I think this is an excellent idea, alas I don’t know anyone from lobste.rs and I just cannot be bothered with going on IRC in 2026, so I guess I don’t get an invite
I just cannot be bothered with going on IRC in 2026
This is the reason that private trackers make the interview process as annoying as possible. People think this way and filter themselves out without any effort on the part of the site’s moderation team. IRC has been core to the piracy world since the beginning, not being comfortable with IRC is a big indicator that a person is a newbie.
Because of the various hoops that you have to jump through: getting on IRC, reading the rules, being tested on the rules, etc. The people that make it through the interview process are pre-selected for being the kind of people who are willing and capable of finding the information that they need to know.
I didn’t have an invite for a large music tracker and so I had to take a ~2 hour test on audio codecs, formats, bittorrent configuration, etcetcetc. Yes, it is annoying, but there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so to speak.
Of course, you could just skip all of that and just get an invite, but then the responsibility for training you on the rules is on whoever invited you… if you screw up then they get kicked too.
It’s a good system, everyone has to individually prove their competence and the result is a much higher quality community.
It’s worth it if you could benefit from having fast seeds or if you want to use Sonarr/Radarr with less failures/fake/bad media downloads.
For example, I use a VPS for my seedbox/media server. This makes it so that if I discover a movie/tv show that I’m interested in, I can add it to Sonarr and when it starts the torrent from the private tracker I’m guaranteed to have at least 5 multi-gigabit seeds so a 4k movie transfers in a few minutes. This makes it so that all movies and TV shows are essentially on-demand.
There are third party services (debrid) that give you a similar experience without having to deal with hosting issues or private trackers.
If you do decide to try, it’s not hard… they give you all of the material and it’s open notes. As long as you understand 1. You have some amount of time that you have to seed each torrent and you have a global ratio so seeding everything all the time is the best strategy and 2. Whatever domain specific knowledge to cover the site’s content… a movie site will make sure you know the difference between x264 and x265 and what an mkv file is and an audio site will want to make sure you know the difference between lossless and lossy encoding and the associated formats (FLAC, MP3, etc).
They’re mostly just checking that you’re a real person and not completely incompetent. If you’ve been using bittorrent for a while then you probably know most everything except the site specific rules on seeding and ratio.
I think this is an excellent idea, alas I don’t know anyone from lobste.rs and I just cannot be bothered with going on IRC in 2026, so I guess I don’t get an invite
This is the reason that private trackers make the interview process as annoying as possible. People think this way and filter themselves out without any effort on the part of the site’s moderation team. IRC has been core to the piracy world since the beginning, not being comfortable with IRC is a big indicator that a person is a newbie.
Because of the various hoops that you have to jump through: getting on IRC, reading the rules, being tested on the rules, etc. The people that make it through the interview process are pre-selected for being the kind of people who are willing and capable of finding the information that they need to know.
I didn’t have an invite for a large music tracker and so I had to take a ~2 hour test on audio codecs, formats, bittorrent configuration, etcetcetc. Yes, it is annoying, but there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so to speak.
Of course, you could just skip all of that and just get an invite, but then the responsibility for training you on the rules is on whoever invited you… if you screw up then they get kicked too.
It’s a good system, everyone has to individually prove their competence and the result is a much higher quality community.
Ahhh. And then you have people like me who have been seeding for years but are way too socially anxious to even start any of that process. (:
It’s worth it if you could benefit from having fast seeds or if you want to use Sonarr/Radarr with less failures/fake/bad media downloads.
For example, I use a VPS for my seedbox/media server. This makes it so that if I discover a movie/tv show that I’m interested in, I can add it to Sonarr and when it starts the torrent from the private tracker I’m guaranteed to have at least 5 multi-gigabit seeds so a 4k movie transfers in a few minutes. This makes it so that all movies and TV shows are essentially on-demand.
There are third party services (debrid) that give you a similar experience without having to deal with hosting issues or private trackers.
If you do decide to try, it’s not hard… they give you all of the material and it’s open notes. As long as you understand 1. You have some amount of time that you have to seed each torrent and you have a global ratio so seeding everything all the time is the best strategy and 2. Whatever domain specific knowledge to cover the site’s content… a movie site will make sure you know the difference between x264 and x265 and what an mkv file is and an audio site will want to make sure you know the difference between lossless and lossy encoding and the associated formats (FLAC, MP3, etc).
They’re mostly just checking that you’re a real person and not completely incompetent. If you’ve been using bittorrent for a while then you probably know most everything except the site specific rules on seeding and ratio.
Give it a shot!
IRC still awesome, even in 2026. It’ll be awesome in 2056 too.
I’ll have to take your word for it. I can’t be bothered setting up quassel.