So far, public trackers have been working fine for me, but think I’ve finally run into some niche shows that have been hard to find or only been able to find individual episodes instead of a single collected season torrent. (Nothing too special, just some baking shows.)
I’m wondering if it’s finally time to look into private trackers or Usenet.
If you use them, what did it take for you to finally look into these more time or effort intensive piracy options?
A movie you wanted to see that was too old to be seeded on public trackers? TV shows too old or niche? A game, an obscure music artist? Something else? Was it just curiosity? Or something you did immediately upon getting into piracy? I’m just curious myself lol.
Semi-private trackers like TorrentLeech are a great step up from public trackers and they are relatively easy to join (e.g. seedbox promo). More content is available and well-seeded for longer periods of time.
It’s not difficult to keep your ratio, even with a 50MBit/s connection (torrents > 15GB are freeleech anyway), as long as you seed 24/7. Or buy a seedbox for a while, build a few TB of buffer (autobrr) and never worry again.
Edit: Usenet is great because it’s fast, and depending on your (non-english) language, it’s a completely different league than public trackers. But I’d argue for english content TL (and a few others) is good enough.
TorrentLeech is semi-private!?
What’s a private tracker then?
Semi-private just refers to how easy it is to join them. E.g. rutracker is considered a semi-private tracker, because it requires an account, but always allows registrations and does not enforce any ratio.
In that sense I was wrong in calling TL a semi-private tracker, because TL does require maintaining a ratio. But given it is possible to simply join via their seedbox offerings, it is not as private as some other trackers, which require proofs of good behaviour on other trackers and/or an application process.
Edit: Public: no registration required
Semi-private: registration required, but always possible; lax ratio rules
Private: registration required, mostly through invites/applications; anti-leech ratio rules
Just because it’s easy to join doesn’t make it semi-private.
Public tracker all content is available publicly no registration required.
Semi-private content is available publicly but registration may be required or optional (ex: Demonoid), torrents maybe set as private.
Private the content isn’t available publicly, registration is required. Torrents are set as private (open trackers, no DHT)
If you look at Prowlarr indexers you can see what is public, semi-public or private. All private require registration, where public or semi-public not so.
Your points about torrents being set to private and enabling/disabling DHT are good.
Do you mean the content pages on the tracker are publicly available? Because there’re private trackers with no original content, so I don’t think this is a differentiating factor between semi-private and private trackers.
As you’ve written, there’re trackers categorized as semi-private on prowlarr where an account is required to view anything besides the login page.
Would it be weird to get a seed box when I already have a separate plex server I’ve been using to torrent and an NAS, just so I can seed 24/7 without risking leaking packets or something?
It depends on what trackers you’re on and how much storage you have, and how risk averse you are.
First of all, binding your torrent client to the VPN interface should prevent all leakage.
Additional precautions like running your torrent client behind a container like gluetun should make it pretty much impossible to leak your IP to adversaries. Or if you have a plain Linux server, running the torrent client in it’s own network namespace also achieves the same result.
The other big reason to get a seedbox is to be able to maintain your ratio. This depends on your tracker.
E.g. I have enough storage for a large enough seeding size and enought torrents to get sufficient bonus points. Combined with a bit of upload here and there, I get enough upload/buffer to snatch what I want.
On many trackers, large enough torrents are often freeleech, so they don’t count towards the download stat anyway.
tl;dr
If you bound your torrent client to the VPN, I’d seed with your NAS unless you don’t get enough upload to maintain your ratio on your specific private trackers. Storage is way cheaper on your NAS.