requested material on other related trackers also works, though the process can be tedious.  
+
*'''Uploading your own content''': This is a reliable way to get upload credit ''and'' satisfy the usual userclass promotion requirements; however, unless you're operating from a seedbox or a very fast connection, you'll have a hard time achieving a ratio much above 1:1. That's because seedboxes usually snatch your stuff (especially if it's recent or matches certain tags) before taking priority to distribute it across the swarm, since the BitTorrent protocol favors peers with a faster upload speed. You'll still get upload of at least equal to your torrent size though, so you could survive on uploading stuff alone (also, if you keep uploading consistently good stuff, users will eventually "subscribe" to you and snatch everything you upload). On sites like Bibliotik, uploading enough content makes the entire site freeleech. You might also be able to get extra bonus points for uploading content.  
  
−
*'''Uploading your own content''': A reliable way to get upload credit AND satisfy the usual userclass promotion requirements; however, unless you're operating from a seedbox or a very fast connection, you'll have a hard time achieving a ratio much above 1:1. That's because seedboxes usually snatch your stuff (especially if it's recent or matches certain tags, like "classical" on What.CD) before taking priority to distribute it across the swarm, since the Bittorrent protocol favors peers with a faster upload speed. You'll still get upload of at least equal to your torrent size though, so you could survive on uploading stuff alone (also, if you keep uploading consistently good stuff, users will eventually "subscribe" to you and snatch everything you upload). On sites like Bibliotik uploading enough content makes the entire site freeleech. You might also be able to get extra bonus points for uploading content.  
+
*'''/pyramid/''': And finally, jumping onto popular swarms (aka /pyramid/ on /ptg/) is a risky though exciting activity that rewards those who catch on early and get to upload to everyone, while those who joined in on a later date only get a fraction of the original seeders' credit, thus creating a pyramid scheme. Popular torrents include those about to become freeleech and the newest content from popular artists. /ptg/ regulars will often post about /pyramid/ tips, which means you could download from that torrent in the hope that it'll grow and eventually get you a ratio above 1. If you have a seedbox or any kind of dedicated server, automatic tools such as autodl-irrsi will snatch stuff based on relevant information (such as tags, year etc.), however you run the risk of downloading too much stuff you can't afford, even if some of it pays off. Use at your own discretion and beware, your upload speed and peering have an enormous impact on what ratio you will end up with.
  
−
*'''/pyramid/''': And finally, jumping onto popular swarms (aka /pyramid/ on /ptg/) is a risky though exciting activity that rewards those who catch on early and get to upload to everyone, while those who joined in on a later date only get a fraction of the original seeders' credit, thus creating a pyramid scheme. Popular torrents include those about to become freeleech or the newest content from popular artists. /ptg/ regulars will often post about /pyramid/ tips, which means you could download from that torrent in the hope that it'll grow and eventually get you a ratio above 1. If you have a seedbox or any kind of dedicated server, automatic tools such as autodl-irrsi will snatch stuff based on relevant information (such as tags, year etc.), however you run the risk of downloading too much stuff you can't afford, even if some of it pays off. Use at your own discretion and beware, your upload speed and peering has an enormous impact on what ratio you will end up with.
+
====Other economy====
 +
Economies that have no ratio requirements, but maintain a semblance of order and structure by relying solely on seedpoints, or bonus points, to function in a similar way to 'hard' ratio-only trackers. Rewarding long-term seeding while at the same time disincentivizing pump-and-dump autosnatchers, seedpoints are used in ways other than to simply download torrents depending on the tracker. Voting on requests, ascending the userclass ladder and purchasing goodies in a bonus points store are a few ways that seedpoints can be used. It is worth noting that many ratioless trackers use points to purchase optional functionality, BTN is an example of this. By changing the requirements for maintaining a ratio to that of spending seedpoints to download a torrent is what separates this category from the ratioless variety.
  
 
====Which kind of economy is the best?====
 
====Which kind of economy is the best?====
−
Asking this question is a good way to start a shitstorm on /ptg/ and torrent forums alike, especially when you consider the different kinds of soft economy: BCG has essentially no global economy but a hard hit-and-run system that makes it difficult to seed back single torrents with ease, 32p has an inkdrop system that treats essentially replaces ratio with points, AB has a very, ''very'' elaborate formula for calculating the amount of points you get from seeding, and so on. There is probably no objective answer to that question, as there are top-tier trackers with all kinds of economy (e.g. BTN is ratioless, PTP is soft and WCD is hard) and of course countless shit tier trackers in either as well; different systems for different content. That doesn't preclude you from having a subjective opinion and posting it on /ptg/, of course.
+
Asking this question is a good way to start a shitstorm on /ptg/ and torrent forums alike, especially when you consider the different kinds of soft economy: 32p has an inkdrop system that essentially replaces ratio with points, AB has a very, ''very'' elaborate formula for calculating the amount of points you get from seeding, and so on. There is probably no objective answer to that question, as there are top-tier trackers with all kinds of economy (e.g. BTN is ratioless, PTP is soft and Bib is hard) and of course countless shit-tier trackers in either as well; different systems for different content. That doesn't preclude you from having a subjective opinion and posting it on /ptg/, of course.
 +
 
 +
==Recruiting pathways==
  
−
==Notable staff==
+
See [https://inviteroute.github.io/graph/ this Github-updated Pathway Graph!]
−
*'''312c''': Also known as '''312cuck''', he's a PTP developer and former mod of /r/trackers. Known for being autistic, power-trippy and an asshole in general. Notable achievements include getting his mod privileges stripped on /r/trackers for excessive and reckless faggotry.
+
 
−
*'''Aldy''': Aldy is a based god who makes AB /comfy/ as hell.  
+
=="Help, I've been cabal banned!"==
−
*'''chunkylover53''': A PTP recruiter who is known for taking very, very long for replying to PMs, and get mad when people go ask other, faster recruiters instead. It is advised that you refrain from requesting invites from him as he may take literally months to reply and will ban you if you PM someone else in the meantime.  
+
 
−
*'''Readable''': One of the BTN administrators, who had to face the daunting task of answering literally hundreds of invite requests on various trackers and despite this always replied in a friendly, timely manner. Because of this, he's considered bro-tier by /ptg/.
+
I can just turn my router off and on again to get a new IP and start over, r-right? Wrong. The private tracker community is small, so unless you live near a large population center there's a real chance you are the only person in your town or city using private trackers, which means it'll be obvious when staff cabal ban a rural Danish IP and the next day a rural Danish IP is in the RED interview channel. Consider what exchange you use and what IP range range your ISP uses. As well as other data like the torrent client you have, browser version and so on. If you ever do get banned and want to get back in, it's best to wait a few weeks, or better yet a few months. If you are creating a new identity, remember, ''do not'' check your old profile, especially just after joining the tracker. Some paranoid sysops are checking every new account's activity for weeks, even for months. ''Do not'' act the same as you did before, especially if you were an active user on forums and were uploading a lot. And obviously, don't use a similar username. Also, don't use the password you used to have, because they can see every users hashed password. Generally speaking, just don't draw attention to yourself and stay /pure/ by not inviting anyone or donating to your trackers, ever (by the way, what kind of cuck would you be, giving a donation to a tracker that cabaled you?). If you are ever cabal banned, consider all linked accounts to be tainted even if you can still access them. If you plan on starting over from the beginning, you will have to burn all of the accounts that could be traced to your cabal banned account, including the accounts that you think are not part of the cabal (i.e MoreThanTV, TorrentLeech, IPTorrents, foreign trackers and so on).
−
*'''TARS''': A what.cd staff member who reached meme status on /ptg/ by not releasing the freeleech within the promised timeframe.
 
−
*'''tehlarsie''': A chill admin of AHD who usually replies quickly to invite requests.
 
  
 
==Notable private trackers==
 
==Notable private trackers==
−
;[http://hdbits.org/ HDBits] (''HDB''): Large HD tracker, home to many high-profile encoders.
 
−
;[http://artofmisdirection.com/ Art of Misdirection] (''AOM''): Large magic tracker, limited to professional magicians only.
 
−
;[http://what.cd/ What.CD] (''WCD''): Massive music tracker with over 2 million torrents.
 
−
;[http://broadcasthe.net/ Broadcast the Net] (''BTN''): Large ratioless television tracker.
 
−
;[http://passthepopcorn.me/ Pass the Popcorn] (''PTP''): Large movie tracker. Content ranging from black and white obscura to the latest blockbuster.
 
−
;[http://bibliotik.me/ Bibliotik] (''BiB''): Large book tracker. Overdrive access recommended for users.
 
−
;[http://animebyt.es/ Animebytes] (''AB''): Large anime tracker with over 100,000 torrents. Many torrents are freeleech.
 
−
;[http://iptorrents.com/ IPTorrents] (''IPT''): Large general purpose tracker.
 
−
;[http://waffles.fm/ Waffles.FM] (''WFM''): Medium-sized music tracker. Regarded as what.cd alternative.
 
−
;[http://tehconnection.eu/ TehConnection] (''TehC or TC''): Medium-sized movie tracker. Regarded as PTP alternative.
 
−
;[http://freshon.tv/ Freshon.tv] (''TvT''): Medium-sized television tracker.
 
−
;[http://morethan.tv/ MoreThan.tv] (''MTV''): Small up-and-coming ratioless television and movie tracker.
 
−
;[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace#Shut-down_and_media_response/ OiNK] (''OPP''): What.CD, Waffles.FM, and other's predecessor.
 
  
−
==Paths to getting into Private Trackers (or where should I start?)==
 
−
Generally it is accepted that many major/reputable trackers recruit from What.cd (about 80% meaning that it is one of the best and most well regarded starting places).
 
  
−
Unlike many private trackers, What.cd has open interviewing system which allows people who are not currently part of the private tracker commnunity to advance. You can read more about getting into what.cd here: https://www.whatinterviewprep.com
+
'''Movies & TV'''
 +
 
 +
;[https://broadcasthe.net/ Broadcast the Net] (''BTN''): General TV tracker, the best of its kind by far. Other TV trackers can fill specific niches but 95% of everyone's needs can be filled with BTN. Ratioless.
 +
;[https://tv-vault.me/ TV Vault] (''TVV''): TV-only content that finished airing at least 5 years ago. Has lots of rare content not found elsewhere. Will fill much of your niche content needs if you don't have BTN and sometimes even if you do. No recruiting, user invites only. Users get lots of invites to give out and they often do so on a variety of trackers so keep your eyes peeled. Currently beyond usercap though so don't expect any for some months, Elite userclass can still invite though. Has some dated rules which are irritating.
 +
;[https://passthepopcorn.me/ Pass the Popcorn] (''PTP''): General movie tracker, the best of its kind by far. Other movie trackers can fill specific niches but 95% of everyone's needs can be filled with PTP.
 +
;[https://animebyt.es/ Animebytes] (''AB''): Anime, manga, Asian live action, soundtracks and general weeb shit. The best of its kind by a wide margin. Other cabal trackers were not happy about the loli/shota content hosted there.
 +
;[https://www.morethantv.me/ MoreThanTV] (''MTV''): Ratioless tracker for movies and TV, though the focus is on the latter. The closest competitor to BTN however distantly. Has been down for some months and is being rebuilt by the EMP sysop, expected to go live in early 2021. A good alternative to BTN if you haven't got it as it used to mirror the new content, while lacking the larger back catalogue.
 +
;[https://asiancinema.me/ AsianCinema] (''ACM''): Asian video tracker that is generally considered the successor to AsianDVDClub. If you ''ever'' admit to buying a DVD/BR, you'll get at least one faggot in your inbox asking you to buy him shit. Full disc images and remuxes only.
 +
;[https://karagarga.in Karagarga] (''KG''): A tracker for obscure, rare, arthouse, foreign and classic films. Mainstream not allowed. Also has a community of bilingual speakers who write subtitles for untranslated movies.
 +
;[https://sdbits.org SDBits] (''SDB''): HDB sister site, for SD content obviously. ''Not'' a path to HDB. As SD has fallen largely out of favour, the site is slowly dying. Don't waste your time.
 +
;[https://cinemageddon.net/ Cinemageddon] (''CG''): Movies with no IMDB page, <1000 reviews, or a score <3/10. Lots of "erotic" cinema that Travis Bickle would watch in some seedy '70s wanking kinoplex. Sister site of TVV and the invite process is the same. Below usercap, but invites are given out much less frequently than TVV.
 +
;[https://anthelion.me Anthelion] (''ANT''): General movies, run by Alastor who has a storied history of public meltdowns. Seems to have chilled out in recent years. Gained relevance in summer 2023 during PTP's extended downtime, as thousands of users flocked to it as a replacement. Once PTP returned, many users fucked off; nevertheless, keep it in your back pocket in case PTP shits the bed again.
 +
;[https://nebulance.io/ Nebulance] (''NEB''): Sister site of ANT, also run by Alastor, Ratioless. Not terrible for new users, but still pretty shit.
 +
;[https://cinematik.net Cinematik] (''TiK''): Untouched releases of obscure and rare content. Full Discs and so on. Very difficult to join as a user must vouch for you and then request an invite in the forums. Unnecessary for most users.
 +
;[https://secret-cinema.pw/ Secret Cinema] (''SC''): Ratioless tracker for obscure, weird or arthouse movies and TV. Easy to join with a very active requests section. Users often fill from PTP/KG/TIK/CG etc. so it's an excellent source of that content for anyone without access to a more difficult-to-obtain tracker.
 +
;[https://www.horrorcharnel.org The Horror Charnel] (''THC''): Horror, sleaze, sci-fi, B movies etc. Boomer tracker through and through. An easy to join alternative to CG. Died in 2022, may come back?
 +
;[https://bakabt.me/ BakaBT] (''BBT''): Old anime/manga tracker. Content is curated by staff so uploads come slowly. Has IRC signups. Good for old content to supplement nyaa.
 +
;[https://asiandvdclub.org AsianDVDClub] (''ADC''): Very much dead and buried. solcen (CTRL+F) bought the domain for an exorbitant sum and runs a failed and broken website, tracker and begging operation created through abuse of an autistic dev. No longer in development (still broken) but solcen is still begging for money, threatening bans and shutdowns whilst seething at ACM's success. Solcen shut it down after a christmas begging event in 25/12/2021.
 +
;[https://jptv.club/ JPTV] (''JPTV''): Nip telly. You'd better be able to understand moon. New tracker that looks promising.
 +
;[https://avistaz.to AvistaZ] (''avistaz''): Asian movies/TV. Probably the best tracker for this kind of general content.
 +
 
 +
 
 +
 
 +
'''HD trackers'''
 +
 
 +
;[https://hdbits.org/ HDBits] (''HDB''): General HD tracker with movies/TV and porn. The best and biggest of its kind by far. The biggest HD archive as well as the largest population of knowledgeable encoders. Encoders on other good HD trackers will often also be internal and release on HDB.
 +
;[https://beyond-hd.me/ BeyondHD] (''BHD''): Notable for being very fast to get remuxes, even before scene. Good for 4k content. Allows un-encoded SD content if no HD version is available.
 +
;[https://blutopia.xyz Blutopia] (''BLU''): Very good tracker, sir. All citizen of Pakistan banned.
 +
;[https://uhdbits.org UHDbits] (''UHDB''): Originally a Vietnamese HD tracker. Mediocre archive. Internal encoders are good. Recently had HDB invites offered in the forums to users with >200 uploads and high userclass. This has caused a flurry of activity with users reaching these same requirements in the hopes of getting HDB invites again. Unlikely to happen given HDB's historically autistic approach to giving out invites and getting butthurt when people find out where they are being offered.
 +
;[https://hd-torrents.org/ HD-Torrents] (''HDT''): Low-quality HD tracker, though easy to join for new users. Run for profit, requires users to download >15GB quarterly or get b&. Get it if you're a brand new user but don't sweat if you lose the account eventually.
 +
;[https://hd-space.org HD-Space] (''HDS''): Somehow a shitter version of HDT. Same considerations apply.
 +
 
 +
 
 +
 
 +
'''Music'''
 +
 
 +
;[https://redacted.ch Redacted] (''RED''): Music tracker which has solidified its position as the WCD successor. Controversial seedbox economy and its use as an invite stepping stone into other trackers has divided community opinion. Regardless it still has over 2 million torrents. Can be joined via IRC interview.
 +
;[https://orpheus.network Orpheus] (''OPS''): Formerly Xanax, Apollo (a-poo-in-loo). Music tracker with a much more user-friendly economy than RED. The archive is considerably smaller than RED's but it lacks a lot of the junk uploads people vomit onto the tracker for userclass.
 +
;[https://lztr.me/ LzTr] (''LzTr''): A soundtrack and classical music tracker. Small but useful.
 +
;[https://deepbassnine.com DeepBassNine] (''DB9''): A tracker for DnB music. Because it's reputedly hard to join, many people will try to get in just for epeen even though they don't care about DnB, jungle or anything like that.
 +
;[https://exigomusic.org Exigo] (''E****o''): Ultra sekrit tracker. As is typical with ultra sekrit trackers, it's worth joining for epeen alone.
 +
;[https://www.jpopsuki.eu/ jpopsuki] (''JPS''): Jpopsuki, Asian music tracker. Sysop is AWOL, staff is chill, content is really badly curated. Good to farm uploads (if they are very carefully checked) for RED.
 +
;[https://themixingbowl.org/ TheMixingBowl] (''TMB''): Semi-private music tracker for radio shows and sets. Open registration and easy economy. Very good if you want this kind of content.
 +
;[https://xbtmusic.org Pedro's XBTMusic] (''Pedro's''): A reputedly hard-to-join tracker dedicated to lossless music. Basically a subset of What with very rigid naming and tagging conventions, high-dpi booklet scans, harsher ratio and upload rules as well as an incredibly autistic staff and community. "[People say we are] anal retentive. It's true!" -Pedro. Currently dead.
 +
;[https://waffles.ch/ Waffles] (''WFM/WCH''): Medium-sized music tracker. Was originally waffles.fm but they changed their URL. Recently came back from the dead. Even more recently died again.
 +
;[[Wikipedia:Oink%27s_Pink_Palace#Shut-down_and_media_response |OiNK]] (''OPP''): Music tracker which was the genesis of the private tracker ecosystem we know today. Closed over 10 years ago.
 +
;[[Wikipedia:What.cd |What.cd]] (''WCD''): Music tracker that replaced OiNK. Huge archive, huge userbase. Created the cabal and headed it. Pussy admins hit the self-destruct button at the first whiff of police heat. Closed in 2016.
  
−
Some condensed notes for the interview process can also be found [http://pastebin.com/raw/Wgz6T7ta here]
 
  
−
Alternate recommended starting places include:
 
−
* Animebyt.es application: Weebs will love this place, but it's also much easier to find uploads for than what.cd and is arguably easier with a generous bonus point system and generous community. Registration is currently open via application although this only opens up when AB is below their usercap (currently 18000). You can get into What.cd via animebyt.es and vice versa.
 
−
* ScienceHD Application
 
−
* bB Application: Recommended for ledditors: currently closed
 
  
−
===Getting into the desirable trackers===
+
'''Books & e-learning'''
  
−
====BroadcasTheNet (BTN)====
+
;[https://bibliotik.me/ Bibliotik] (''BiB''): Large book tracker. Overdrive access recommended for users.
−
BTN currently does not recruit anywhere, and personal invites are disabled for all members apart from staff and a small number of very high-ranking users. There is no way to get into BTN unless you personally know a staff member, and if you do you're already in BTN.
+
;[https://www.myanonamouse.net/ My Anonamouse] (''MAM''): Large book, music sheet, and audio tracker. Friendly atmosphere that borders on clutish. You are not allowed to swear. One of the best trackers a new user can join and immediately use.
 +
;[https://32pag.es 32pages] (''32p''): Formerly ComicBT, the best tracker for comics. Peculiar inkdrop system in lieu of ratio.  Staff had a long history of breaches and general incompetence. Died in early 2020 and will not be returning. Use MAM for your comic needs in the meantime.
  
−
====PassThePopcorn (PTP)====
 
−
PTP is currently recruiting from the Animebyt.es PU, What.cd elite and AHD HD-Pro forums, amongst others. The fastest and most reliable way in is via What.CD, which requires a two month old account to join. The recruiter on AHD is known for being slow to respond to requests, so avoid going via this route if you possibly can.
 
  
−
====HDBits (HDB)====
+
'''General'''
−
For limited times they have been known to have invite threads on PTP, BTN, AHD, SDbits, CN, KG and various other "well known" movie/TV trackers. If you want to get into HDB your best chance is to max out the userclasses on those trackers. Any application offers or invite offers you see on forums are fake because HDB does not allow users to give invites on other trackers.
 
  
−
Here's a list of requirements typically expected to get into HDBits when they recruit:
+
;[https://iptorrents.com/ IPTorrents] (''IPT''): The largest and best general tracker. Run for profit by a fat Russian guy. Notable for being the sworn enemy of cabal with history of DDoSing cabal trackers and stealing peers. The sysop was doxxed a few years ago. Worth joining, just don't give them any money.
−
* Have a 6 month account at one of the aforementioned major trackers
+
;[https://filelist.io/ Filelist] (''FL''): Romanian general tracker. The language is primarily in Romanian and some English but you can use a translator addon to read it. Decent tracker which mirrors a lot of content from HDB.
−
* Reach a high userclass like Elite or TM which needs dozens and dozens of uploads.
+
;[https://alpharatio.cc AlphaRatio] (''AR''): Middling tracker, more closely associated with cabal than the other general trackers.
−
* Download 1 TB
+
;[http://funsharing.net FunSharingCommunity] (''FSC''): Another one of those sekrit klubs, for general content. Used to be the shit due to its exclusivity and focus for "community," is now almost dead and has worse selection than public trackers.
−
* Upload 1 TB
+
;[https://www.torrentleech.me TorrentLeech] (''TL''): Like a smaller version of IPT, slightly less scummy though not to be trusted. Has open signups so frequently they can be considered semi-private. Recently introduced freeleech which has made the seedbox-driven economy considerably easier.
−
* Have an average seedtime of 1 month or better (to keep seedbox hogs out)
+
;[https://rutracker.org/ RuTracker] (''RUT''): A public tracker entirely in Russian, but of unusually good quality. Hosts an enormous amount of content, some of which can't be found on private trackers. Always worth having in your back pocket for the times you are desperate to find some content, or don't feel like seeding it. Use a translator addon to read it.
−
* Not be warned.
 
−
* Be prepared to be asked for profile links to other trackers even after you send the recruiter your PM and to not be warned on those trackers.  
 
  
−
It is reported that the threads on AHD have been closed which may or may not have something to do with the fact that the pathway became publicized.
 
  
−
====Art of Misdirection (AoM)====
+
'''Porn'''
−
WIZARDS. ONLY. FOOL.
 
  
−
And professional wizards only too as they apparently want to watch your acts.
+
;[https://empornium.me Empornium] (''EMP''): The top general porn tracker.  Not much more to say. A very easy economy and a large number of coomers willing to buy Onlyfans packs and share them.
 +
;[https://slitopen.me/ Sinderella] (''S''): Korean porn tracker, as in run by Koreans. Porn is illegal in Korea. Used to have actual Korean porn and also be closed up tighter than a nun's snatch. Admins purged all the Korean porn and started recruiting again early in 2020. Still gets frequent JAV uploads though. Currently experiencing extended downtime.
 +
;[https://femdomcult.org/ FemdomCult] (''FDC''): Femdom, obviously. Has open signups now and then. Good if you are a degenerate coomer. Beware the scat tag.
 +
;[https://kp.m-team.cc/ M-Team] (''MT''): Chinese general tracker with porn section hidden by default in settings. Rich and well-seeded in JAV contents and Chinese-subtitled JAV. Note that admins set several porn collections (500 GiB to 5 TiB size) on Sunday/Monday each week to freeleech, which makes it easier to build a ratio.
  
−
====Bibliotik====
 
−
Bibliotik recruits from baconBits (3 month old account, Elite, plus Overdrive) and what.cd (6 month old account,PU, plus overdrive). Invites for members are currently suspended but when they open back up the Elite forum on Animebytes has unofficial member invites with no time/OD requirement. However you WILL need a way to get retail ebooks to survive on bibliotik. You've been warned.
 
  
−
Bibliotik is currently down due to DDOS so it is believed that all if not most threads have been removed.
+
'''Videogames'''
  
−
====AwesomeHD (AHD)====
+
;[https://gazellegames.net GazelleGames] (''GGn''): The top tracker for games. The economy itself is a game, with trading cards, item crafting and customizable avatars which affect your own personal economy. Also includes tangentially related videogame content such as artbooks and OSTs.
−
Recruitment is currently known to be available on Animebyt.es. They previously recruited on What.CD, but the thread has been taken down.
+
;[https://bemaniso.ws/ Bemaniso] (''sows''): Tracker for rhythm games and related music.  
  
−
====Karagarga (KG)====
 
−
Members of KG have to manually ask for invites in the forum, so getting an invite is harder than before. They recruit on baconBits (6 month old PU account) and What.cd.
 
  
−
====baconBits (bB)====
+
'''Misc'''
−
Has been available via What.cd's PU forum, but bB has been over the usercap (6,000) for quite some time now.
 
  
−
bB does irc interviews for reddit users if you have a 3 month old account with 300 comment karma. If you are not a reddit user, what.cd is a much easier and more available starting point for getting into more private trackers. If you aren't on reddit but still want in, make an account, post hilarious sexual innuendos on appropriate subs like /r/AskReddit or /r/TheRedPill to farm karma, wait for 3 months and interview. Any subreddit which isn't /r/trackers is also a potential spot for gaining karma, for example anime subreddits and pokemon subreddits.  The whole process is fairly trivial if you aren't a retard.
+
;[http://artofmisdirection.com/ Art of Misdirection] (''AOM''): Large magic tracker, limited to professional magicians only.
 +
;[https://myspleen.org MySpleen] (''MTV''): Old cartoons and nostalgic, hard-to-find content. Things like broadcast television cartoons from the '90s with the original commercials included. Closed, but the usercount does tick up every now and then so it may be possible to join if you try hard enough.
  
−
====Animebyt.es(AB)====
+
==Notable staff==
−
Currently open for application but apparently they have an application queue and a usercap. Also recruits on What.cd under PU. When it hits usercap the applications temporarily close until they fall below the limit. Also apparently there's a cap on how many applications can be in the queue at the same time. Apparently they are also used as a path into ADC, U2, JPS, and any other site that specializes in Japan.
+
*'''312c''': Also known as '''312cuck''', he's a PTP "developer" and former mod of /r/trackers. Known for being autistic, powertrippy and an asshole in general. Notable achievements include getting his mod privileges stripped on /r/trackers for excessive and reckless faggotry.
 +
*'''Aldy''': Aldy is a based god who makes AB /comfy/ as hell.
 +
*'''Azathoth and Spaghetti''': A /g/ay couple that used to run Oppaitime although they are far too reddit for most other boards.
 +
*'''chunkylover53''': A PTP recruiter who is known for taking very, very long for replying to PMs then getting mad when people go ask other, faster recruiters instead. It is advised that you refrain from requesting invites from him as he may take literal months to reply and will ban you if you PM someone else in the meantime.
 +
*'''Nala''': Sysop for PassTheHeadphones.
 +
*'''PrettyGreat''': Is PrettyGreat.
 +
*'''Readable''': One of the BTN administrators, who had to face the daunting task of answering literally hundreds of invite requests on various trackers and despite this always replied in a friendly, timely manner. Because of this, he's considered bro-tier by /ptg/.
 +
*'''sarek''': The hilariously incompetent sysop for attempted what.cd replacement tracker nostream (rip). Was banned from cabal after doxxing someone from his own staff channel (lmao).
 +
*'''TARS''': A What.CD staff member who reached meme status on /ptg/ by not releasing the freeleech within the promised timeframe.
 +
*'''tehlarsie''': A chill admin of AHD who usually replies quickly to invite requests.
 +
*'''solcen''': A hairless Vietnamese boy who achieved short-lived e-fame in the West for his singular testicle shaped like a Cornetto. Overfond of underage girls urinating in Japanese cartoons, and generally a rude and stupid person who couldn't even scam weebs, of all people. Still mad at ACM being the real ADCv2.
  
 
==Glossary==
 
==Glossary==
−
 
+
*'''Application''': Some trackers will let new users apply for an invite instead of simply registering. These questions are typically all the same and range from existing ratio proofs, knowledge of torrenting, interest in the site's content and what you have to offer to the site. The questions are usually very easy. Unless you're an absolute retard and talk like you're on 4chan, you will have no problem getting accepted.  
−
*'''32p''': [http://32pag.es 32pages], formerly ComicBT, the best tracker for comics. Peculiar inkdrop system in lieu of ratio.
+
*'''Autosnatching (autosnatcher)''': Renting a seedbox and configuring it to snatch (new/freeleech/recent-year/etc) torrents, virtually always to engage in /pyramid/ schemes (see below). Effective, although autosnatchers are generally derided because most of them "pump and dump" to hoard ratio instead of permaseeding, which hurts the fragile tracker economy by letting worthless lossy-web Deezer comps die.
−
*'''AHD''': [http://awesome-hd.net AwesomeHD], a tracker devoted to HD movies and TV. Considered the best alternative to HDBits which many people often settle for as the encodes on AHD rival that of HDB and HDB is much harder to join. Regarded as comfy-tier by /ptg/ because of the decent encodes, chill staff, availability of bonus points and easy paths to top trackers.
+
*'''Buying''': The incredibly moronic act of exchanging money for a tracker invite or account, usually via an invite forum. A good way to lose both your money and any chance of getting into the tracker you were looking to buy into.
−
*'''AB''': [http://animebyt.es AnimeBytes], the best tracker for weebs. Regarded as comfy-tier by the weeb part of /ptg/ for many of the same reasons. Rumored to have HDB recruitment at Legends forum. Often opens applications in which you are required to explain in a correct English bullshit such as how you know how to torrent and seed, have decent ratio proofs elsewhere and don't actually like Naruto.
+
*'''Cabal''': The staff of PTP, BTN and HDBits. Because they are objectively the best and everyone wants to join them, they rule the private tracker community and other trackers tend to align with them. Some trackers such as IPT are enemies of the cabal and supporting these in any way on cabal-controlled zones (such as cabal forums or /r/trackers) will get you into trouble.
−
*'''Application''': Some trackers will let new users apply for an invitation instead of simply registering. These questions are typically all the same and range from existing ratio proofs, knowledge of torrenting, interest in the site's content and what you have to offer to the site. The questions are usually very easy, unless you're an absolute retard and talk like you're on 4chan you will have no problem getting accepted.  
 
−
*'''bB''': [http://baconbits.org baconBits], a general tracker for redditors. Literally. Often babby's first tracker (when it's not What.CD or AB) and used as a stepping stone for better trackers, has a decent request system and is known to be the only places KG recruits from. Just like AB and AHD, once you seed enough you end up swimming in bonus points and the tracker becomes essentially freeleech.
 
−
*'''BCG''': [http://blackcats-games.net BlackCatsGames], the best tracker for video games. Has weird rules about HnR, inactivity and IP, is non-Gazelle, but is still regarded as top-tier.
 
−
*'''Bib''':  [http://bibliotik.org Bibliotik], the best tracker for books. (Note that the best '''general''' source for books is and will always be [http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ Libgen] or failing that, #bookz). Reputed for its ratio that is either completely impossible to maintain or utterly non-existent once you upload 100 torrents. Also known for its autistic staff and community, do not engage under any circumstances.
 
−
*'''BG''': [http://bitgamer.ch BitGamer], a low-tier game tracker infamously known for being hacked and doing nothing about it, and storing users' passwords in plaintext.
 
−
*'''BTN''': [http://broadcasthe.net BroadcasTheNet], the best TV tracker. Nothing much more to say, no other tracker even comes close.
 
−
*'''Buying''': the incredibly moronic act of exchanging money for a tracker invitation or account, usually via an invite forum. A good way to lose both your money and any chance of getting into the tracker you were looking to buy into.
 
−
*'''Cabal''': The staff of WCD, PTP, BTN and HDBits. Because they are objectively the best and everyone wants to join them, they rule the private tracker community and other trackers tend to align to them. Some trackers like IPT are enemies of the cabal and supporting these in any way on cabal-controlled zones (such as cabal forums or /r/trackers) will get you into trouble.
 
 
*'''Cheating''': Using one of the various known methods to abuse ratio, get caught by staff and eventually banned on all cabal trackers.
 
*'''Cheating''': Using one of the various known methods to abuse ratio, get caught by staff and eventually banned on all cabal trackers.
−
*'''Comfy''': Used to describe a tracker with chill staff, a friendly community and easy bonus points. Examples of comfy trackers include AHD, AB or SHD.
+
*'''Comfy''': Used to describe a tracker with chill staff, a friendly community and easy bonus points. Examples of comfy trackers include AHD or AB.
−
*'''CN''': CosaNostra, a tracker about gangster movies. Recruitment isn't automatic like in most trackers, instead you have to apply ''within'' the PM to the recruiter like you would on public applications for AB, SHD etc.  
 
 
*'''Country ban''': The practice of banning people residing in certain countries from registering (even when invited), applying for an invite or interviewing. Such country lists vary from tracker to tracker but often include India, thus leading to the curry meme.
 
*'''Country ban''': The practice of banning people residing in certain countries from registering (even when invited), applying for an invite or interviewing. Such country lists vary from tracker to tracker but often include India, thus leading to the curry meme.
−
*'''Curry''': As a noun, refers to a pleb who hasn't gotten in any private tracker and cluelessly begs on /ptg/ by thinking that grovelling enough and saying "gimme gimme" will land them an invite, in the manner of illiterate internet users from 3rd world countries and most notably India (which is infamously banned on many trackers), hence the name. As an adjective, refers to any low-tier tracker with low seed-to-peer ratio, shit content, shit interface and/or shit administrators. Note that cabal trackers, although they may have shit staff, cannot be curry.
+
*'''Curry''': As a noun, refers to a pleb who hasn't gotten in any private tracker and cluelessly begs on /ptg/ by thinking that grovelling enough and saying "gimme gimme" will land them an invite, in the manner of illiterate internet users from third-world countries and most notably India (which is infamously banned on many trackers), hence the name. As an adjective, refers to any low-tier tracker with low seed-to-peer ratio, shit content, shit interface and/or shit administrators. Note that cabal trackers, although they may have shit staff, cannot be curry.
−
*'''DB9''': [http://deepbassnine.com DeepBassNine], a tracker for DnB music. Because it's reputedly hard to join, many people will try to get in just for epeen even though they don't care about DnB, jungle or anything like that.
 
 
*'''DELETE THIS''': A meme on /ptg/ that mocks the secrecy some communities like to wrap themselves with, such as censoring their own name or URL (Exigo, h4h, etc.), forbidding people from taking screenshots of their site or refusing to reveal recruitment pathways into their tracker. The expression itself is a parody of the supposed anger from such people seeing such secret information being posted on /ptg/ and not being able to do anything about it.
 
*'''DELETE THIS''': A meme on /ptg/ that mocks the secrecy some communities like to wrap themselves with, such as censoring their own name or URL (Exigo, h4h, etc.), forbidding people from taking screenshots of their site or refusing to reveal recruitment pathways into their tracker. The expression itself is a parody of the supposed anger from such people seeing such secret information being posted on /ptg/ and not being able to do anything about it.
−
*'''Disabled channel''': A purgatory where users are rumoured to wait for weeks and months on IRC to get staff's attention, only to be eventually told "no, you won't get your account back and we won't tell you why" or "whoops, we did a mistake, sorry about that".
+
*'''Disabled channel''': A purgatory where users are rumored to wait for weeks and months on IRC to get staff's attention, only to be eventually told "no, you won't get your account back and we won't tell you why" or "whoops, we did a mistake, sorry about that".
−
*'''Deli.sh''': [http://deli.sh Delish], a tracker for recipes and cookbooks created by former What staff. Also known as that tracker everyone joined but no one knows why.
 
−
*'''E****o''': [http://exigomusic.org Exigo], one of those super ultra sekrit trackers that are incredibly hard to join (they even censor their own name) and are absolutely not worth it. Basically a subset of What for lossless content, with a dead community.
 
−
*'''Emp''': [http://empornium.me Empornium], the best tracker for porn. Once open signup and considered curry as fuck, it is now completely closed and impossible to get in. Some people still lament that they didn't get in while they could. It is rumoured on /ptg/ that the reason Emp is still closed is that they couldn't be assed to set up a proper invite system for now.  
 
 
*'''Epeen''': Bragging rights on the internet. Used in a self-derogatory way to mock the way /ptg/ regulars brag about tracker membership when this is hardly relevant in real life, if at all.
 
*'''Epeen''': Bragging rights on the internet. Used in a self-derogatory way to mock the way /ptg/ regulars brag about tracker membership when this is hardly relevant in real life, if at all.
 
*'''Exclusive''': The practice of restricting the diffusion of a torrent's content to a single tracker. Frowned upon by /ptg/ regulars who like to point out the hypocrisy of the thing.
 
*'''Exclusive''': The practice of restricting the diffusion of a torrent's content to a single tracker. Frowned upon by /ptg/ regulars who like to point out the hypocrisy of the thing.
−
*'''FL''': Freeleech, when downloading a torrent doesn't count against your ratio but uploading counts for it. Can be global, personal or specific to some torrents. The nature, incidence and targets of freeleech are entirely decided by the staff but usually occur for special occasions (Christmas, tracker anniversary, etc.)
+
*'''FL''': Freeleech, when downloading a torrent doesn't count against your ratio but uploading counts for it. Can be global, personal or specific to some torrents. The nature, incidence and targets of freeleech are entirely decided by the staff but usually occur on special occasions (Christmas, tracker anniversary, etc.).
−
*'''FSC''': [http://funsharing.net FunSharingCommunity], another one of those sekrit klubs, for general content. Used to be the shit due to its exclusivity and focus for "community", is now almost dead and has worse selection than public trackers.
+
*'''Gazelle''': A [https://whatcd.github.io/Gazelle/ web framework] geared towards private trackers, developed by [https://github.com/WhatCD What.CD]. Because of its clean interface and organization, it has been widely adopted by other trackers in the torrent community, including most top tier trackers like PTP or BTN. However, it is regarded as shit coding-wise (notably, you have to rewrite the music-related parts if you want to deploy it yourself for something else) by /ptg/, its only redeeming quality being that other frameworks are even worse. Note that it is distinct from [https://github.com/whatcd/ocelot Ocelot], the torrent tracker itself.
−
*'''Gazelle''': A web [https://whatcd.github.io/Gazelle/ framework] geared towards private trackers, developed by [http://github.com/WhatCD What.CD]. Because of its clean interface and organization, it has been widely adopted by other trackers in the torrent community, including most top tier trackers like PTP or BTN. However, it is regarded as shit coding-wise (notably, you have to rewrite the music-related parts if you want to deploy it yourself for something else) by /ptg/, its only redeeming quality being that other frameworks are even worse. Note that it is distinct from Ocelot, the torrent tracker itself.
+
*'''Global ban''': Ban from all cabal trackers. When one commits a serious offense (such as cheating, trading, buying or selling), tracker staff ban you and share your information to other staff of the cabal, eventually getting someone banned everywhere. Information retained by staff includes all the IP addresses you've ever used, location, ISP range, username, password hash, snatchlists and stylometry.  
−
*'''Global ban''': Ban from all cabal trackers. When one commits a serious offense (such as cheating, trading, buying or selling), tracker staff ban you and share your information to other staff of the cabal, eventually getting someone banned everywhere. Information retained by staff includes all the IP addresses you've ever used, as well as location, ISP range, username, password hash, snatchlists and stylometry.
 
−
*'''GGn''': [http://gazellegames.net GazelleGames], the second best tracker for games (sometimes regarded as the best because it's Gazelle even though its selection is less than BCG, your mileage may vary). Who knows when it will come back.
 
 
*'''HnR''': Hit and Run, the act of downloading a torrent without meeting seeding requirements (typically individual ratio and/or seed time).
 
*'''HnR''': Hit and Run, the act of downloading a torrent without meeting seeding requirements (typically individual ratio and/or seed time).
−
*'''HDB''' [http://hdbits.org HDBits], the best tracker for HD content. Is reputedly hard to join (invites are known to sell for $300 on the scum market) than even most top trackers, but recruitment still happens at the higher userclasses of other top movie/HD trackers.
+
*'''Inactivity''': Not using a private tracker (this usually applies to logging into the site and browsing it, not simply seeding). People who go inactive for too long eventually get disabled, and people who get disabled this way have to beg for it back at the disabled channel. Each tracker slowly loses some of its userbase due to inactivity and will recruit an appropriate amount to get fresh blood without growing too large. Some trackers even impose a minimum downloaded amount in order not to be disabled, most notably HDBits. That's because HDB accounts are so prized that members would rather log in once in a while than get disabled, even if they were not using the site.
−
*'''Inactivity''': Not using a private tracker (this usually applies to logging into the site and browsing it, not simply seeding). People who go inactive for too long eventually get disabled, and people who get disabled this way have to beg for it back at the disabled channel. Each tracker slowly loses some of its userbase due to inactivity and will recruit an appropriate amount to get fresh blood without growing too large. Some trackers even impose a minimum downloaded amount in order not to be disabled, most notably HDBits. That's because HDB accounts are so prized that members would rather log on once in a while than get disabled, even if they were not using the site.
+
*'''Invite''': What you live for. A way to access a tracker by getting vouched for by an existing member. A member may usually only give out a limited number of invites under certain conditions and is completely responsible for the people they invite, so the act is never to be taken lightly.  
−
*'''Invite''': What you live for. A way to access a tracker by getting vouched for by an existing member. A member may usually only give out a limited number of invitations under certain conditions and is completely responsible for the people they invite, so the act is never to be taken lightly.  
 
 
*'''Invite forum''': May refer to two things which are completely different. '''Public invite forums''' such as torrentinvites etc. are places for scammers to trade, sell and buy invites and '''are to be avoided at all costs''' as they are actively monitored by cabal staff who frequently ban the gullible users buying or trading their way into private trackers. Even having an account is enough to warrant a ban on strict trackers. On the other hand, '''tracker invite forums''' are class-restricted forums on reputed private trackers where other tracker members offer invites to a given class of users. They are notably used by staff from other trackers to recruit members they trust to be in good standing on the forum's host tracker. These are the ones you want to be on.
 
*'''Invite forum''': May refer to two things which are completely different. '''Public invite forums''' such as torrentinvites etc. are places for scammers to trade, sell and buy invites and '''are to be avoided at all costs''' as they are actively monitored by cabal staff who frequently ban the gullible users buying or trading their way into private trackers. Even having an account is enough to warrant a ban on strict trackers. On the other hand, '''tracker invite forums''' are class-restricted forums on reputed private trackers where other tracker members offer invites to a given class of users. They are notably used by staff from other trackers to recruit members they trust to be in good standing on the forum's host tracker. These are the ones you want to be on.
 
*'''Invite privilege''': The ability to give out invites. These are known to be revoked for the slightest thing, sometimes even without justification. People don't protest too much though since that'd involve waiting for weeks in the disabled channel for something they don't really care about since they never invite anyone anyway.
 
*'''Invite privilege''': The ability to give out invites. These are known to be revoked for the slightest thing, sometimes even without justification. People don't protest too much though since that'd involve waiting for weeks in the disabled channel for something they don't really care about since they never invite anyone anyway.
 
*'''Invite tree''': The set of people you've invited and their invite trees.
 
*'''Invite tree''': The set of people you've invited and their invite trees.
−
*'''Interview''': A conversation conducted on IRC with an official tracker representative asking a prospective member a series of question, usually related to the tracker's content and knowledge of torrenting in general. Interviews can range from a friendly chat (in MAM or bB) to a full-blown test where your knowledge is extensively checked and material to review is provided in advance (What.CD).
+
*'''Interview''': A conversation conducted on IRC with an official tracker representative asking a prospective member a series of questions, usually related to the tracker's content and knowledge of torrenting in general. Interviews can range from a friendly chat (in MAM or bB) to a full-blown test where your knowledge is extensively checked and material to review is provided in advance (Redacted).
 
*'''/impure/''': Having been invited by a friend who isn't staff or a staff-approved recruiter. Some /ptg/ regulars frown upon /impur/ity as it may lead to the invitee being banned in rare cases (such as a major treeban). It is sometimes the only way to get into some trackers though.
 
*'''/impure/''': Having been invited by a friend who isn't staff or a staff-approved recruiter. Some /ptg/ regulars frown upon /impur/ity as it may lead to the invitee being banned in rare cases (such as a major treeban). It is sometimes the only way to get into some trackers though.
−
*'''IPT''' [https://iptorrents.eu/ IPTorrents], a very large general tracker regarded as the best for general content. For various reasons such as being pay2join and pay2leech, DDoSing other trackers and leaking their peerlists, it is considered to be shady by the torrent community at large and is the worst enemy of the cabal.
 
−
*'''KG''' [http://karagarga.in Karagarga], a tracker for obscure, rare, arthouse, foreign and classic films. Mainstream not allowed. Also has a community of bilingual speakers who write subtitles for untranslated movies.
 
−
*'''MAM''' [http://myanonamouse.net MyAnonaMouse], a tracker for books, audiobooks and music sheets. Regarded as the best alternative to Bib and is much easier to join (admission is done via a trivial interview). Is considered comfy-tier by some of /ptg/ due to the easy availability of bonus points and the ''extreme'' friendliness of the community (who showers you with bonus points upon arrival). Its organization is a bit curry though, and language is very policed there, prohibiting any kind of swearing or sexual undertones - behaving as you would on 4chan is a very quick way to get banned. Your mileage may vary.
 
 
*'''mRatio''': Software touted by /ptg/ trolls to bait newcomers into ratio cheating and getting all their accounts banned.
 
*'''mRatio''': Software touted by /ptg/ trolls to bait newcomers into ratio cheating and getting all their accounts banned.
 
*'''/mu/''': /mu/tracker, a dead tracker that used to be operated by /mu/ users. RIP in peace, not that it was any good to begin with.
 
*'''/mu/''': /mu/tracker, a dead tracker that used to be operated by /mu/ users. RIP in peace, not that it was any good to begin with.
 
*'''Ocelot''': Tracker software used by What.CD, is distinct from Gazelle.
 
*'''Ocelot''': Tracker software used by What.CD, is distinct from Gazelle.
−
*'''OT''': [https://oppaiti.me Oppaitime], a tracker dedicated to hentai. Administrators are /ptg/ regulars, making OT one of the rare non-cabal, non-IPT trackers.
 
−
*'''Pedro's''' [http://xbtmusic.org Pedro's XBTMusic], a reputedly hard to join tracker dedicated to lossless music. Basically a subset of What with very rigid naming and tagging conventions, high dpi booklet scans, harsher ratio and upload rules as well as an incredibly autistic staff and community. "[People say we are] anal retentive. It's true!" -Pedro
 
−
*'''Pornolab''': [http://pornolab.net Pornolab], a very large semi-private tracker for porn. The site is in Russian but the content is international. Ratio rules are loose, but may prevent you from downloading too many torrents if you aren't careful. Probably the best alternative to Empornium if you hadn't gotten in while it was open.
 
 
*'''/pure/''': Having been invited exclusively though recruitment channels, thus ensuring that you will never be banned because someone in your invite tree's ramification got caught in a selling scheme. Some trackers are impossible to get /pure/ on though, as they may not recruit from anywhere.
 
*'''/pure/''': Having been invited exclusively though recruitment channels, thus ensuring that you will never be banned because someone in your invite tree's ramification got caught in a selling scheme. Some trackers are impossible to get /pure/ on though, as they may not recruit from anywhere.
 
*'''/ptg/''': The private tracker general on 4chan's /g/. Basically where everything happens. Note that no one ever goes on /t/ because /t/ is shit although /ptg/er influence can extend into boards as diverse as /gd/, /ic/, /wsr/, /lit, /a/, /tv/ and /mu/ due to their respective trackers.
 
*'''/ptg/''': The private tracker general on 4chan's /g/. Basically where everything happens. Note that no one ever goes on /t/ because /t/ is shit although /ptg/er influence can extend into boards as diverse as /gd/, /ic/, /wsr/, /lit, /a/, /tv/ and /mu/ due to their respective trackers.
−
*'''#ptg''': The name of two channels, one on Rizon and the other one on Oppaitime's IRC. Both are hang out places for /ptg/ regulars, but only the one on Oppaitime is not dead.  
+
*'''#ptg''': <s>The name of two channels, one on Rizon and the other one on Oppaitime's IRC. Both are hang out places for /ptg/ regulars, but only the one on Oppaitime is not dead.</s> Both IRCs are now closed due to 312c's mass banning of /ptg/ users. There is a rumored third IRC.
 
*'''PTG''': The private tracker game, an RPG where climbing userclasses is the equivalent of leveling up and joining other trackers is the equivalent of unlocking new abilities. Everyone on /ptg/ is playing the private tracker game.
 
*'''PTG''': The private tracker game, an RPG where climbing userclasses is the equivalent of leveling up and joining other trackers is the equivalent of unlocking new abilities. Everyone on /ptg/ is playing the private tracker game.
−
*'''PTP''': The best movie tracker. Infamously known for having 312cuck in the dev team.
 
 
*'''/pyramid/''': Once referring to the practice of jumping onto popular swarms (usually on What) to harvest upload before others like a pyramid scheme, it mostly now refers to the hierarchy of trackers from the entry-level ones like What or bB to hard to join ones like BTN or HDB. Climbing the pyramid describes one's ascension of a /ptg/ regular through these various steps.
 
*'''/pyramid/''': Once referring to the practice of jumping onto popular swarms (usually on What) to harvest upload before others like a pyramid scheme, it mostly now refers to the hierarchy of trackers from the entry-level ones like What or bB to hard to join ones like BTN or HDB. Climbing the pyramid describes one's ascension of a /ptg/ regular through these various steps.
−
*'''Ratio''': Amount of uploaded data over amount of downloaded data. May be global or torrent-specific. Acts as an indicator of how much you contribute data to the community. If more than 1, you are a positive contributor; if less than 1, you are a leech. Note that on sites where ratio is hard to gain, having a too high ratio is also frowned upon as you are essentially hoarding credit that could be used by other users to spend, thus reducing tracker activity and harming its economy.
+
*'''Ratio''': Amount of uploaded data over amount of downloaded data. May be global or torrent-specific. Acts as an indicator of how much you contribute data to the community. If more than 1, you are a positive contributor; if less than 1, you are a leech. Note that on sites where the ratio is hard to gain, having a too high ratio is also frowned upon as you are essentially hoarding credit that could be used by other users to spend, thus reducing tracker activity and harming its economy.
−
*'''Ratio watch''': A way to enforce ratio requirements on various trackers. A state of ratio watch is attained when ratio falls below what the tracker requires, and acts as a temporary warning before harsher measures are taken such as the removal of leeching privileges or an outright ban.
+
*'''Ratiocuck''': Refers to someone who has to use a seedbox to get buffer or maintain a good ratio on a generally hard-to-seed tracker, or in regards to any user who seeds content instead of downloading with no responsibilities from usenet.
 +
*'''Ratio watch''': A way to enforce ratio requirements on various trackers. A state of ratio watch is attained when the ratio falls below what the tracker requires, and acts as a temporary warning before harsher measures are taken such as the removal of leeching privileges or an outright ban.
 
*'''Ratioless''': A tracker with no ratio rules. It may still have HnR rules though.
 
*'''Ratioless''': A tracker with no ratio rules. It may still have HnR rules though.
−
*'''Recruitment''': An official way to get invited to a tracker, sanctioned by staff (or an official staff representative with unlimited invites) itself. Recruitment usually refers to class-restricted invite forum threads where staff or staff reps present their tracker and state the conditions for admission via PM request, but it can also broadly refer to any kind of official recruitment like interview or applications. Open signup is not recruitment though.
+
*'''Recruitment''': An official way to get invited to a tracker, sanctioned by staff (or an official staff representative with unlimited invites) itself. Recruitment usually refers to class-restricted invite forum threads where staff or staff reps present their tracker and state the conditions for admission via PM request, but it can also broadly refer to any kind of official recruitment like interviews or applications. Open signup is not recruitment though.
 
*'''Required ratio''': The minimum threshold set by ratio-based trackers. It depends on each tracker and may even vary within a tracker. Sites with a hard economy tend to have a lower required ratio. Required ratio rules aren't typically enforced for newcomers (who are given a grace period/amount to download a little).
 
*'''Required ratio''': The minimum threshold set by ratio-based trackers. It depends on each tracker and may even vary within a tracker. Sites with a hard economy tend to have a lower required ratio. Required ratio rules aren't typically enforced for newcomers (who are given a grace period/amount to download a little).
 
*'''/r/trackers''': The private tracker subreddit where people like to re-ask the same question for the 1000th time, post announcements, complain about bans and suck the cock of cabal tracker staff. Supporting non-cabal trackers is not allowed there.
 
*'''/r/trackers''': The private tracker subreddit where people like to re-ask the same question for the 1000th time, post announcements, complain about bans and suck the cock of cabal tracker staff. Supporting non-cabal trackers is not allowed there.
−
*'''rutracker''': [http://rutracker.org Rutracker], a very large general public tracker in Russian (only the site's language, the content is international), and probably the best public tracker in terms of content and availability. Once semi-private, it went full public with magnet links after being ordered to remove torrents pointing to copyrighted content by a Russian court.
+
*'''Seedbox''': A remote server with a high-speed connection used primarily for downloading and seeding torrents.
−
*'''TPS''': [http://thepiratesociety.info ThePirateSociety], a forum to circlejerk with other pirates about trackers. Requires an application to sign in but being accepted isn't hard. Will copiously suck cabal tracker cock and openly share the information about you they have. It is however an interesting alternative path to some of the hard to join trackers like Pedro's, Exigo or HDBits.
+
*'''Semi-private''': Used to describe a tracker with open registration but whose torrents still retain the ''private'' flag, only allowing members with a registered passkey to connect to the swarm and leech/upload data. Trackers that require registration to view the site but are still open-signup are semi-private. ThePirateBay or Kat are ''not'' semi-private.
 +
*'''Selling''': A scam conducted on public invite forums by unscrupulous people. They give away invites or accounts (usually hacked and "buffered," i.e. artificially inflated with ratio cheating tools) to naive users for money, who then get obviously caught by staff and realize they wasted money for nothing. There exists a whole alternative market for invites, ranging from $15 for What to $200-300 for sites like Exigo or HDBits. None of them are worth wasting money for.
 +
*'''TPS''': [https://thepiratesociety.info ThePirateSociety], a forum to circlejerk with other pirates about trackers. Requires an application to sign in but being accepted isn't hard. Will copiously suck cabal tracker cock and openly share the information about you they have. It is however an interesting alternative path to some of the hard-to-join trackers like Pedro's, Exigo or HDBits.
 
*'''Trading''': Exchanging tracker invites, which is forbidden on all cabal trackers. Invites should only be offered (and even then, only on class-restricted forums on other cabal trackers, if at all) or requested (and even then, only by PM to the individual person having the invites), with no compensation whatsoever. The idea is that you would only ever do that for a friend or someone you like and trust.
 
*'''Trading''': Exchanging tracker invites, which is forbidden on all cabal trackers. Invites should only be offered (and even then, only on class-restricted forums on other cabal trackers, if at all) or requested (and even then, only by PM to the individual person having the invites), with no compensation whatsoever. The idea is that you would only ever do that for a friend or someone you like and trust.
−
*'''Treeban''': A mass ban enacted on a user and his entire invite tree. Usually happens when the user or one of his invitees is caught in a selling scheme. Because trees can be so extensive, some innocent users often get caught in the process; this led /ptg/ users to exclusively sticking to official recruitment channels, thus creating the /pure/ meme.
+
*'''Treeban''': A mass ban enacted on a user and his entire invite tree. Usually happens when the user or one of his invitees is caught in a selling scheme. Because trees can be so extensive, some innocent users often get caught in the process; this led /ptg/ users to exclusively stick to official recruitment channels, thus creating the /pure/ meme.
−
*'''Userclass''': An indicator of how much a user has contributed to the tracker. They typically are (with some variations): User, Member, Power User, Elite, Master, VIP and Staff classes. Each userclass awards certain privileges like being able to give out invites, inactivity pruning immunity or access invite forums. Higher userclasses usually require a certain amount of upload credit, uploaded torrents and tracker presence.  
+
*'''Userclass''': An indicator of how much a user has contributed to the tracker. They typically are (with some variations): User, Member, Power User, Elite, Master, VIP and Staff classes. Each userclass awards certain privileges like being able to give out invites, inactivity pruning immunity or access to invite forums. Higher userclasses usually require a certain amount of upload credit, uploaded torrents and tracker presence.
−
*'''S''': [https://blady.me/ Sinderella], a notoriously hard to join tracker for Korean porn. That's because porn is illegal in Korea.
+
*'''#KGB''': The IRC channel rumoured to be used by cabal and associates to share information about users.
−
*'''SDB''': [http://sdbits.org SDBits], the equivalent of HDBits for Standard Definition. Not as hard to get in, but not as coveted as the cabal trackers. It is known for having had recruitment threads to HDBits in the past.
 
−
*'''Semi-private''': Used to describe a tracker with open registration but whose torrents still retain the ''private'' flag, allowing only members with a registered passkey from connecting to the swarm and leeching/uploading data. Trackers that require registration to view the site but are still open signup are semi-private. ThePirateBay or Kat are ''not'' semi-private.
 
−
*'''SHD''': [https://sciencehd.me ScienceHD], a tracker for documentaries and e-learning (with a bit of scientific software). Has an open application system which is as always easy to pass, a very tight-knit community and decent invite forums. Considered comfy-tier.
 
−
*'''Selling''': A scam conducted on public invite forums by unscrupulous people. They give away invites or accounts (usually hacked and "buffered", i.e. artificially inflated with ratio cheating tools) to naive users for money, who then get obviously caught by staff and realize they wasted money for nothing. There exists a whole alternative market for invites, ranging from $15 for What to $200-300 for sites like Exigo or HDBits. None of them are worth wasting money for.
 
−
*'''WFM''': [http://waffles.fm Waffles], a subset of What. Regarded as the best alternative to What but some /ptg/ folks would argue you'd be better off with rutracker or Soulseek.
 
−
*'''WCD''': [http://what.cd What.CD], the best music tracker and probably the best music catalog of all time. Known for its interview system and preparation material, autistic staff, comprehensive invite section, hipster community and incredible music selection. Also accepts books and software for some reason. Ratio is hard to maintain at first for some people.
 
  
 
== External links ==
 
== External links ==
−
* [http://4chanmusic.wikia.com/wiki/Obtaining_Music /mu/'s guide to obtain music]
+
* [https://4chanmusic.wikia.com/wiki/Obtaining_Music /mu/'s guide to obtain music]
 +
* [https://boards.4channel.org/g/#s=ptg The current /ptg/ thread]
 +
* [https://pastebin.pl/view/f19e4e48 A somewhat dated list of encoding groups and the trackers they release on]
  
 
== See also ==
 
== See also ==

Latest revision as of 16:34, 10 February 2024

Private Tracker Flowchart (outdated)

In this article, you will be guided on how to get into (and survive) the world of private trackers.

Commonly asked questions that everyone is tired of hearing

What is a private tracker?

A private tracker is a torrent website that provides the same functionality as a public tracker but is invite-only. This means you need to be a member to view the contents of the site and download its torrents. A tracker can either be semiprivate, where you can create an account for free by just registering your details, or fully private, where another user has to invite you. Within a tracker, there is usually an extensive set of rules covering how much one can download, what kind of content one can upload, what precautions one must take when logging into the site, etc. Such rules and content vary from tracker to tracker, and go from rather liberal with little enforcement to ultra-paranoid and autistic. Advantages of private trackers include:

  • Speed: If you're familiar with torrents, you probably know that the bigger the swarm, the faster you download. Private trackers encourage their members to seed torrents for as long as possible, thus increasing the chances of a torrent having a healthy swarm for longer. Not only that, but many members use seedboxes, which are just servers based in data centers offering very high speeds and excellent peering. Enough to max out anyone's home connection.
  • Retention: Similarly, private trackers usually enforce rules that encourage long-term seeding. A few peers on private trackers will perennially seed many torrents for obscure content that will have little or no seeders on a public tracker.
  • Selection: Some content simply isn't available on any public site and will only be found on private trackers. Many private trackers are devoted to specific kinds of content, be it the format of the media, or the specific genre or region. Sometimes you can't even legally buy it at all, ironically. Some trackers specialize in obscure or rare content, ensuring that it doesn't get lost from the Internet.
  • Quality control: A major asset of private trackers, albeit one that can vary a lot across trackers. Good private trackers have stringent rules on the content format, quality, and organization. Music trackers will ensure you don't get horrible 92kbps transcodes, movie trackers will ensure you only get good encodes, ebook trackers will ensure you get retail quality, etc. Members and staff review and approve each torrent. Trumping rules and the removal of duplicates ensure you only get one community-approved source for the specific content and format. This, coupled with a decent site layout, makes private trackers much more orderly than public ones.
  • Security: There are two reasons private trackers are more secure, albeit they may not apply in the future. The first one is that most of them are obscure enough that no one really knows or cares about them (security through obscurity). The second one is that copyright trolls would rather focus on huge public sites that are easy to fish for peers rather than small communities that are hard to join. From a monetary point of view, it's more worthwhile to stop 10,000 casuals from downloading two torrents than to stop two neckbeards from downloading 10,000 torrents. There are some caveats to this though, copyright trolls will aggressively pursue the source of leaked pre-release media, such as screeners. As a result, many private trackers do not allow this content. Fortunately, leaked screeners are generally very popular and will be easily found on public trackers anyway. Large prolific piracy groups such as scene or well-known release groups are huge targets for copyright enforcement.

How secure/safe are private trackers?

There are two aspects to this: one is your own personal security, the other is the security of the tracker itself. Due to the nature of private trackers, they will often require you sign up for an account using your home IP address. In order to keep track of banned users, banned regions and so on, most private trackers will log everything you do on their platform and keep that data forever. Private trackers are all inherently illegal and you are trusting some unknown person or group with a pretty considerable amount of your data. You don't know if the staff have nefarious intentions and you don't know how competent they are with their own op-sec. There have been numerous cases of tracker security breaches over the years due to incompetent tracker developers. Many old trackers store your password in plaintext, don't have 2FA, don't secure their sites correctly or a host of other things. There are, however, a few things you can do to minimize the risk.

  • Never use the same password across multiple trackers. To be safe, don't use the same usernames either. This doesn't do a great deal but it will at least stop regular users from stalking you across trackers. Some tracker admins in the past have been known to use username/email and password combinations of users on their tracker to try to log in on other trackers and steal accounts. Using two-factor authentication is also advised, where available. A different email address for every tracker is maximum tinfoil but go for it if you want to. At a minimum, you should use a different username and password for every tracker and for God's sake don't put links to your other track profiles in your profile bios.
  • Don't tie any personal information to your tracker accounts. This includes a non-throwaway email address or personally identifiable information of any kind. Staff have said in the past that users have signed up for private trackers using their work email addresses, full name included and everything. Idiots. Information like that could be used to harm or track you down should it fall into the wrong hands. The tracker staff may be legitimate, but the site itself can be busted or defaced by hackers. Don't post about yourself in the forums and for fuck's sake don't post in any of those "post a pic of you" threads. Torrent trackers are not social networks.
  • Again, remember that you are entrusting your information to an unknown and effectively unaccountable second party. The email you use, your IP, your snatchlist, everything. Once you sign up for a tracker, you lose control over who has access to this data. It's simply a risk you must take if you wish to join the private tracker community.

What are the best private trackers?

There are two kinds of trackers, content-wise: specialized and general. General trackers will often serve the majority of your needs, while bigger general trackers will usually have plenty of niche content. Popular public trackers are general trackers: RARBG, RuTracker, ThePirateBay, etc. Due to their broad scope, they will still never match the niche trackers in their particular area of specialty.

The following is a global consensus on what is considered the best tracker in their fields, namely: Music, Movies (both mainstream and obscure), TV, HD (yes, this gets a separate category), Games, Books, E-learning, Porn, Anime, Scene and General.

  • Green trackers are the cabal — the holy trinity of PTP, BTN and HDB + RED (This is known as the /ptg/ diamond). These are the best, most reputed trackers in the torrent community. They are objectively the best in their respective categories and rule the torrent world. Do not fuck with cabal staff as they will gang up on you and have you permabanned from all cabal trackers along with any other trackers willing to cooperate with them (and many often do).
  • Yellow trackers are subject to the cabal — if you're banned from the cabal, you will get banned from these as well. On the other hand, a good ratio proof on one of these will be well-considered if you apply to another cabal-subjected tracker. However, because of their niche or subpar content, they don't get as much exposure as the cabal.
  • Red trackers are primarily shady — they are either the IPT mafia empire or are run by staff known for shitty practices such as trading accounts, DDoSing other sites, encouraging pay2leech and storing passwords in plaintext. They are the cabal's worst enemies, so don't expect ratio proof on one of these trackers to be taken into consideration on cabal sites. They may still have good content and be worth joining, just don't give them any money for any reason whatsoever. Being in the cabal means you can afford to give little to no fucks about your account on one of these. For instance, if your IPT account gets purged, you can just get another one.
  • White trackers are either open or not known to cooperate much with the cabal, but they aren't known for shitty practices either.
Music Movies (mainstream) TV HD Films (obscure) Games Books Anime Porn E-learning General
Tier 1 RED PTP BTN HDB KG GGN BIB AB EMP TG IPT
Tier 2 OPS ANT TVV BHD CG PxC MAM BBT PB BS TL
Tier 3 RUT* HUNO MTV BLU SC bG TG Nyaa* PL LF FL

*public tracker

For trackers that fill a specific niche

How to get into private trackers (and survive)

The first thing you need to ask yourself is whether your needs are satisfied by what you currently have at your disposal (DHT/public trackers (TPB and KAT), DDL, newsgroups, streaming, Soulseek, Tribler, DC++, Kad/eDonkey, sneakernet etc.) because private trackers may not be actually worth your time depending on what you want. Joining private trackers isn't hard, but it takes time. Do you just want that one specific file you've been searching in vain for weeks? If so, you'd be better off asking someone on /r/ to snatch it for you and call it a day. Do you want to build a comprehensive library with consistent and superior quality such as good encodes, proper music tagging, or retail ebooks? Then you should try to join one of the specialized trackers. Do you live in a copyright-cucked shithole and are afraid to get raped by the MPAA/RIAA and associates, but care little about music or HD? Then a general tracker should suit you. Depending on your goals, whether they are long-term or short-term and whether they are currently satisfied, the amount of time you will have to invest will vary.

  • Open-signup trackers: This is the easiest step. All trackers have to start small and build up a decent userbase before they can afford to limit entry, and thus some trackers are open to signup for a time. Numerous websites keep track of these (opentrackers.org, opentrackers.net, btracs.com, /r/OpenSignups), unless you're looking for something specific, just go to RuTracker (rutracker.org). Yes, it's entirely in Russian, but who cares? All registration forms look the same, and you weren't going to post in the forums anyway, right? (More on that later.) RuTracker is really nice because it's comprehensive, well-seeded and has high standards despite having very few ratio restrictions. In fact, 99% of the needs of most users are met there. If you are looking for porn, it is recommended to open pornolab (pornolab.net). Yes, it's in Russian too. Here's a guide from a Russian speaker to RuTracker.
  • Pay2Pirate: Some trackers will invite you for a fee. The idea is to prevent potential cheaters from abusing the system (in ways defined at the discretion of the staff) since any fuck-up would cost them their account, and thus their money. Pay2pirate trackers are generally considered low tier, since they are run for-profit and several, notably IPT, have a history of shitty behavior. There are no trackers worth paying to join, at all. Almost without exception, they can be joined for free with easy-to-obtain user invites. The content that paid trackers offer is rarely, if ever, better than what is offered by the good public trackers.
  • Application: Some trackers have a special page with an application form in one way or another. Their goal is to keep a moderate influx of new members they can control by assessing your willingness to join and what you have to offer. Different trackers have different requirements: some will require proof of good ratio on other trackers, some will only require that you show genuine interest and good will in your application form even if you are new to the tracker scene. Some mostly care about what material you have to offer to the site. Try to be sincere, honest, lengthy and don't forget to provide an email address so they can notify you of their response.
  • Interview: A few trackers have an interview system; it means that you are going to join an IRC channel and answer questions to their staff. It's mostly a way to control members' origin as almost all of them will ask that you join from your home connection.
    • Redacted interview: You must read this guide as well as this one before interviewing for Redacted.ch. Generally, this is the best way to get into good trackers. The interview is quite extensive and similar to what.cd (though easier because the spectral analysis section appears to have been toned down). You can fail if you don't take this seriously. Redacted.ch is currently the most reputed tracker known to maintain an interview system and is essentially the new what.cd.
    • Myanonamouse interview: This is more of a chat, questions are mostly about the rules, you will not pass or fail so there is no need to worry.
    • Bakabt interview: More of a 3-minute chat about whether or not you understand the rules.
  • Invite forums: Once you've established a good standing on one of the aforementioned trackers you've hopefully managed to get in, you will be able to move on to more restrictive ones. Most top trackers require new users to have a past of good standing (i.e. Power User or Elite userclass) such as one that can be shown on a tracker whose staff they trust - the tracker scene is a small world, and tracker staff often cooperate (or fight) with each other. As such, there are recruitment threads on various trackers so they can exchange good-standing users for the benefit of all.
  • Super Exclusive Sekrit Klub: Once you've made it to the big ones, the rest is up to you - you may try to join some of the ultra-closed trackers such as EXIGO or HDBits but at this point your needs should be pretty much covered unless you are looking for something really specific or just doing it for e-peen.

Generally speaking, open-signup trackers will not offer you a pathway into more desirable trackers. Some trackers have application signups and you can progress from there, but you'll be taking months if not years longer to climb the pyramid if you do this. It's even harder to remain /pure/ as well. The standard method of progressing is to join RED, regardless of your feelings on a music tracker. You can join via an IRC interview and it offers the best invite forum for new users. The RED interview is conducted like an online exam, they ask you to close everything except for IRC and then send them a screenshot of your desktop. You aren't supposed to look at the prep material. They monitor the prep website and if your IP address shows up connecting to it they'll stop the interview and ask you to admit to cheating. If you fess up you can try again the next day. If you lie they'll permaban you, this is like a cabal ban as well so it can make life much harder for you. What you can do is cheat by saving the prep as a pdf. It's all fairly simple stuff to remember and you'll need to know it if and when you start uploading anyway.

Next up is reaching the Elite userclass to unlock the invite forums. You actually get access at Power User, but better trackers require you to be Elite before asking for an invite. Some will have even more requirements, like a 6-month-old account or more. The requirements for Elite userclass are 50 uploads, 4 weeks of account age and 100GB of upload. The first two are easy, you can just upload shit from deezer, or transcode FLACs with no MP3 version. Getting 100GB is tricky. Without a seedbox you'll likely get a 1.00 ratio on your uploaded torrents, so it will take considerably more than 50 FLACs. You can seed your initial uploads with a seedbox, which should get your better returns. You could also race by autosnatching. RED is very competitive however, so do this only if you have some experience using a seedbox and configuring it correctly. Pay2win is an option, you can usually get 5-10GB filling a request for an album from bandcamp or similar. Another option is to use the "premier" plugin for Deluge, which manipulates the swarm and piece distribution to only upload a new piece once everyone in the swarm has the previous one, which means you upload 100% of the torrent to every single user. Proceed with extreme caution though, this plugin is not specifically banned on RED, but if autosnatchers notice they are getting 0 upload from you they may add you to a blackl-, sorry, blocklist. If no one autosnatches from you at all you will only ever get upload from permaseeding or requests.

I have ratio proofs on tracker A, can this get me tracker B?

Forget about proofs for official recruitment. People asking for proofs are generally going to be regular users offering user invites (/impure/), or staff holding application signups (/pure/). All that should matter to you most of the time is getting the userclass required to access tracker A's invite forums. Next you read the recruitment thread for tracker B, the recruiter will list the requirements they need from people requesting an invite. These are not negotiable. Trying to haggle with recruiters will get your invite forum access revoked and/or you banned altogether. They don't give a shit if you have 100TB upload, they only care about the requirements they list.

On being /pure/ and avoiding treebans

Your account is /pure/ when you have only been invited to trackers via official channels, such as staff-run applications, or official recruiting threads. Staff will virtually never treeban an official recruiter since it would wipe out too many innocent users along with them. The benefit of being /pure/ is the assured knowledge your account is safe today and ten years from now. Remember that once you are in someone's tree you are in it forever, you have no control over the other people they invite, or who those people invite. Your inviter might be a good dude, but if he invites someone who sells accounts you are now in a poisoned tree. Being /pure/ is not always easy.

  • Official recruiting requirements might be high.
  • You might get an invite way faster from a buddy, this can be a good idea if you know and truly trust this person not to give out user invites willy nilly. You can sidestep potentially years of pyramid climbing if you have a friend in the right place who you can trust implicitly.
  • Some trackers don't have official recruiting at all. TVV, for example. Joining these trackers doesn't really affect your accounts' /pure/ status as they are generally not cabal associated. Obviously, you can still get in some trouble if the wrong person invites you, just be prudent with how you get your invites.
  • Some trackers are in no way associated with the cabal, so being /impure/ doesn't matter. IPT is an example of this.

On being /marked/

Staff have confirmed that browsing /ptg/ will result in your account being "marked". This does not mean that you will be disabled, but staff will be less lenient with you if you break the rules in the future.

Avoid clicking on any links that are posted in /ptg/. If you have to click on a link, do it a day or two after it was posted. Avoid searching for any torrents that are posted on /ptg/. Staff members search the logs to find /ptg/ members. Keep a low profile and use your head.

Ghostleeching

Refer to the Ghostleech article. Unless you know what you're doing, ghostleeching is very obvious and will get you cabal banned.

What NOT to do

  • Cheating: The cardinal rule of thumb is that most cheaters end up with their account and their entire invite tree banned. Beware of any anon which recommends cheating. Cheating doesn't just mean using some dodgy client to fake ratio. If you "seed" 1000 torrents and throttle them all to 1kb/s in order to farm bonus points without using up bandwidth, you will probably be in trouble if anyone ever notices. Any actions like this that are not in good faith will not be looked upon kindly.
  • Beg for invites: Autists on /ptg/ have taken it upon themselves to report every single email they see in /ptg/ threads to various tracker staff and spam crawlers (they've gone as far as combing the archives for emails in past threads and reporting those too). Tracker staff are known to lurk /ptg/ and will ban anyone they catch sending an invite to an email posted there. If you accept an invite you begged for, you will be found out and lose any chance of acquiring a legitimate account. Especially watch out for PTP staff as they will revoke invite privileges and ban you over the smallest of transgressions (such as, but not limited to, accidentally posting IP lists in screenshots or posting the email you use for trackers). Tracker staff have been known to autistically pore over /mu/, /g/ and /ptg/ threads (archived and live) for the express purposes of finding and banning inviters/ees.
  • Buy invites: You'll lose money along with the chances of getting in legitimately. Some staff will be lenient if you ditch your seller though, probably because they want to get at the source first. Invites are usually free (and easy enough) to get from gateway trackers so it's not even worth buying invites.

Generally speaking, you should avoid invites from random dudes on the internet if you can. You most likely have no idea of their standing and they could very well fuck up later, resulting in an entire treeban and you getting banned through no fault of your own. It's unfair, it sucks. Stick to official invites (interview, application, recruitment threads) and no one will bother you.

  • Posting on the forums: Every post you make on the forum is an occasion of getting someone riled up, and that someone may very well be staff. You're here for downloading and uploading stuff, not chitchat. Don't use the forums.
  • Talking to staff more than necessary: Same reason as above, don't give them any reason to ban you. If you happen to annoy a staff member in any way, causing them to ban you, the entire staff will rally behind them even if they wouldn't have personally banned you themselves. It's the mods' word against yours, you can never win.
  • Being confrontational with staff: Simply assume they are always right, even (and especially) when you point out that they are wrong.

In short, either keep a low profile or suck staff's dick, as with all sites.

Cabal is so hard to join, I just want some content. What do I do?

A brand new user is looking at potentially years before they get into the desirable trackers such as PTP for movies and BTN for TV. These trackers are not the sole sources of content however, they are merely the most convenient since they have the largest archives. To get the best coverage of content, a new user should look to join a few decent HD trackers as well as a few general trackers. The more, the merrier. Staff don't appreciate people collecting trackers they will rarely use. Fuck 'em. Join any tracker that you feel has interesting content or will compliment your ability to find the content you are after. Some decent and more importantly accessible HD trackers a new user could join would be Blutopia, BeyondHD and UHDbits. Couple this with IPT or TorrentLeech as your general tracker to fill the gaps. SecretCinema is an excellent tracker for people with a genuine interest in obscure/arthouse/weird cinema, as it has an active requests section with users filling from KG/PTP/TiK and so on. TVV will supplement your general/HD trackers for older or obscure TV content, if you can find an invite in the wild. Avistaz or ACM will fill your asian media needs. Don't count out public trackers either: RuTracker especially is a top general tracker despite being public. BakaBT has IRC signups and its old archives will fill the gaps of obscure content you can't find on nyaa. RED is the top music tracker and should be your first port of call, so that's covered right away. MAM is also arguably the best book tracker and has IRC signups as well.

Getting acquainted with rules and maintaining your ratio

Okay, now we're going to assume you made it to a couple of private trackers - if you haven't yet, please read above part (TL;DR: get into an entry-level tracker; work you way up from there on either tracker's PU forums; if that's too much bother for you, use RuTracker/pornolab and stop reading this). This is a guide intended to help those who already made their first steps in the elitist, restricted and highly autismal private tracker world. As you can see, things are quite different here. Rules, ratio, buffer, seeding, userclasses... what the fuck's all this? Things were much simpler on ThePirateBay where you could just search, click and have your stuff right there, right?

And you know what? You're right. Most folks on /ptg/ and elsewhere will tell you stories about how they did a kind gesture and invited a friend of theirs (or even a fellow Anon) only to see them log in twice into the site before never using it again, no matter how hard they begged and how convincing they sounded. In all likelihood, these people first logged on, their excitement faded when they saw that they couldn't just start downloading everything before signing off, found the rules too complicated, lost interest in the whole thing and settled for more accessible alternatives (which are, again, not necessarily bad, depending on what one wants). Since you're reading this, It is assumed that you're not one of these people and that you actually want to use the trackers you're on. Are they worth it? Well, that's for you to find out. Before you decide, here's a few tips that'll show you it's not that hard, if you can read that is.

First things first

Read the rules. Seriously, do it. Tracker staff are autistic, you get one account per lifetime and you don't want to start playing cat-and-mouse games with the admins that early. Most tracker rules are similar, and go on the lines of "Suck our dicks at all occasions; don't leak invites or torrent files to public places; don't trade or sell invites; don't be inactive" followed by specifics on content rules (what you may upload) and ratio rules (more on that later). Read all the details as there may be some specifics on each tracker. Some have exclusive content that you can't upload elsewhere; some prohibit the use of Tor or VPNs, or even expressively forbid that you log in from anywhere else than your home connection; and so on. Read it all so you don't get caught unawares on some autistic peculiarity.

Ratio issues and tracker economy

Now let's assume you're familiar with the rules, how about you download some shit? The only problem is that ratio thingy: surprise, when you're done downloading something, no one ever downloads it back from you, ever. That's because, unless you joined a low-tier tracker, the seeder-to-leecher ratio is extremely high, with everyone permaseeding everything while only leeching occasionally. This brings us to our main point: tracker economy. Trackers can be roughly sorted into three categories: those with no economy, those with a soft economy, and those with a hard economy. Some of the most forward-thinking trackers do away with ratio altogether, though keeping seedpoints as the sole currency of their site. These are neither soft or hard economies as the economic levers are created by and adjusted solely at the discretion of the respective tracker.

No economy

Trackers with no economy are essentially ratioless. Torrent retention is achieved by imposing seeding requirements or individual ratio requirements ("you must seed with a 1:1 ratio OR for 72 hours"), and users get an incentive for seeding by acquiring bonus points that can be used to transcend userclasses. The most prominent example of a ratioless tracker is BTN, you won't have any problem there as long as you seed. A tracker being ratioless does not give users leave to go on Hit n' Run rampages however, as these kinds of trackers will routinely keep tabs on users with low average seedtimes who appear to be taking advantage of the economy.

Soft economy

Trackers with a soft economy use a ratio-based system complemented by bonus points. These points are typically earned by doing specific actions, the most common of which is seeding for an X amount of GBs, regardless of whether someone is actually downloading it from you. Some trackers will reward you for uploading torrents, idling on IRC or doing any kind of activity that contributes to the tracker and the site as a whole. Most trackers have a soft economy, from AHD to PTP, from MAM to bB or AB. Another kind of soft economy is a ratio-based system with a large amount of freeleech torrents, i.e. torrents whose download stats aren't counted but still earn you upload credits. Such trackers include SHD, SCC or bB, AB and MAM (again). You won't have many problems if you don't download everything like a retard: just grab some freeleech or small torrents, wait for your amount of bonus points to passively increase, get upload credit when you can, use that upload credit to download more, etc. The more you snatch, the more you seed, the more points you earn, and eventually you'll have enough buffer to freely download what you want.

Hard economy

Trackers with a hard economy are ratio-based but provide little to no means of complementing one's upload amount, like bonus points or freeleech sections. As a result, there's only a limited amount of upload credit (which acts as tracker currency, there are whole academic papers about it if you're into that kind of stuff) in the whole tracker, and whatever credits you earn, someone else has to spend. Getting upload credit is quite hard and you might have to work on your ratio before being able to download whatever you want without hindrance. On the other hand, since nearly everyone is as tight on ratio as you are, everyone will be permaseeding everything and torrents will have an excellent retention.

Trackers such as Bibliotik have a hard economy, and most struggles you hear about getting one's ratio up will typically be on one of those trackers. There are four main methods to get upload credit, on top of permaseeding everything (which you should do in every tracker anyway - you are doing that, right?): getting a seedbox, filling requests, uploading your own content and jumping on popular torrent swarms early.

  • Getting a seedbox: Basically pay2win but you might end up doing that if you don't want to bother too much and have money to spend. A surefire way to build a ratio on any tracker. They also alleviate the risk for users in countries who hand out DDMCA notices. Seedboxes can also serve as media servers and much more.
  • Abusing the fuck out of freeleech: /ptg/ers like to preference the most active torrents (especially staff picks) and the top 10 most active on freeleech days.
  • Filling requests: Can be tricky as people will obviously request stuff they can't find elsewhere, so unless they're particularly inept at googling and people didn't catch on you won't have any luck. If you consider the request to be worth it and you like the content requested you could also buy it, a less cheesy pay2win since you still end up with the physical medium as opposed to imaginary points on a website that might get busted at any moment, on top of the warm fuzzy feeling that you made someone you don't know on the other side of the globe happy. Looking for requested material on other related trackers also works, though the process can be tedious.
  • Uploading your own content: This is a reliable way to get upload credit and satisfy the usual userclass promotion requirements; however, unless you're operating from a seedbox or a very fast connection, you'll have a hard time achieving a ratio much above 1:1. That's because seedboxes usually snatch your stuff (especially if it's recent or matches certain tags) before taking priority to distribute it across the swarm, since the BitTorrent protocol favors peers with a faster upload speed. You'll still get upload of at least equal to your torrent size though, so you could survive on uploading stuff alone (also, if you keep uploading consistently good stuff, users will eventually "subscribe" to you and snatch everything you upload). On sites like Bibliotik, uploading enough content makes the entire site freeleech. You might also be able to get extra bonus points for uploading content.
  • /pyramid/: And finally, jumping onto popular swarms (aka /pyramid/ on /ptg/) is a risky though exciting activity that rewards those who catch on early and get to upload to everyone, while those who joined in on a later date only get a fraction of the original seeders' credit, thus creating a pyramid scheme. Popular torrents include those about to become freeleech and the newest content from popular artists. /ptg/ regulars will often post about /pyramid/ tips, which means you could download from that torrent in the hope that it'll grow and eventually get you a ratio above 1. If you have a seedbox or any kind of dedicated server, automatic tools such as autodl-irrsi will snatch stuff based on relevant information (such as tags, year etc.), however you run the risk of downloading too much stuff you can't afford, even if some of it pays off. Use at your own discretion and beware, your upload speed and peering have an enormous impact on what ratio you will end up with.

Other economy

Economies that have no ratio requirements, but maintain a semblance of order and structure by relying solely on seedpoints, or bonus points, to function in a similar way to 'hard' ratio-only trackers. Rewarding long-term seeding while at the same time disincentivizing pump-and-dump autosnatchers, seedpoints are used in ways other than to simply download torrents depending on the tracker. Voting on requests, ascending the userclass ladder and purchasing goodies in a bonus points store are a few ways that seedpoints can be used. It is worth noting that many ratioless trackers use points to purchase optional functionality, BTN is an example of this. By changing the requirements for maintaining a ratio to that of spending seedpoints to download a torrent is what separates this category from the ratioless variety.

Which kind of economy is the best?

Asking this question is a good way to start a shitstorm on /ptg/ and torrent forums alike, especially when you consider the different kinds of soft economy: 32p has an inkdrop system that essentially replaces ratio with points, AB has a very, very elaborate formula for calculating the amount of points you get from seeding, and so on. There is probably no objective answer to that question, as there are top-tier trackers with all kinds of economy (e.g. BTN is ratioless, PTP is soft and Bib is hard) and of course countless shit-tier trackers in either as well; different systems for different content. That doesn't preclude you from having a subjective opinion and posting it on /ptg/, of course.

Recruiting pathways

See this Github-updated Pathway Graph!

"Help, I've been cabal banned!"

I can just turn my router off and on again to get a new IP and start over, r-right? Wrong. The private tracker community is small, so unless you live near a large population center there's a real chance you are the only person in your town or city using private trackers, which means it'll be obvious when staff cabal ban a rural Danish IP and the next day a rural Danish IP is in the RED interview channel. Consider what exchange you use and what IP range range your ISP uses. As well as other data like the torrent client you have, browser version and so on. If you ever do get banned and want to get back in, it's best to wait a few weeks, or better yet a few months. If you are creating a new identity, remember, do not check your old profile, especially just after joining the tracker. Some paranoid sysops are checking every new account's activity for weeks, even for months. Do not act the same as you did before, especially if you were an active user on forums and were uploading a lot. And obviously, don't use a similar username. Also, don't use the password you used to have, because they can see every users hashed password. Generally speaking, just don't draw attention to yourself and stay /pure/ by not inviting anyone or donating to your trackers, ever (by the way, what kind of cuck would you be, giving a donation to a tracker that cabaled you?). If you are ever cabal banned, consider all linked accounts to be tainted even if you can still access them. If you plan on starting over from the beginning, you will have to burn all of the accounts that could be traced to your cabal banned account, including the accounts that you think are not part of the cabal (i.e MoreThanTV, TorrentLeech, IPTorrents, foreign trackers and so on).

Notable private trackers

Movies & TV

Broadcast the Net (BTN)
General TV tracker, the best of its kind by far. Other TV trackers can fill specific niches but 95% of everyone's needs can be filled with BTN. Ratioless.
TV Vault (TVV)
TV-only content that finished airing at least 5 years ago. Has lots of rare content not found elsewhere. Will fill much of your niche content needs if you don't have BTN and sometimes even if you do. No recruiting, user invites only. Users get lots of invites to give out and they often do so on a variety of trackers so keep your eyes peeled. Currently beyond usercap though so don't expect any for some months, Elite userclass can still invite though. Has some dated rules which are irritating.
Pass the Popcorn (PTP)
General movie tracker, the best of its kind by far. Other movie trackers can fill specific niches but 95% of everyone's needs can be filled with PTP.
Animebytes (AB)
Anime, manga, Asian live action, soundtracks and general weeb shit. The best of its kind by a wide margin. Other cabal trackers were not happy about the loli/shota content hosted there.
MoreThanTV (MTV)
Ratioless tracker for movies and TV, though the focus is on the latter. The closest competitor to BTN however distantly. Has been down for some months and is being rebuilt by the EMP sysop, expected to go live in early 2021. A good alternative to BTN if you haven't got it as it used to mirror the new content, while lacking the larger back catalogue.
AsianCinema (ACM)
Asian video tracker that is generally considered the successor to AsianDVDClub. If you ever admit to buying a DVD/BR, you'll get at least one faggot in your inbox asking you to buy him shit. Full disc images and remuxes only.
Karagarga (KG)
A tracker for obscure, rare, arthouse, foreign and classic films. Mainstream not allowed. Also has a community of bilingual speakers who write subtitles for untranslated movies.
SDBits (SDB)
HDB sister site, for SD content obviously. Not a path to HDB. As SD has fallen largely out of favour, the site is slowly dying. Don't waste your time.
Cinemageddon (CG)
Movies with no IMDB page, <1000 reviews, or a score <3/10. Lots of "erotic" cinema that Travis Bickle would watch in some seedy '70s wanking kinoplex. Sister site of TVV and the invite process is the same. Below usercap, but invites are given out much less frequently than TVV.
Anthelion (ANT)
General movies, run by Alastor who has a storied history of public meltdowns. Seems to have chilled out in recent years. Gained relevance in summer 2023 during PTP's extended downtime, as thousands of users flocked to it as a replacement. Once PTP returned, many users fucked off; nevertheless, keep it in your back pocket in case PTP shits the bed again.
Nebulance (NEB)
Sister site of ANT, also run by Alastor, Ratioless. Not terrible for new users, but still pretty shit.
Cinematik (TiK)
Untouched releases of obscure and rare content. Full Discs and so on. Very difficult to join as a user must vouch for you and then request an invite in the forums. Unnecessary for most users.
Secret Cinema (SC)
Ratioless tracker for obscure, weird or arthouse movies and TV. Easy to join with a very active requests section. Users often fill from PTP/KG/TIK/CG etc. so it's an excellent source of that content for anyone without access to a more difficult-to-obtain tracker.
The Horror Charnel (THC)
Horror, sleaze, sci-fi, B movies etc. Boomer tracker through and through. An easy to join alternative to CG. Died in 2022, may come back?
BakaBT (BBT)
Old anime/manga tracker. Content is curated by staff so uploads come slowly. Has IRC signups. Good for old content to supplement nyaa.
AsianDVDClub (ADC)
Very much dead and buried. solcen (CTRL+F) bought the domain for an exorbitant sum and runs a failed and broken website, tracker and begging operation created through abuse of an autistic dev. No longer in development (still broken) but solcen is still begging for money, threatening bans and shutdowns whilst seething at ACM's success. Solcen shut it down after a christmas begging event in 25/12/2021.
JPTV (JPTV)
Nip telly. You'd better be able to understand moon. New tracker that looks promising.
AvistaZ (avistaz)
Asian movies/TV. Probably the best tracker for this kind of general content.


HD trackers

HDBits (HDB)
General HD tracker with movies/TV and porn. The best and biggest of its kind by far. The biggest HD archive as well as the largest population of knowledgeable encoders. Encoders on other good HD trackers will often also be internal and release on HDB.
BeyondHD (BHD)
Notable for being very fast to get remuxes, even before scene. Good for 4k content. Allows un-encoded SD content if no HD version is available.
Blutopia (BLU)
Very good tracker, sir. All citizen of Pakistan banned.
UHDbits (UHDB)
Originally a Vietnamese HD tracker. Mediocre archive. Internal encoders are good. Recently had HDB invites offered in the forums to users with >200 uploads and high userclass. This has caused a flurry of activity with users reaching these same requirements in the hopes of getting HDB invites again. Unlikely to happen given HDB's historically autistic approach to giving out invites and getting butthurt when people find out where they are being offered.
HD-Torrents (HDT)
Low-quality HD tracker, though easy to join for new users. Run for profit, requires users to download >15GB quarterly or get b&. Get it if you're a brand new user but don't sweat if you lose the account eventually.
HD-Space (HDS)
Somehow a shitter version of HDT. Same considerations apply.


Music

Redacted (RED)
Music tracker which has solidified its position as the WCD successor. Controversial seedbox economy and its use as an invite stepping stone into other trackers has divided community opinion. Regardless it still has over 2 million torrents. Can be joined via IRC interview.
Orpheus (OPS)
Formerly Xanax, Apollo (a-poo-in-loo). Music tracker with a much more user-friendly economy than RED. The archive is considerably smaller than RED's but it lacks a lot of the junk uploads people vomit onto the tracker for userclass.
LzTr (LzTr)
A soundtrack and classical music tracker. Small but useful.
DeepBassNine (DB9)
A tracker for DnB music. Because it's reputedly hard to join, many people will try to get in just for epeen even though they don't care about DnB, jungle or anything like that.
Exigo (E****o)
Ultra sekrit tracker. As is typical with ultra sekrit trackers, it's worth joining for epeen alone.
jpopsuki (JPS)
Jpopsuki, Asian music tracker. Sysop is AWOL, staff is chill, content is really badly curated. Good to farm uploads (if they are very carefully checked) for RED.
TheMixingBowl (TMB)
Semi-private music tracker for radio shows and sets. Open registration and easy economy. Very good if you want this kind of content.
Pedro's XBTMusic (Pedro's)
A reputedly hard-to-join tracker dedicated to lossless music. Basically a subset of What with very rigid naming and tagging conventions, high-dpi booklet scans, harsher ratio and upload rules as well as an incredibly autistic staff and community. "[People say we are] anal retentive. It's true!" -Pedro. Currently dead.
Waffles (WFM/WCH)
Medium-sized music tracker. Was originally waffles.fm but they changed their URL. Recently came back from the dead. Even more recently died again.
OiNK (OPP)
Music tracker which was the genesis of the private tracker ecosystem we know today. Closed over 10 years ago.
What.cd (WCD)
Music tracker that replaced OiNK. Huge archive, huge userbase. Created the cabal and headed it. Pussy admins hit the self-destruct button at the first whiff of police heat. Closed in 2016.


Books & e-learning

Bibliotik (BiB)
Large book tracker. Overdrive access recommended for users.
My Anonamouse (MAM)
Large book, music sheet, and audio tracker. Friendly atmosphere that borders on clutish. You are not allowed to swear. One of the best trackers a new user can join and immediately use.
32pages (32p)
Formerly ComicBT, the best tracker for comics. Peculiar inkdrop system in lieu of ratio. Staff had a long history of breaches and general incompetence. Died in early 2020 and will not be returning. Use MAM for your comic needs in the meantime.


General

IPTorrents (IPT)
The largest and best general tracker. Run for profit by a fat Russian guy. Notable for being the sworn enemy of cabal with history of DDoSing cabal trackers and stealing peers. The sysop was doxxed a few years ago. Worth joining, just don't give them any money.
Filelist (FL)
Romanian general tracker. The language is primarily in Romanian and some English but you can use a translator addon to read it. Decent tracker which mirrors a lot of content from HDB.
AlphaRatio (AR)
Middling tracker, more closely associated with cabal than the other general trackers.
FunSharingCommunity (FSC)
Another one of those sekrit klubs, for general content. Used to be the shit due to its exclusivity and focus for "community," is now almost dead and has worse selection than public trackers.
TorrentLeech (TL)
Like a smaller version of IPT, slightly less scummy though not to be trusted. Has open signups so frequently they can be considered semi-private. Recently introduced freeleech which has made the seedbox-driven economy considerably easier.
RuTracker (RUT)
A public tracker entirely in Russian, but of unusually good quality. Hosts an enormous amount of content, some of which can't be found on private trackers. Always worth having in your back pocket for the times you are desperate to find some content, or don't feel like seeding it. Use a translator addon to read it.


Porn

Empornium (EMP)
The top general porn tracker. Not much more to say. A very easy economy and a large number of coomers willing to buy Onlyfans packs and share them.
Sinderella (S)
Korean porn tracker, as in run by Koreans. Porn is illegal in Korea. Used to have actual Korean porn and also be closed up tighter than a nun's snatch. Admins purged all the Korean porn and started recruiting again early in 2020. Still gets frequent JAV uploads though. Currently experiencing extended downtime.
FemdomCult (FDC)
Femdom, obviously. Has open signups now and then. Good if you are a degenerate coomer. Beware the scat tag.
M-Team (MT)
Chinese general tracker with porn section hidden by default in settings. Rich and well-seeded in JAV contents and Chinese-subtitled JAV. Note that admins set several porn collections (500 GiB to 5 TiB size) on Sunday/Monday each week to freeleech, which makes it easier to build a ratio.


Videogames

GazelleGames (GGn)
The top tracker for games. The economy itself is a game, with trading cards, item crafting and customizable avatars which affect your own personal economy. Also includes tangentially related videogame content such as artbooks and OSTs.
Bemaniso (sows)
Tracker for rhythm games and related music.


Misc

Art of Misdirection (AOM)
Large magic tracker, limited to professional magicians only.
MySpleen (MTV)
Old cartoons and nostalgic, hard-to-find content. Things like broadcast television cartoons from the '90s with the original commercials included. Closed, but the usercount does tick up every now and then so it may be possible to join if you try hard enough.

Notable staff

  • 312c: Also known as 312cuck, he's a PTP "developer" and former mod of /r/trackers. Known for being autistic, powertrippy and an asshole in general. Notable achievements include getting his mod privileges stripped on /r/trackers for excessive and reckless faggotry.
  • Aldy: Aldy is a based god who makes AB /comfy/ as hell.
  • Azathoth and Spaghetti: A /g/ay couple that used to run Oppaitime although they are far too reddit for most other boards.
  • chunkylover53: A PTP recruiter who is known for taking very, very long for replying to PMs then getting mad when people go ask other, faster recruiters instead. It is advised that you refrain from requesting invites from him as he may take literal months to reply and will ban you if you PM someone else in the meantime.
  • Nala: Sysop for PassTheHeadphones.
  • PrettyGreat: Is PrettyGreat.
  • Readable: One of the BTN administrators, who had to face the daunting task of answering literally hundreds of invite requests on various trackers and despite this always replied in a friendly, timely manner. Because of this, he's considered bro-tier by /ptg/.
  • sarek: The hilariously incompetent sysop for attempted what.cd replacement tracker nostream (rip). Was banned from cabal after doxxing someone from his own staff channel (lmao).
  • TARS: A What.CD staff member who reached meme status on /ptg/ by not releasing the freeleech within the promised timeframe.
  • tehlarsie: A chill admin of AHD who usually replies quickly to invite requests.
  • solcen: A hairless Vietnamese boy who achieved short-lived e-fame in the West for his singular testicle shaped like a Cornetto. Overfond of underage girls urinating in Japanese cartoons, and generally a rude and stupid person who couldn't even scam weebs, of all people. Still mad at ACM being the real ADCv2.

Glossary

  • Application: Some trackers will let new users apply for an invite instead of simply registering. These questions are typically all the same and range from existing ratio proofs, knowledge of torrenting, interest in the site's content and what you have to offer to the site. The questions are usually very easy. Unless you're an absolute retard and talk like you're on 4chan, you will have no problem getting accepted.
  • Autosnatching (autosnatcher): Renting a seedbox and configuring it to snatch (new/freeleech/recent-year/etc) torrents, virtually always to engage in /pyramid/ schemes (see below). Effective, although autosnatchers are generally derided because most of them "pump and dump" to hoard ratio instead of permaseeding, which hurts the fragile tracker economy by letting worthless lossy-web Deezer comps die.
  • Buying: The incredibly moronic act of exchanging money for a tracker invite or account, usually via an invite forum. A good way to lose both your money and any chance of getting into the tracker you were looking to buy into.
  • Cabal: The staff of PTP, BTN and HDBits. Because they are objectively the best and everyone wants to join them, they rule the private tracker community and other trackers tend to align with them. Some trackers such as IPT are enemies of the cabal and supporting these in any way on cabal-controlled zones (such as cabal forums or /r/trackers) will get you into trouble.
  • Cheating: Using one of the various known methods to abuse ratio, get caught by staff and eventually banned on all cabal trackers.
  • Comfy: Used to describe a tracker with chill staff, a friendly community and easy bonus points. Examples of comfy trackers include AHD or AB.
  • Country ban: The practice of banning people residing in certain countries from registering (even when invited), applying for an invite or interviewing. Such country lists vary from tracker to tracker but often include India, thus leading to the curry meme.
  • Curry: As a noun, refers to a pleb who hasn't gotten in any private tracker and cluelessly begs on /ptg/ by thinking that grovelling enough and saying "gimme gimme" will land them an invite, in the manner of illiterate internet users from third-world countries and most notably India (which is infamously banned on many trackers), hence the name. As an adjective, refers to any low-tier tracker with low seed-to-peer ratio, shit content, shit interface and/or shit administrators. Note that cabal trackers, although they may have shit staff, cannot be curry.
  • DELETE THIS: A meme on /ptg/ that mocks the secrecy some communities like to wrap themselves with, such as censoring their own name or URL (Exigo, h4h, etc.), forbidding people from taking screenshots of their site or refusing to reveal recruitment pathways into their tracker. The expression itself is a parody of the supposed anger from such people seeing such secret information being posted on /ptg/ and not being able to do anything about it.
  • Disabled channel: A purgatory where users are rumored to wait for weeks and months on IRC to get staff's attention, only to be eventually told "no, you won't get your account back and we won't tell you why" or "whoops, we did a mistake, sorry about that".
  • Epeen: Bragging rights on the internet. Used in a self-derogatory way to mock the way /ptg/ regulars brag about tracker membership when this is hardly relevant in real life, if at all.
  • Exclusive: The practice of restricting the diffusion of a torrent's content to a single tracker. Frowned upon by /ptg/ regulars who like to point out the hypocrisy of the thing.
  • FL: Freeleech, when downloading a torrent doesn't count against your ratio but uploading counts for it. Can be global, personal or specific to some torrents. The nature, incidence and targets of freeleech are entirely decided by the staff but usually occur on special occasions (Christmas, tracker anniversary, etc.).
  • Gazelle: A web framework geared towards private trackers, developed by What.CD. Because of its clean interface and organization, it has been widely adopted by other trackers in the torrent community, including most top tier trackers like PTP or BTN. However, it is regarded as shit coding-wise (notably, you have to rewrite the music-related parts if you want to deploy it yourself for something else) by /ptg/, its only redeeming quality being that other frameworks are even worse. Note that it is distinct from Ocelot, the torrent tracker itself.
  • Global ban: Ban from all cabal trackers. When one commits a serious offense (such as cheating, trading, buying or selling), tracker staff ban you and share your information to other staff of the cabal, eventually getting someone banned everywhere. Information retained by staff includes all the IP addresses you've ever used, location, ISP range, username, password hash, snatchlists and stylometry.
  • HnR: Hit and Run, the act of downloading a torrent without meeting seeding requirements (typically individual ratio and/or seed time).
  • Inactivity: Not using a private tracker (this usually applies to logging into the site and browsing it, not simply seeding). People who go inactive for too long eventually get disabled, and people who get disabled this way have to beg for it back at the disabled channel. Each tracker slowly loses some of its userbase due to inactivity and will recruit an appropriate amount to get fresh blood without growing too large. Some trackers even impose a minimum downloaded amount in order not to be disabled, most notably HDBits. That's because HDB accounts are so prized that members would rather log in once in a while than get disabled, even if they were not using the site.
  • Invite: What you live for. A way to access a tracker by getting vouched for by an existing member. A member may usually only give out a limited number of invites under certain conditions and is completely responsible for the people they invite, so the act is never to be taken lightly.
  • Invite forum: May refer to two things which are completely different. Public invite forums such as torrentinvites etc. are places for scammers to trade, sell and buy invites and are to be avoided at all costs as they are actively monitored by cabal staff who frequently ban the gullible users buying or trading their way into private trackers. Even having an account is enough to warrant a ban on strict trackers. On the other hand, tracker invite forums are class-restricted forums on reputed private trackers where other tracker members offer invites to a given class of users. They are notably used by staff from other trackers to recruit members they trust to be in good standing on the forum's host tracker. These are the ones you want to be on.
  • Invite privilege: The ability to give out invites. These are known to be revoked for the slightest thing, sometimes even without justification. People don't protest too much though since that'd involve waiting for weeks in the disabled channel for something they don't really care about since they never invite anyone anyway.
  • Invite tree: The set of people you've invited and their invite trees.
  • Interview: A conversation conducted on IRC with an official tracker representative asking a prospective member a series of questions, usually related to the tracker's content and knowledge of torrenting in general. Interviews can range from a friendly chat (in MAM or bB) to a full-blown test where your knowledge is extensively checked and material to review is provided in advance (Redacted).
  • /impure/: Having been invited by a friend who isn't staff or a staff-approved recruiter. Some /ptg/ regulars frown upon /impur/ity as it may lead to the invitee being banned in rare cases (such as a major treeban). It is sometimes the only way to get into some trackers though.
  • mRatio: Software touted by /ptg/ trolls to bait newcomers into ratio cheating and getting all their accounts banned.
  • /mu/: /mu/tracker, a dead tracker that used to be operated by /mu/ users. RIP in peace, not that it was any good to begin with.
  • Ocelot: Tracker software used by What.CD, is distinct from Gazelle.
  • /pure/: Having been invited exclusively though recruitment channels, thus ensuring that you will never be banned because someone in your invite tree's ramification got caught in a selling scheme. Some trackers are impossible to get /pure/ on though, as they may not recruit from anywhere.
  • /ptg/: The private tracker general on 4chan's /g/. Basically where everything happens. Note that no one ever goes on /t/ because /t/ is shit although /ptg/er influence can extend into boards as diverse as /gd/, /ic/, /wsr/, /lit, /a/, /tv/ and /mu/ due to their respective trackers.
  • #ptg: The name of two channels, one on Rizon and the other one on Oppaitime's IRC. Both are hang out places for /ptg/ regulars, but only the one on Oppaitime is not dead. Both IRCs are now closed due to 312c's mass banning of /ptg/ users. There is a rumored third IRC.
  • PTG: The private tracker game, an RPG where climbing userclasses is the equivalent of leveling up and joining other trackers is the equivalent of unlocking new abilities. Everyone on /ptg/ is playing the private tracker game.
  • /pyramid/: Once referring to the practice of jumping onto popular swarms (usually on What) to harvest upload before others like a pyramid scheme, it mostly now refers to the hierarchy of trackers from the entry-level ones like What or bB to hard to join ones like BTN or HDB. Climbing the pyramid describes one's ascension of a /ptg/ regular through these various steps.
  • Ratio: Amount of uploaded data over amount of downloaded data. May be global or torrent-specific. Acts as an indicator of how much you contribute data to the community. If more than 1, you are a positive contributor; if less than 1, you are a leech. Note that on sites where the ratio is hard to gain, having a too high ratio is also frowned upon as you are essentially hoarding credit that could be used by other users to spend, thus reducing tracker activity and harming its economy.
  • Ratiocuck: Refers to someone who has to use a seedbox to get buffer or maintain a good ratio on a generally hard-to-seed tracker, or in regards to any user who seeds content instead of downloading with no responsibilities from usenet.
  • Ratio watch: A way to enforce ratio requirements on various trackers. A state of ratio watch is attained when the ratio falls below what the tracker requires, and acts as a temporary warning before harsher measures are taken such as the removal of leeching privileges or an outright ban.
  • Ratioless: A tracker with no ratio rules. It may still have HnR rules though.
  • Recruitment: An official way to get invited to a tracker, sanctioned by staff (or an official staff representative with unlimited invites) itself. Recruitment usually refers to class-restricted invite forum threads where staff or staff reps present their tracker and state the conditions for admission via PM request, but it can also broadly refer to any kind of official recruitment like interviews or applications. Open signup is not recruitment though.
  • Required ratio: The minimum threshold set by ratio-based trackers. It depends on each tracker and may even vary within a tracker. Sites with a hard economy tend to have a lower required ratio. Required ratio rules aren't typically enforced for newcomers (who are given a grace period/amount to download a little).
  • /r/trackers: The private tracker subreddit where people like to re-ask the same question for the 1000th time, post announcements, complain about bans and suck the cock of cabal tracker staff. Supporting non-cabal trackers is not allowed there.
  • Seedbox: A remote server with a high-speed connection used primarily for downloading and seeding torrents.
  • Semi-private: Used to describe a tracker with open registration but whose torrents still retain the private flag, only allowing members with a registered passkey to connect to the swarm and leech/upload data. Trackers that require registration to view the site but are still open-signup are semi-private. ThePirateBay or Kat are not semi-private.
  • Selling: A scam conducted on public invite forums by unscrupulous people. They give away invites or accounts (usually hacked and "buffered," i.e. artificially inflated with ratio cheating tools) to naive users for money, who then get obviously caught by staff and realize they wasted money for nothing. There exists a whole alternative market for invites, ranging from $15 for What to $200-300 for sites like Exigo or HDBits. None of them are worth wasting money for.
  • TPS: ThePirateSociety, a forum to circlejerk with other pirates about trackers. Requires an application to sign in but being accepted isn't hard. Will copiously suck cabal tracker cock and openly share the information about you they have. It is however an interesting alternative path to some of the hard-to-join trackers like Pedro's, Exigo or HDBits.
  • Trading: Exchanging tracker invites, which is forbidden on all cabal trackers. Invites should only be offered (and even then, only on class-restricted forums on other cabal trackers, if at all) or requested (and even then, only by PM to the individual person having the invites), with no compensation whatsoever. The idea is that you would only ever do that for a friend or someone you like and trust.
  • Treeban: A mass ban enacted on a user and his entire invite tree. Usually happens when the user or one of his invitees is caught in a selling scheme. Because trees can be so extensive, some innocent users often get caught in the process; this led /ptg/ users to exclusively stick to official recruitment channels, thus creating the /pure/ meme.
  • Userclass: An indicator of how much a user has contributed to the tracker. They typically are (with some variations): User, Member, Power User, Elite, Master, VIP and Staff classes. Each userclass awards certain privileges like being able to give out invites, inactivity pruning immunity or access to invite forums. Higher userclasses usually require a certain amount of upload credit, uploaded torrents and tracker presence.
  • #KGB: The IRC channel rumoured to be used by cabal and associates to share information about users.

External links

See also

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