What to you was your biggest loss of pirated content?

We all have our favorites that we go-to overtime to meet our pirating needs. We've also watched a lot of big names in this year alone, go down in a blaze of glory and others in a whimper. I'm awfully curious what, to you, is the biggest loss to date?

For me it's Uloz, first thing that came to mind. Uloz has served me very well in acquiring music albums through them, for a good 6 years I recall that I used them for getting albums. When they decided to switch the way in how they do their service, that to me felt like a sucker punch. No longer can I just collect album names, find a sacrificial wi-fi network and go to work.

I also remember missing ISOHunt, EmuAsylum, EmuParadise, OG Pirate Bay, AnimeSuge (soon HiAnime once the piss-ants of ACE get their way soon) and I really hope we don't lose Internet Archive. But with the way it's been hammered by shitty people and court lawsuits, I predict that it doesn't really have much time on it's side in the near future.

All I can say is just thank you to all of those sources and of course the ones everyone is familiar with. Helped save me a lot of money, helped me increase my interests and eh, can't argue against free shit.

71 comments

Definitely Vimm's Lair for me. I still play a lot of GameCube and N64 games and Vimm's was always my go-to place for finding roms. They got hit with a lot of DMCAs and take down notices, and had to remove the vast majority of their Nintendo library along with anything related to Sega and Lego. The site is still up, but it's like visiting a graveyard now

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- This one hurt me really bad. I was just getting started with retro gaming and then all of this shit happened.
  
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- Could you give an example of a game no longer available? Just checked and was able to dl Luigi's Mansion just fine
  
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  On GameCube, I can see that Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, Mario Party 6, Smash Bros Melee are all unavailable. On N64, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Pokemon Stadium are also unavailable
  
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Deeeefonitely what.cd for me. RIP WCD. We have two great music trackers now, but nothing comes close to WCD.

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- What.cd and BitGamer were the two private trackers where I really put in effort not just to seed but to contribute unique uploads.
  
  I stepped away from torrenting for awhile and when I returned both were ashes.
  
  Edit- what are the two good music trackers you're referencing?
  
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  Losing what.cd was like having a Music Library of Alexandria burn down. Such an amazing resource for rare, out of print, obscure, and or otherwise unobtainable media.
  
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  Opheus and REDacted are the two! RED has more and interview signups. I’m only on OPH because they welcomed WCD refugees and it’s been very good.
  
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- Easily the biggest loss imo. RIP WCD.
  
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- what.cd was a bigger loss than just privacy - what.cd was an enormous loss to preservation of music history
  
  the amount of content that has simply never been available for purchase was incredible, and made available in one of the cleanest and most comprehensively complete taxonomies was amazing
  
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- Absolutely agreed
  
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Demonoid. They had a community that put together a lot of high-quality torrents.

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- This and I believe it was called TvTorrents. Private tracker that was amazing for TV shows.
  
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Megaupload. It was like the Library of Alexandria burning down. Not just pirated stuff, either.

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- I remember to swear by megaupload because all the other upload sites uses extremely sketchy ads and allow the fake download buttons.
  
  Now Jdownloader is the only way for me to download non-torrents
  
  5
- no. kim is a shit human.earning millions off the work of others. nope. it is good its gone. mega.nz needs to go too.
  
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Permanently Deleted

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- Same about 6 months ago maybe. Didn't burn down but my raid system corrupted everything if it losses power while reading and writing... It's now rebuilt fully and on a UPS.
  
  Edit the biggest L was the stuff that was not pirated on it like video game save files pictures, documents, etc
  
  11
  
  What RAID system did you use which corrupted your data on power loss? With software raid like zfs I believe corruption on power loss shouldn't be a problem (unless the hardware fails. Or your using btrfs raid 5/6, ignoring all warnings).
  
  Edit: For this reason I'm looking into buying another drive for an offline backup of my media files. I could redownload them, but it'd be increasingly more annoying.
  
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  Permanently Deleted
  
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- ;-;
  
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TheTrove was a collection of tabletop RPG books and magazines going back decades that has never had a decent replacement yet. It was fairly well organized and quite complete with tons of obscure games and out of print books. It had a different name or two before that but the collection always migrated somewhere until The Trove was finally shut down. I really miss that collection, even though I've managed to track down most of what I needed, it has been much more difficult since the shutdown.

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- It continues marching on as The Eye.
  
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  If I understand, that collection is missing a lot from the original. I could be wrong though.
  
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tntvillage

It was, hands down, THE place for every Italian media

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- omg yes
  
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15ish years ago when Seagate was having lots of issues with their 2TB externals getting the click o' doom I lost 6 2TB drives over 2 years.

The data was just data, easily re-acquirable, but fuck that was a pain in the ass.

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- Same happened to us. Not as much data. But two 2TB.
  
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You and another have already said it, but Emuparadise. It was...truly a shame. :'(

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Going a bit old-school with this one, but unmoderated DALnet. It used to be the wild West, with everything at your fingertips.

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- +1, the IRC days were glorious
  
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- DALnet and EFnet were both great for that
  
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SuprNova was the big one for me. Everything else was either redundant (Like RARBG) or just faded away (like my Usenet sources). I didn't have any replacement lined up when SuprNova died.

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Websites: rarbg and emuparadise

Personally: I have an 8tb HDD completely full with shows and movies I haven't tested since a house fire. I'm afraid it may have been dropped in the move, and I don't even have my PC with me to check it out

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GrooveShark was a great music streaming service. If a track wasn't available you could just upload it and it would be available to all users.

It eventually got sued into oblivion leaving us with the streaming platforms of today. I really wish it could have made the transition to being legit because it had a great interface.

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- GrooveShark, for me, particularly thrived on early Android as Tinyshark. It was probably one of the first ways I remember actively listening to whatever music I wanted to; no algorithm outside of the list of "most popular songs".
  
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- If you like the interface, check out Funkwhale. It's a federated service based on Grooveshark, but you need to provide your own mp3/flac files.
  
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  Oh hell yeah! That sounds great!
  
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Maybe not the actual biggest, but the loss of pirated material that i feel the most sad about is The Trove. The Trove was a website with a huge list of downloadable PDFs of source books for tabletop RPGs. I got the pdfs for everything DND, and also tried a bunch of other games I'd never heard of with a few friends. It also had downloads for other books and documents but I only used it for RPGs. I think it went down in 2019 or so.

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- I think there are some telegram groups with that type of material in them if you take a quick look. Not sure how they compare with your old resource though.
  
  1
Asiandvdclub (not the shady remake)

What.cd. - RED is great but there's still a hole...

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Any and all sites that offer unique content that other pirated sites do not offer, such as unknown and unpopular animes/movies, every day they run the risk of being erased by the corrupt hands of the DMCA and unfortunately they may not have repositories for them due to their rare and unique gallery.

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I remember using something called ourtunes back in college that just let everyone in the dorm freely access and download each others iTunes libraries on the dorm network.

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I will be loudly knocking on wood after posting this, but I set up my NAS with RAID5 and have had 1 drive die on me but I hot-swapped one in and recovered the entire volume.

No regrets, highly recommend raid5

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- I second raid5 despite not having much experience with it.
  
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Napster

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Haven't quite filled the void from 9anime/aniwave going down, hard to replace the king.

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Taringa, it was the go-to place for everything, especially content in spanish

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The overnight disappearance of xPhilez.

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ethor.net and rarbg.to

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TorrentDB. First tracker I participated. Good layout, nice rules. Sad to see it go

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This is a good time to introduce the concept of backups. Remember to backup both to local storage and to have a copy that is remote, in case of natural disaster.

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DC++ It was just sharing stuff. No search. You connect to someone’s computer, they have a shared folder. You download what you want and move on. Instead of searching for stuff, you discovered it.

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Oink, Demonoid, AsianDVDclub... Various private Hotline sites circa 90s. Sadly missed

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- Demonoid, absolutely! Warez-bb, and many oldschool GeoCities blogs. I remember one that had portable cracks of any programs you could imagine.
  
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torrentz.eu, started my torrent journey in 2010 from this website.

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Free MP3 Download, which as of October 14, 2024 is still up on the megathread. The moment I start getting into downloading music online outside of downloading audio from yt videos, the site gets taken down a few months later. Now I don't know where to go for DDL since pretty much all of the other linked sites are either anime music, game music, or upload an [ Insert Service ] link and it'll give you an audio file to download from that service.

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@Pyflixia This one might be a very obscure thing, but back when I was in high school, I used to download music from a website called mp3ostrov.rucom (edit: it was .com, apparently). Of course, the website was in Russian and I couldn't understand a damn thing, so I had to resort to the Chrome translation for it (Or I guided myself with the icons). But it had so much music on it, and it was really easy to get. And whatever I could not source from there, I downloaded from YouTube, but the downloader I used had too many ads.

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Permanently Deleted

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I still long for the old Scene Torrents days. RIP SCT

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Nzbmatrix

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Black cats games :(

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nzbmatrix

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Newzbin.

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ProstoPleer! Russian website with direct mp3 downloads and uploads, playlist creation and sharing, just like the old GrooveShark. I was lucky that I made a backup of all my playlists 2 months before it happened.

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