What's your take on private trackers?

It's all I use. I feel like there's less risk and they're way more organized.

I tried signing up for a few but they want me to disable my VPN ... nope.

Finding public torrents for audio books is utter bullshit in my experience. Myanonamouse has a massive selection, is friendly and well organised and doesn't have absurd rules, just reasonable ones.

I love the place.

For anything else not audio book related public trackers work just fine for me.

So far there's never been a thing I couldn't find on a public tracker, so there was never a need to look into it.

Childish and against the spirit of piracy. Always have been.

Great as long as it's easy to maintain ratio. And by "easy" I mean basically not having to do anything that can't be automated. I also don't care enough about the harder-to-get-in trackers that I would spend a lot of time sending in screenshots of profiles of other trackers I'm on or whatever. I'm not trying to get internet points for being on the very "coolest" private trackers.

The good thing is that decent private trackers have a well maintained catalog and most content usually has at least one or two seeders even months/years after the torrent was created, and these seeders often have a ton of bandwidth.

In contrast, public trackers often falsely advertise the amount of peers in the swarm (so a torrent that's supposedly alive is often dead). I'd say I'm grabbing about 80/20 from private/public trackers, and I seed each torrent for around 30 days. Public torrents are often so starved for somewhat decent seeders that I regularly have a ratio of 20+ after the 30 days I'm seeding for. And that's without a seedbox, just a normal Internet connection.

In the end, both are fine. When you setup your *arr tools correctly, they usually choose a decent release automatically, whether from private or public trackers.

Some of them are designed for having people buying upload credits. I'm into one where only the admins are allowed to post new torrents, and they keep everything on 5 seedboxes. It's almost impossible to seed back, as their own seedboxes are pushing too much upload, then old torrents are removed and re-uploaded "to gather interest", but that means you will never find new peers. And then they always send messages complaining that they're spending 500 a month for those seedboxes "to guarantee fast downloads" and everyone should become a donator or the site will close. Assholes, those seedboxes are indeed guaranteeing fast downloads, but also are guaranteeing zero upload back

I just don't have the time for it or well, I do, but I don't wanna put effort into mantaining ratios and whatnot. I have stuff to do that I enjoy more than be part of a internet club.

But that's just me.

I think it depends on why you pirate. Are you doing it because you don’t want to pay? Then services like usenet and private trackers, where there is some expectation of payment (be it monetary or bandwidth) are probably not for you.

Do you pirate because you hate DRM and want to self host a robust media library that you can curate without fear of media being removed because of an expired license or something? Then you might be more into private trackers and Usenet. I spend almost as much on hard drives and Usenet subscriptions and PT donations as a Netflix account.

I'm not really a fan because in a lot of cases it forces you to download stuff you might not want just to establish and maintain an acceptable ratio so eventually you can get the stuff you do want.

if I wanted something obscure and not really interested in the popular thing I'm either wasting bandwidth and/or server space starting out or searching for that thing on a public tracker.

the one private tracker I do use is extremely generous with upload credits for newbies and I was able to take advantage of that plus contribute something right away so I didn't and still don't have any issues but I know that's not the case with some people.

If you're going to Torrent you need to keep one in your pocket at a minimum.

Public or private,you should be running hiding your ass through a VPN or seed box.

Private trackers run ratios to make sure that content stays available. Well you can find most of what you want on public trackers there are always a few things here and there that are much easier to find in private.

Security-wise I don't really think there's much of a difference. Private trackers get infiltrated and shut down they're just much smaller when it happens so you don't hear about as much.

It's mainly all I use. The consistent quality is super nice. Though when PTP was down for a month or two I ended up back on Usenet too.

BTN and PTP aren't hard to maintain ratio on.

Redacted can be a bit of a pain, and I've had to fix my ratio there a few times. But I had a few CDs from some small local bands I'm using Usenet more for music at the moment so lidarr doesn't tank my ratio so quick.

How do you get membership to a private tracker when they are always invite only?

If anyone has invites to a decent tracker, hmu.

Just shamelessly begging, I haven't been on a private tracker in over a decade but I should probably step up my game again with the way that streaming services are headed.

My previous experience was that I was completely incapable of maintaining a decent seed ratio on my home connection. I felt that many users were using seedboxes with really high upload speeds and hogging all the seeding. But I still felt it was quite a valuable community because, as people have already mentioned, the organization and quality of the torrents is infinitely better. So I basically used it sparingly for stuff that was hard to find. They also had a bunch of free-leech torrents that didn't affect your ratio, which was a really nice feature. Honestly can't remember the name of the site though.

They’re extremely good for higher quality content such as 4K REMUX files. I have access to a private tracker that I use regularly. I only search public trackers if what I want isn’t available in the private one…which is rare.

To me it’s not about price or openness or anything. Piracy is a service issue. Private trackers have better service than public trackers. Better curated content, better seeders, and fewer (if any) shit quality re-encodes by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

I can find most everything I want/need on public trackers, so I've never felt the need to jump through their hoops; however easy that would be.

I love my privates :)

I’ve used them and can find a lot of stuff that isn’t available on the more open seas, but maintaining ratio is a big issue, not sure if it’s my setup or the tracker itself, so I can’t download as much as I want to.

What are some good public trackers for movies and shows? With VPN enabled of course.

Not for me.

1. My setup puts all external traffic from my torrent container through the VPN
2. Getting into a private tracker is a pain
3. Setting up the VPN exception is a pain
4. I won't even know if the tracker is worth it until I'm already in and can see their library

Just use I2P 🤷 It's slow, but it's safe

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Only because I was randomly invited to one by a friend, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered with it.

I've only been part of one private tracker, and I got kicked from them after not logging in for a month despite meeting ratios. haven't bothered since then

They're the tits. Public trackers are literal trash by comparison. Like comparing Notre Dame to a busted gas station chapel in Missouri.

Edit: Don't PM me and beg for invites... Not a chance.

TL;DR: Great to have if you're looking for less popular content, high quality files, and/or are concerned about copyright notices, but the rules that keep the niche content alive make them less appealing for super popular content.
I randomly made friends IRL about a year ago and got an invite to BTN & PTP. I don't watch/download a lot of movies, so my account at PTP has lapsed, but I've kept my account with BTN.
From my recent searches, BTN tends to have higher quality files and more seeders than public trackers, but since a) I have a seed box, which provides a line of defense against copyright notices, and is only strengthened my my *aars (gets me in & out of the swarm before the studios find it), b) I usually can't tell the difference in quality from the devices I'm using (and my friends/family most definitely don't notice/care), c) seed ratio or time doesn't impact access to public trackers, and d) I prefer to keep public torrents alive, I usually lean towards public trackers, and only use the private trackers for things that are harder to find and/or things I want in high quality.
I still try to seed to a minimum ratio of 3.0 on popular files (public or private), and ∞ for more niche files, but sometimes demand is so low, and I need to move files off of my seed box. While a ratio below 1.0 makes me feel "stuck" no matter where I got the file from, private tracker rules definitely amplify that feeling.

I've never really used them as most content I can find readily available on public sites. I do want to get access to the World Boxing Video Archive one day as that is an area that seems to be pretty barren on public sites, unfortunately it seems that the registration is forever locked. Maybe I'm wrong but they all seem pretty pointless unless you have some pretty niche tastes in which case they can make a whole lot of sense.

I've never liked them outside of the niches the private trackers I had access to were about.

I've had one that sucked for anything other than music (and even the music was annoying because the uploaders had boners for FLAC and this was back when file size still mattered and FLACs are fucking huge and don't sound different enough to warrant the file size), one that only hosted textbooks for college courses, and another that was strictly niche as fuck films that nobody has ever even really heard of.

It's good to filter out bad actors uploading viruses, but it also limits how much stuff is there period.

I do use private trackers but only if I can't find something on public trackers

I switched to only private trackers 5 or 6 years ago and haven't looked back.

ITT: the sourest of grapes.

I don't use private trackers..

Better quality releases and more active users with much less leeches as they get thrown out.
Though there are many site admins with some complex here too.. your experience can vary.

And of course you need to contribute to the community, most trackers will grant you buffer for both uploading and keeping the torrent running. You want something, then you have to give back.
If the tracker doesnt give possebilities to build your buffer in multiple ways, other than just uploading, its usually a shit tracker.
And some are just super hard to impossible to get into. Start small, wait for open signups or just go to new trackers, they might get bigger over time.
Dont publicly beg for invites, you can humiliate yourself in private chats if you are into that.

id like to get into one, I have good seed ratios, just hard to know where to start

I've been using private trackers since demonoid. Maybe I'm just a different generation, but I enjoy sharing stuff from my local library on private trackers. Torrents rarely fully die on private trackers. People will generally reseed if they have the ability. I can quality shop, and get things that are generally harder to find/request things that I can't find anywhere.

They’re basically the RC Cola of Usenet. Instead of messing around with torrents and private trackers, just move on to the grownup option.