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.

    • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      18 hours ago

      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

      • American_Jesus@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        16 hours ago

        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.

        • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          1·
          14 hours ago

          Your points about torrents being set to private and enabling/disabling DHT are good.

          Semi-private content is available publicly

          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.