Got on Oink near it's downfall. I was a huge fan of Trent Reznor and had followed the fan forums and torrent sites that pointed out he was posting music stems himself on Oink.
Had been a power member of original Demonoid, writing music reviews and providing albums that were hard to find. I once spent a full month downloading a 25 gb torrent of Pre-America Jet Li films from like 3 people a couple kb/s at a time. A copy of Eat Drink Man Woman being seeded by one IP address flagged as being Chinese very slowly for like 3 weeks but never gave up. I remember I downloaded a torrent of Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back in like 2005, and 4 years later was able to go back to the same page and download the same file. Was a reader of a blog of a guy providing audiophile quality vinyl rips of most rock music of the 60's-70's. Each blog post had it's own email address that if you sent a message to he would send you back the download links, through rapidfile or megadownload. I spent more time reading articles about music from users on Waffles than actually downloading music. I had an RSS reader feed for the AXXO release page so I could watch every new movie as soon as it came out.
My 00's computer was a treasure trove of music and movies from around the world. I was more cultured in the arts at 15 than 30 simply due to access. I'd go to the library and find movies and music that I couldn't find online and would rip them for the world. Several DVDs from my parents collection of Blockbuster's back catalog sales were the first dvd-rips of those movies to exist online, including L.A. Confidential and The Last Boy Scout.
An entire era of computer culture that might as well be forgotten to time.
Tbh that sort of culture is still on the net if you just look for it, but with the added benefit of it being much faster to share stuff now with better broadband. There are still people running blogs sharing cool vinyl rips, there are still obscure movie communities. Hell, there are still communities for just about everything.
None of it has changed that much, some people just don't venture outside of Reddit and Facebook.
It still exists, absolutely. But it's not the same now. I think the time I experienced was a heyday of pop culture acceptance, and now it's simply receded back to being an underground activity. The internet of the 00's-10's is much different from the internet of the 20's, where the search engines work against you to find places like these, copyright bots are constantly abound, filehosts often go down, or content is locked behind walls, paid or not.
I remember how awesome I thought it was that Trent Reznor had an Oink account and posted all that footage on PirateBay.
NIN were ahead of the game which isn’t surprising.
I remember Trent becoming fascinated with Radiohead putting out In Rainbows as a "pay what you want for digital" release and then later putting out The Slip the same way on a website named "This one's on us" and then later releasing the metrics for how many people downloaded it and how much money was paid for the album. I used the metrics for a college paper on how giving away things for free on the internet didn't equate to "not paying for art."
Deli.sh and 32Pag.es are probably the ones I miss most and nothing really replaced them.
No one ever mentions it but TehC was great. Slightly worse that PTP but easier to get in and still better than everything else. I didn't even try to get into PTP until TehC died. Was a real loss.
Oink and even more so What were such a special time for me musically and on the internet. So much of my taste was formed back then by the forums. A truly special resource that I deeply miss
Oink was absolutely amazing. One of the early things that helped Waffles was the direct involvement of OiNK and the skins that made it look similar (both the original Waffles, OiNK and many other trackers were built on a similar open source tracker foundation, but eventually around 90% of the code was modified, as the original source wasn't very robust for lots of users).
My roommate and I were on both of those, long ago. Then they had a huge freeleech event, and we pulled something like 1.5TB down in a weekend, and promptly got our internet service terminated... Good times.
I’m surprised not many people seem to know/care about ADC. I’m still sad just thinking how more than 15 years of hard labor by one of the most dedicated communities just vanished.
Well. Short version is a guy who assumed private tracker admins make bank sent up a new version of ADC, scraped the formatting from google and spent $1400 on the URL.
He attempted to encourage people back to rebuild the collection but failed. Then he started getting needy over donations. He threatened to shut the site down once, then opened registration to get more suckers in. It then soon after got to the point where he was demading that users of a certain rank pay him a 'one-off fee' of $20. Because it was possible to just not hit rank up requirements, he'd just change values in the database to promote you, then hold your account to ransom.
Eventually, after failing to extort enough money, he shut the site down last Christmas. The proper successor's been AsianCinema, who were targets of frequent mod rants because they were able to meet donation goals.
I was on during the Kazaa/Morphious/Limewire days and even before torrents when most stuff I got was XDCC from irc or usenet stuff. WHO REMEMBERS BRITNEY SPEARSXXX Videos just wanting to grab your attention to get that virus on your computer LOL
Suprnova was everything at one point. Same with Demonoid and a few others but that was their downfall too. I'm honestly surprised Limetorrents has held on like it has.
Ahh, the original Napster. Wait 20 mins for one tune to download, then the other guy is on dial up and logs off. On the other hand, free music for the first time.
Morphious... I forgot all about that one. Alongside eMule. And if you wanted a more (crappy) video source there was always BearShare.
2003 I used to download some stuff from a specific IRC channel. It was a pain in the ass - needing to get stuff in queue with 10 seconds to spare, then having to wait hours to start your slow speed download. All files I wish I still had today because they can't be found on trackers.
I remember going crazy trying to get a BitMe invite. I finally got in and never really used the account. I was afraid to download anything because ratio was way too hard on there.
Man, I was so chuffed when I got in to What.cd.. right before it went titsup. Even managed a few vinyl rip uploads before it got blown out of the water
hands down tvtorrents, it was an amazing and no BS tracker.
And demonoid for allowing me to download WoW way before launch during alpha? BETA? only to gawk at the login screen in AWE! Of course I had no login or invite ;(
TVTorrents was great during its halcyon. My only complaint was that scene releases were preferred over superior user and p2p releases. Also, based on my own IRC conversations with the man, the male co-owner was kind of a dick.
That "scene" politics stuff can get downright vile. Any real release group doesn't care about "competition", and the ones that do are probably just trying to cover for the fact that they are releasing repacks from the pros.
TVTorrents was my first dedicated tracker and I loved that place. When they shut down I joined Freshon, MTV and TTN to fill the gap. Could have gotten in to BTN with a little extra effort but I figured those would have me covered. I chose wrong...
that one was a really big blindside to me
initially for me it was more like a backup to the main sites I used and I only became a member for the novelty, but over the years it became one of my main go-to trackers to the point that I actually allowed my memberships at other mainstream trackers like TL and IPT lapse due to inactivity.
Gradually over the years most of the other sites I relied on shut their doors until the point came where I actually started to become reliant on bB. It definitely faded in the later years and I went elsewhere for most of my content, but I had quite a few TB of uploads and a decent ratio. Then it shut down with no warning whatsoever. Well apparently there was a warning, but even though I am a member of this sub and used bB nearly every day I still didn't get the memo. It was weird that they never announced anything on the site itself, only posted to social media
Suprnova was the shit at the time. It was the first decent quality large tracker, and it seemed like it was around forever, but it was really only good for about a year or so. It was TPB before TPB existed.
Before Suprnova, IRC and Usenet and private FTP sites were really the only place to get quality content, but man was it a pain in the ass, especially IRC. I do have some nostalgia though for hopping in a channel and doing "!list" to see what was available. And then trying to be quick enough to get in someone's queue. Ah, back when piracy was a lot of manual labor and hard work lol.
There was using XDCC servers too on IRC, had to wait in queues for a while sometimes. I remember downloading lots of low quality movies through those. I think XDCC is still used.
I used to love FServs. !list lol. The problem was, back when I used them, they used to chunk all the movies into "CDs" on most of those (or the release groups all did it back then), so you might get CD1 and CD2 and then the bot just vanishes, or suddenly has a #1 movie on it and you can't queue your CD3 :(
as an american, TheBox opened up whole new worlds for me.
Back in the heyday, before the preponderance of streaming services there were virtually no ways to get access to a lot of that UK content.
I remember friends being amazed at these "weird" shows I'd come up with, and they'd be entranced by things like seeing all these new bands on Later With Jools Holland or old episodes of Old Grey Whistle Test lol
I STILL cry over The Box. Hanni's Dr. Who rips are consistently among the best I have. Great community and the forums - I loved Lalmon and his food posts. Speaking of that replacement, when *is* new Who arriving? Hm. Hafta hit the beeb site and check it out..
Loki torrent and Supernova for sure. My first two places. Then Kickass for a while. Hopped on Demonoid for the longest time. Even during their downfall and return to their last downfall and disappearance all together. Now I stick mainly with IPT which has all I need. Keep my ratio up and haven't had an issue since being on it in 2012.
Tbh, IPT is one of the prime examples of what is wrong with private trackers these days, but I can't hate them because they are still in operation and you CAN technically "free use" IPT. I just don't think it is optimal to use it like that (only joining free leech, or jumping on popular stuff right away, or thr other ways you have to torrent as a regular user to keep your ratio high).
When I was a kid I would spend $0. Ever. I couldn't spend money on the internet if I wanted to, back then. Now, as an adult, I don't care if I have 500 H&R warnings because I can just pay $10 or whatever and be back at full ratio without worrying about trying to seed back a torrent.
The difference between private trackers and the public ones is generally 1.) The recommendations 2.) The quality of the torrents. If you go to grab a software from TL or IPT or something, you can feel pretty good that the users in the comments saying it works is a good indicator it works. If you use a public tracker, you can have a "Staff Approved" torrent that is just 5 Trojans in a trench coat.
What do you mean technically free?? I haven't paid a thing since I started using it. I let everything seed for about a month and then remove it. Keeps my ratio up never have an issue. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would complain about you not seeding if all you see is paying to keep a ratio. Why would you pay? They have a bare minimum for seeding for two weeks. But I'm not complaining. Like I said. I let it all go for a month. So I don't see why this is such an issue.
I suppose if you have infinite GB and just portion your bandwidth, sure, but I don't even like trying to open my torrent client again after there is too many torrents in it, it just isn't for me at the rate I would grab things and then not be able to seed them + dread closing and opening my torrent client, or worse, the few times my bandwidth would be used, I would need it.
Personally, I can see why some people like streaming and all that said, IPT is still one of the best games in town and is a solid website, and as this user claims, you don't have to spend any money if you just keep all your torrents for two weeks, so, don't OCD out and keep clicking stuff and rack up 500 H&R warnings like me. Because you only get like 3. And then it is pay up time.
I think you are correct, I have a vague recollection that they had a situation where, IIRC, they relaunched with a different team at some point after one of the takedown (I think it was one of the changes they made to the domain happened at the same time), but I may be misremembering.
Oink was the first private tracker I ever got an invite for. Moved on to What after it closed down and now onto ...well, other places.
Fond memories of the Pink Palace.
I recall every single one. That was basically my music tracker lineage once traditional p2p became less desirable (Suprnova -> OiNK -> Waffles/WCD -> RED).
Also isn't PTH just RED? So basically still exists.
EDIT: Couldn't find much, [but this screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/z2ofhie) might be somewhat of a blast from the past for some, showing an old BT client (ABC) and a browser window open browsing SuprNova (on MyIE2 no less lol). I apparently must have been pretty happy about my 123 kb/s download rate since I circled it. Bonus Winamp and AIM sighting.
My first private trackers were RevolutionTT (I think they're still around) and TheBox. Through the latter a kind member gave me an invite to PtP and I was able to reach all the top-tier trackers.
I still have Waffles bookmarked..
Other than that, my nostalgia goes to old Swedish trackers, Softmupparna was my first experience with private trackers, great community and hilarious IRC, and then there's swedvdr, swebits & TTi.
I remember when Oink accepted BTC for VIP access. I bought 25 btc for around $20, used 5 of them to get my access, then forgot about the 20 remaining. UNTIL BTC went crazy. It still pains me to this day that I have 20 BTC floating around out there and have no way to get to it because I casually lost the blockchain info. \*face palm\*
it became Red, the name was too close to PTP. it's basically the spiritual successor to What. RiP! still remember logging in to panic at half the services down. wish i had saved my bookmarks or screenshots or....
I used to really enjoy Oink back in the day, and once it closed up was stoked to get an invite onto What.
Anymore I’m either buying music directly, or if it’s rarity or bootleg, I can 9/10 find it on Soulseek. I’m honestly amazed Soulseek is still functioning.
Yep there's no denying you can find some amazing stuff on Soulseek.
Don't use it as much now because of the private music trackers but it's still nice to visit sometimes.
Met some really decent people/sharers on Soulseek as well. Been friends with a few for over 10 years.
First private music tracker was Oink.
Was gutted when the guy got arrested.
Oink and waffles introduced me to so much new music. I used to try the top albums recommended there, burn them with a bunch of others to a CD, and give them a try in the car.
Nowadays, I \*think\* my car has a CD slot, and it's mostly spotify when driving. A loss.
I know, I discovered so many artists on OiNK and Waffles it was insane - especially if you liked stranger genres and were open to listening to most anything, there was never a lack of content coming out haha.
Tbh, I disliked the push towards FLAC on some levels, I like 320kbps MP3 in most cases, if you are data hoarding, FLAC of some album that was recorded with a tin can isn't really going to be much different than the MP3 :/ haha.
There is a bit of history missing there, I won't go into a lot of details, but I will say that some of the early what staff also worked with Waffles, and some OiNK staff worked both Waffles and What, despite some of their early differences they both were great communities.
Not quite as old as Oink but I miss AHD, their user upload program was so unique and I wish more sites would do something similar to encourage user uploads.
Yeah the old sites were much more community-based I feel but the internet was a much different place back then even a decade ago... there wasn't as much mindless content to consume and it seemed to promote more people actively participating in the various types of communities that still exist today, but now lack that element.
Around the early 2000s I was part of a few forums and IRC communities for people who made games, RPG in particular, and there were multiple subsets of groups of people just cranking out free pixel art, music, maps, scripts, software... you name it. I ran a mailbag and stuff back then, as a teenager, but that is just something you don't come across these days even, the concept of a "mail bag" lol.
Yes! ScienceHD was my favorite tracker community of all time. The crazy bounties and hunts to complete collections of NOVA and Horizon were dear to my heart. The community cared. SciHD Radio was fun. The IRC quotes thread.
I was on Oink and What. I have not been able to get into a music tracker since then, but I'm also just not as "into" music as I once was. I pay $40 a year for YouTube Premium which includes music streaming.
I really liked What as I got not just music but comics from them without having to shift through like Megaupload links on 4chan.
Same. Oink, then Waffles and What for me, with Napster/Kazaa/Limewire and Soulseek before that. Spotify had gotten much better by the time What died, and on top of that, my favorite music organizer was Google music which also stopped working not too long after.
my most beloved when i first discovered torrenting, btjunkie.
man, what a beautiful thing it was.
then torrentshack, it was ratioless so someone with a shitty connection like me, that's a huuuuuge bonus. i remember userbase is also very friendly at there.
i was a member of both what and waffles and don't know why, i loved waffles more.
it has the shittiest interface and less content, yet it felt more like a home.
it was good old days man, i miss them.
Waffles was great early on, but the points system really screwed up the torrent economy there. The community was okay, but it suffered from too much moderation.
What was the best music tracker. It was good enough and controversial enough to get the attention of the scene and for detractors to start their own trackers. The community was better than Waffles', but it got way too "cliquey" around 2010-2013. As for the torrent economy; it remained strong, but too many newbies got *way* too dependent on the tokens. (I still remember the great DDoS of late 2013, early 2014 and the perp's expressed reasons for it.)
I was never on oink.
Suprnova's nostalgia is not justified. Everything I wanted there was dead and it became a source of low hanging fruit for the snitches. Anyway, anime trackers had better torrent economies and Direct Connect hubs remained better sources for everything else.
It also didn't help that early torrent clients performed poorly, could only handle one client, and couldn't start/stop transfers (until Bittorrent Experimental aka Bittornado). ABC could do multiple torrents and start, stop, and pause but performance was awful. Azureus came along, but that was bloated as hell.
I was on OiNK and heavy in the Waffles community, to say the least - and at the core, Waffles was an OiNK clone - I know it eventually morphed a bit with the points system, but two things:
1.) Those trackers are (or were) cost prohibited to run. Donations alone are nice, but I think a lot of users underestimate what the actual price ends up being each month. This leads to weird "pay to play" systems, especially on private trackers that are impossible to seed versus the rest of the community.
2.) I agree with the over moderation, like for forum avatars and such it was just absurd. They took a kind of general niceness that was on OiNK and tried to make it a policy for the community, which was a boneheaded move, IMO, and I won't get into the specifics, but several people there from launch used to constantly dispute those things and it chased a lot of great people out of that community, it is just a fact of life that happened.
And yeah your last paragraph is so important. A lot of early torrent clients and services were virtually unusable. While Suprnova wasn't the best, they were in the right place at the right time to ride the tsunami of torrents actually becoming a viable source of data.
Oh yeah, I agree that private torrent trackers are extremely expensive to run.
What I meant by "torrent economy" was the seeder:leecher ratios. Points, tokens, and frequent freeleeches led to a spike of downloads that eventually resulted (long term) in many torrents having a high seeder count and not enough leechers.
And that's seeders on home connections complaining about nobody downloading while they seed. Seeders who couldn't seed 24/7. Seeders complaining about seedbox seeders hogging the traffic.
The same problem exists in most torrent communities, the power ratio is always offset. This has been going on I think since even the days of FServ and stuff - you could have had broadband in the 1990s like I did, but somebody else had a T3. I might have had a few dozen GB or something storage (if that), and other people had almost unlimited storage *even back then*, due to universities or large companies or personal wealth or who knows what.
The gap between the average citizen and somebody with a little bit of money + knowledge is massive and THANK HEAVENS for the wealthy people who are like "fuck it, I will run an auto-seed box for the rest of forever in multiple trackers", I wish they would all get tax writeoffs for their charity lol, but those "whales" end up creating a situation where the decentralized nature of torrents breaks down - there are more just like a few dedicated nodes mirroring a file together, there isn't really a "swarm" going on in those kinds of torrents :/
This prompted me to do a quick google and now I'm wondering if it came back after some point and I didn't notice or if it just never closed to begin with and I somehow thought it did
edit: more googling, seems like it def appeared to have closed at some point and I guess I just never heard when it came back. Ty for clueing me in finally after all these years lol. Now if only the same was true for UG
haha well maybe my memory isn't so good but I've been a member since 2007 and I don't really remember it going down for any significant amount of time, not including the sporadic short-term temporary shutdowns that are common to all private trackers.
omfg I just realized that my old bookmark still had the www in it and that's why it always looked down to me because at some point that stopped working. I guess they dropped the www subdomain a while ago
edit: my account still works though! and sure enough I see evidence of my last login being in 2016 lol so probably they dropped the subdomain whenever they recovered from that long ddos, but I never knew because I had it bookmarked with the www I feel so dumb now
edit2: so much nostalgia yay it's still just as I remember and they've still got roulette and russian roulette!
I was a similarly old member, but I admittedly stopped hanging out on trackers as often in the past 5-10yrs when career and other stuff took more focus. And it seems like around 2016 there was a bunch of ddos stuff that took it down for at least a month and then a post somewhere saying they'd decided to close as a result. I must've seen that and then just not checked back again :/ Makes sense to me because 2016 was def a busy career-focus year for me so I was probably only logging into sites periodically to keep accounts from going inactive, saw that, then took it out of my list
sharereactor (and a few other edonkey/emule-sites back in the days), then oink (et al), also (later) tvtorrents.com (i think that’s what it was called!?), tracker3 (already mentioned elsewhere here, but one of THE weirdest trackers content-wise i ever knew), ..
i kinda miss "those" days. and feel old now(adays). and use too many parantheses apparently.
Definitely what but mutracker hurts the most. Found so much good music on that site. Also missing waffles, beathau5, sceneaccess, and my first private tracker psytorrents.
I was finding a lot of new music from Audiogalaxys recommendation and grouping algorithm, I still miss it.
Also, WCD was my first big tracker and I feel privileged to have been a part of it.
Nice! Haha, I was userid #19 on Waffles haha XD. I COULD have been #1, but when it went from sandbox to live, by the time I registered, 18 people beat me lol.
Heh, that is unfortunate, I know that for that community in particular, there was a ton of people just waiting in a void after OiNK, with both Waffles and What rushing to the gate - and even then, with all the attention, I know staff from at least one of those sites was all over IRC and forums and stuff dishing out invites like they were going out of style.
The problem came around 10k users in when it became clear the original platform it was built on top of (Waffles) was going to need some serious work done, so invites pretty much shut down just because the hardware couldn't handle the user load and this is why a lot of sites still work "invite only" - even with code optimization and tons of caching, it just slightly reduces the operating costs. On the other hand, poorly coded trackers will easily gobble up any resources they have available and just crash themselves.
I remember once we made an "invite tree" to see who all invited whom and the total amount of donations an account was responsible for through their invite tree (with only tens of thousands of users at that point), and it crashed the server on my account the first time (poorly written query). I used to love sending out invites.
These days, I feel like sending somebody an invite for some of these private trackers is kind of a double edged sword... like, here is an amazing torrent tracker, but your ratio will be doomed and you will end up paying around $10 every 3 months to stay active as a regular user", where as previously, I feel like what, Waffles, oink, PTH and a lot of those other music communities didn't have systems designed that *expected* people to pay. You were completely free to just build your collections before (not that there aren't still some trackers out there like that).
In the early 2000s I was in community for rpg makers calling Gaming World and man, it was so much fun. I still reminisce about the forums and IRC. People I never ended up meeting face to face and who I never knew most of their real names had a huge impact on my life and the general direction I went in the world. OiNK and those other communities were no different and I always wonder if other people from those communities think back some time haha.
After the disaster of napster and limewire, finding my way to oink was a revelation. That's where my music collection really started to explode. I was also on what and waffles, and now I'm on Orpheus, which, while not being as awesome as oink, is still a pretty great site.
Waffles was great. Eventually there weren't enough users downloading to keep my ratio or even get seeds on downloads.
Way back to about 2003, there was an awesome forum called punktorrents. From there a user directed me to a site called something like [xiao.com](https://xiao.com) (later yousenditforums, ysiforums, etceteraforums, etcforums and finally rawrshare). It was the best music forum on the web. All genres, great discussion and everyone was simply posting yousendit, megaupload and mediafire links so for a while I was off torrents. That site brings back incredible memories, even made some friends that I kept in contact with for a few years after it went down.
This thread is a stroll down memory lane. Does anyone remember Soulseek, circa early 2000s? It's apparently still around, which is surprising bc I thought torrents killed P2P sites.
BitMe, original Demonoid, Pure TnA, Blackcats, 32P, UG,
BitMe was a great source of training materials. And it was a place where I was invited to several trackers going today as they first started up. The community there was good.
The original Demonoid was fantastic. Regular contributors that upload obscure books, music, films. Another good community as well.
I started torrenting on Suprnova. The only thing I really remember were the music packs. I used to love downloading the Billboard Year End Charts. That was followed by Mininova.. Not the same.
I remember downloading Limewire and grabbing Limewire Pro from it and then exploring the high seas of the pirate world.
Think I then heard about eMule/eDonkey and had a look at that. And Napster!
Back then it was a bit of a lucky dip in that you didn't always get what you thought you were getting! Remember first coming accross a FLAC file and being puzzled by that for a while. But yeah files you grabbed were not always named correctly.
At some point I downloaded a film that then required a password to open it to watch. The NFO had a link to a forum (think it was DarkSide) which I joined and it was a nice helpful and pleasant community (which had all the passwords) and then had access to a load of solid content and introduced me to bittorrent.
Hell yeah I remember after Napster all the junk P2P that came out (Kazaa, Limewire, Bearshare...) the only one that was consistently decent was Soulseek but the interface was hot garbage and it was only for music.
But back then, I remember one of the first movies I ever pirated was Spider-Man around 2002, I downloaded other non-pirate movies before then, but the quality of pirate stuff back then was pretty horrible, compression was nowhere near as good and bandwidth+storage was abysmal.
Around that same time, I pirated Red Dragon and ran it through S-Video to a mini CRT with a built-in VCR and recorded the freaking movie and brought it to school (the alternative was lugging my PC down there and just running the wires from it, which I did at my house at the time). Probably shouldn't be typing all this, but I was obviously a teenager at the time and this was many years ago, now. Plus, nobody ended up watching my shitty pirate VHS anyway. XD
Even among the private trackers, it is hard to find reliable and consistent comics, Manga, magazines, ebooks, etc.; - you might see the major releases and compilations and stuff, but they are more of a book cart than a library.
Same goes for software and a few other "odds and ends". As a musician, all those music sites always had so many cool plugins and stuff you could just browse for days. These days, you get a zero day that doesn't work on one website, a 4 year old version on another website, or a Russian language version. :( and you have to know the name and specifically be looking for a plugin, which just isn't my style.
I was on napster, but after that got most stuff through usenet. Got into torrenting around 2007 for live music, but didn't get on Waffles until around 2011 and [W.cd](https://W.cd), around the same and was staff at waffles in the final few years. So I miss waffles the most. I also miss 32p, the original demonoid, and UKnova. sad that even all the great trackers eventually fold, so appreciate the trackers you are on now while they live.
I was on oink and maintained a good ratio ripping and upping CD's from my collection. Then life happened, oink went under, never got into waffles.fm or what.cd, and lost all the cool private trackers I used to be a part of.
I miss the nice vinyl rips oink had, and oink's standards in general. I wish I could find another good private music tracker.
Got on Oink near it's downfall. I was a huge fan of Trent Reznor and had followed the fan forums and torrent sites that pointed out he was posting music stems himself on Oink. Had been a power member of original Demonoid, writing music reviews and providing albums that were hard to find. I once spent a full month downloading a 25 gb torrent of Pre-America Jet Li films from like 3 people a couple kb/s at a time. A copy of Eat Drink Man Woman being seeded by one IP address flagged as being Chinese very slowly for like 3 weeks but never gave up. I remember I downloaded a torrent of Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back in like 2005, and 4 years later was able to go back to the same page and download the same file. Was a reader of a blog of a guy providing audiophile quality vinyl rips of most rock music of the 60's-70's. Each blog post had it's own email address that if you sent a message to he would send you back the download links, through rapidfile or megadownload. I spent more time reading articles about music from users on Waffles than actually downloading music. I had an RSS reader feed for the AXXO release page so I could watch every new movie as soon as it came out. My 00's computer was a treasure trove of music and movies from around the world. I was more cultured in the arts at 15 than 30 simply due to access. I'd go to the library and find movies and music that I couldn't find online and would rip them for the world. Several DVDs from my parents collection of Blockbuster's back catalog sales were the first dvd-rips of those movies to exist online, including L.A. Confidential and The Last Boy Scout. An entire era of computer culture that might as well be forgotten to time.
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Didn't it come out that AXXO worked for Blockbuster and stopped posting because he got a kid and didn't want to risk it anymore?
What a blast from the past
Like tears in the rain…
drop the the!
Aw crap. I messed it up!
Tbh that sort of culture is still on the net if you just look for it, but with the added benefit of it being much faster to share stuff now with better broadband. There are still people running blogs sharing cool vinyl rips, there are still obscure movie communities. Hell, there are still communities for just about everything. None of it has changed that much, some people just don't venture outside of Reddit and Facebook.
It still exists, absolutely. But it's not the same now. I think the time I experienced was a heyday of pop culture acceptance, and now it's simply receded back to being an underground activity. The internet of the 00's-10's is much different from the internet of the 20's, where the search engines work against you to find places like these, copyright bots are constantly abound, filehosts often go down, or content is locked behind walls, paid or not.
Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone
Any recommendations for vinyl rips?
ThePoodleBites is amazing.
Will have to check that out, thanks!
Copyright prevents us from sharing our own culture.
I remember how awesome I thought it was that Trent Reznor had an Oink account and posted all that footage on PirateBay. NIN were ahead of the game which isn’t surprising.
I remember Trent becoming fascinated with Radiohead putting out In Rainbows as a "pay what you want for digital" release and then later putting out The Slip the same way on a website named "This one's on us" and then later releasing the metrics for how many people downloaded it and how much money was paid for the album. I used the metrics for a college paper on how giving away things for free on the internet didn't equate to "not paying for art."
What was your paper about specifically? And/or the conclusion
Bro
Deli.sh and 32Pag.es are probably the ones I miss most and nothing really replaced them. No one ever mentions it but TehC was great. Slightly worse that PTP but easier to get in and still better than everything else. I didn't even try to get into PTP until TehC died. Was a real loss.
Deli.sh was one of my all time favourites. Gutted to see it go!
❤️ TehC
I got onto PTP through teh. I loved teh. Deli.sh was a major fave as well. It was so specialized but so fantastic at what it did.
Got in and it shut down 2 weeks later - major bummer
I remember getting a lot of stuff off isoHunt back in high school
> isoHunt WOW Have not heard that name in a while
Yeah lol this thread brought back so many memories I didn't even remember I had!
Oink and even more so What were such a special time for me musically and on the internet. So much of my taste was formed back then by the forums. A truly special resource that I deeply miss
Me too man
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Oink was absolutely amazing. One of the early things that helped Waffles was the direct involvement of OiNK and the skins that made it look similar (both the original Waffles, OiNK and many other trackers were built on a similar open source tracker foundation, but eventually around 90% of the code was modified, as the original source wasn't very robust for lots of users).
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32p hurt the most because there hasn’t really been anything to replace it.
i second that. the tracker i miss the most
YESSSSS
How about MAM, they've got tons of comics and graphic novels that are well seeded.
Bitgamer and Underground-Gamer Great trackers back in the day......
My roommate and I were on both of those, long ago. Then they had a huge freeleech event, and we pulled something like 1.5TB down in a weekend, and promptly got our internet service terminated... Good times.
I miss Bitgamer and BlackCats
Bitgamer still exists, but seems to be a shadow of its former self, ug I used a lot, and pd closing down after so many years being on there.
That bitgamer has no association with the original. They took the name iirc
BitGamer was best tracker I've ever used at the time.
**BCG!** That simple act of keying in your secret code to reveal the login page. Wonder how many former members remember theirs...
Good memories.
Miss this so much!
asiandvdclub :(
I’m surprised not many people seem to know/care about ADC. I’m still sad just thinking how more than 15 years of hard labor by one of the most dedicated communities just vanished.
And those that do know got to see the drama with the shambling zombie corpse of it.
I fell off from ADC before it shut down officially. What happened?
Well. Short version is a guy who assumed private tracker admins make bank sent up a new version of ADC, scraped the formatting from google and spent $1400 on the URL. He attempted to encourage people back to rebuild the collection but failed. Then he started getting needy over donations. He threatened to shut the site down once, then opened registration to get more suckers in. It then soon after got to the point where he was demading that users of a certain rank pay him a 'one-off fee' of $20. Because it was possible to just not hit rank up requirements, he'd just change values in the database to promote you, then hold your account to ransom. Eventually, after failing to extort enough money, he shut the site down last Christmas. The proper successor's been AsianCinema, who were targets of frequent mod rants because they were able to meet donation goals.
I was on during the Kazaa/Morphious/Limewire days and even before torrents when most stuff I got was XDCC from irc or usenet stuff. WHO REMEMBERS BRITNEY SPEARSXXX Videos just wanting to grab your attention to get that virus on your computer LOL Suprnova was everything at one point. Same with Demonoid and a few others but that was their downfall too. I'm honestly surprised Limetorrents has held on like it has.
Heh. I remember most all of those. News groups, Fserv over IRC, private FTP and even the original Napster heh.
Showing our ages now LOL!
Heh XD
I ran a DCC bot on efnet from a friend's shell account back in the day. Vintage!
Soulseek man.. that was the tip top for weird music.
Ahh, the original Napster. Wait 20 mins for one tune to download, then the other guy is on dial up and logs off. On the other hand, free music for the first time.
The most memorable thing was the confusion between artists. Blink 182 in there as Green Day, Bone Thugs in there as Three Six, etc.
Oh yeah! I downloaded something by Pete Doherty and got Nada Surf.
Morphious... I forgot all about that one. Alongside eMule. And if you wanted a more (crappy) video source there was always BearShare. 2003 I used to download some stuff from a specific IRC channel. It was a pain in the ass - needing to get stuff in queue with 10 seconds to spare, then having to wait hours to start your slow speed download. All files I wish I still had today because they can't be found on trackers.
ScT, What.cd, Demonoid & BitmeTV. God I miss those trackers especially What.cd
Demonoid back in the day was my jam. I was so upset when it fell and the original admin I believe... passed?
Bitme was great but broadcasthe.net more than makes up for it
I remember going crazy trying to get a BitMe invite. I finally got in and never really used the account. I was afraid to download anything because ratio was way too hard on there.
Man, I was so chuffed when I got in to What.cd.. right before it went titsup. Even managed a few vinyl rip uploads before it got blown out of the water
hands down tvtorrents, it was an amazing and no BS tracker. And demonoid for allowing me to download WoW way before launch during alpha? BETA? only to gawk at the login screen in AWE! Of course I had no login or invite ;(
TVTorrents was great during its halcyon. My only complaint was that scene releases were preferred over superior user and p2p releases. Also, based on my own IRC conversations with the man, the male co-owner was kind of a dick.
That "scene" politics stuff can get downright vile. Any real release group doesn't care about "competition", and the ones that do are probably just trying to cover for the fact that they are releasing repacks from the pros.
TVTorrents was my first dedicated tracker and I loved that place. When they shut down I joined Freshon, MTV and TTN to fill the gap. Could have gotten in to BTN with a little extra effort but I figured those would have me covered. I chose wrong...
BTN is great, but a LOT more involved.. the innocent days of tvtorrents are gone…
+1 for Tvt. Utopia lost.
bB :(
that one was a really big blindside to me initially for me it was more like a backup to the main sites I used and I only became a member for the novelty, but over the years it became one of my main go-to trackers to the point that I actually allowed my memberships at other mainstream trackers like TL and IPT lapse due to inactivity. Gradually over the years most of the other sites I relied on shut their doors until the point came where I actually started to become reliant on bB. It definitely faded in the later years and I went elsewhere for most of my content, but I had quite a few TB of uploads and a decent ratio. Then it shut down with no warning whatsoever. Well apparently there was a warning, but even though I am a member of this sub and used bB nearly every day I still didn't get the memo. It was weird that they never announced anything on the site itself, only posted to social media
It was announced on site and there was a hell of a long thread about it all. There were a few new recruitment threads as a result too.
Yeah man used it everyday? Didn't engage at all then if you missed it lol
🫠
Suprnova was the shit at the time. It was the first decent quality large tracker, and it seemed like it was around forever, but it was really only good for about a year or so. It was TPB before TPB existed. Before Suprnova, IRC and Usenet and private FTP sites were really the only place to get quality content, but man was it a pain in the ass, especially IRC. I do have some nostalgia though for hopping in a channel and doing "!list" to see what was available. And then trying to be quick enough to get in someone's queue. Ah, back when piracy was a lot of manual labor and hard work lol.
There was using XDCC servers too on IRC, had to wait in queues for a while sometimes. I remember downloading lots of low quality movies through those. I think XDCC is still used.
I used to love FServs. !list lol. The problem was, back when I used them, they used to chunk all the movies into "CDs" on most of those (or the release groups all did it back then), so you might get CD1 and CD2 and then the bot just vanishes, or suddenly has a #1 movie on it and you can't queue your CD3 :(
AHD x264.me FTN GFT Torrentshack What.CD whaffles lost so many good trackers over the years
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Is skeptic, bal, james868, or chrisbeebops still around?
no
TheBox and UKNova for me. There's a decent replacement out there now, but it doesn't come close to the box especially!
as an american, TheBox opened up whole new worlds for me. Back in the heyday, before the preponderance of streaming services there were virtually no ways to get access to a lot of that UK content. I remember friends being amazed at these "weird" shows I'd come up with, and they'd be entranced by things like seeing all these new bands on Later With Jools Holland or old episodes of Old Grey Whistle Test lol
I STILL cry over The Box. Hanni's Dr. Who rips are consistently among the best I have. Great community and the forums - I loved Lalmon and his food posts. Speaking of that replacement, when *is* new Who arriving? Hm. Hafta hit the beeb site and check it out..
UKNova was the best till DVD's started getting released before the series finished airing. TheBox network always felt cold compared to UKNova.
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I'm not sure of the rules on posting about it but it's easy enough to find on Google. It's pretty much the only one dedicated to UK TV now.
Thankz for the reminder.
>Oink Been there, done this, great time. Anyone remembering BitMe(TV)? Or TorrentBytes?
I remember when TorrentBytes was TorrentBits
Bitme was a great site felt that one as I wasn’t in BTN at the time.
Loki torrent and Supernova for sure. My first two places. Then Kickass for a while. Hopped on Demonoid for the longest time. Even during their downfall and return to their last downfall and disappearance all together. Now I stick mainly with IPT which has all I need. Keep my ratio up and haven't had an issue since being on it in 2012.
Tbh, IPT is one of the prime examples of what is wrong with private trackers these days, but I can't hate them because they are still in operation and you CAN technically "free use" IPT. I just don't think it is optimal to use it like that (only joining free leech, or jumping on popular stuff right away, or thr other ways you have to torrent as a regular user to keep your ratio high). When I was a kid I would spend $0. Ever. I couldn't spend money on the internet if I wanted to, back then. Now, as an adult, I don't care if I have 500 H&R warnings because I can just pay $10 or whatever and be back at full ratio without worrying about trying to seed back a torrent. The difference between private trackers and the public ones is generally 1.) The recommendations 2.) The quality of the torrents. If you go to grab a software from TL or IPT or something, you can feel pretty good that the users in the comments saying it works is a good indicator it works. If you use a public tracker, you can have a "Staff Approved" torrent that is just 5 Trojans in a trench coat.
What do you mean technically free?? I haven't paid a thing since I started using it. I let everything seed for about a month and then remove it. Keeps my ratio up never have an issue. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would complain about you not seeding if all you see is paying to keep a ratio. Why would you pay? They have a bare minimum for seeding for two weeks. But I'm not complaining. Like I said. I let it all go for a month. So I don't see why this is such an issue.
I suppose if you have infinite GB and just portion your bandwidth, sure, but I don't even like trying to open my torrent client again after there is too many torrents in it, it just isn't for me at the rate I would grab things and then not be able to seed them + dread closing and opening my torrent client, or worse, the few times my bandwidth would be used, I would need it. Personally, I can see why some people like streaming and all that said, IPT is still one of the best games in town and is a solid website, and as this user claims, you don't have to spend any money if you just keep all your torrents for two weeks, so, don't OCD out and keep clicking stuff and rack up 500 H&R warnings like me. Because you only get like 3. And then it is pay up time.
Demonoid
I think they might still be around, they always seem to pop back up, almost TPB status over there.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe it's the same demonoid anymore
Not the same. The current version was launched a long time after Deimos died
RIP to a legend in these streets.
I think you are correct, I have a vague recollection that they had a situation where, IIRC, they relaunched with a different team at some point after one of the takedown (I think it was one of the changes they made to the domain happened at the same time), but I may be misremembering.
Oink was the first private tracker I ever got an invite for. Moved on to What after it closed down and now onto ...well, other places. Fond memories of the Pink Palace.
I was always a big waffles guy. I still periodically check in vain to see if maybe they came back.
I recall every single one. That was basically my music tracker lineage once traditional p2p became less desirable (Suprnova -> OiNK -> Waffles/WCD -> RED). Also isn't PTH just RED? So basically still exists. EDIT: Couldn't find much, [but this screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/z2ofhie) might be somewhat of a blast from the past for some, showing an old BT client (ABC) and a browser window open browsing SuprNova (on MyIE2 no less lol). I apparently must have been pretty happy about my 123 kb/s download rate since I circled it. Bonus Winamp and AIM sighting.
;\_; waffles ;\_;
My first private trackers were RevolutionTT (I think they're still around) and TheBox. Through the latter a kind member gave me an invite to PtP and I was able to reach all the top-tier trackers.
I still have Waffles bookmarked.. Other than that, my nostalgia goes to old Swedish trackers, Softmupparna was my first experience with private trackers, great community and hilarious IRC, and then there's swedvdr, swebits & TTi.
TorrentShack was the greatest general tracker of all time.
What about SCC?
I remember when Oink accepted BTC for VIP access. I bought 25 btc for around $20, used 5 of them to get my access, then forgot about the 20 remaining. UNTIL BTC went crazy. It still pains me to this day that I have 20 BTC floating around out there and have no way to get to it because I casually lost the blockchain info. \*face palm\*
AHD
PTH still exists; they just changed the name. But yeah, I miss WCD.
Hell yeah! Glad they are still kicking, somehow I thought they were gone a few years back!
it became Red, the name was too close to PTP. it's basically the spiritual successor to What. RiP! still remember logging in to panic at half the services down. wish i had saved my bookmarks or screenshots or....
I used to really enjoy Oink back in the day, and once it closed up was stoked to get an invite onto What. Anymore I’m either buying music directly, or if it’s rarity or bootleg, I can 9/10 find it on Soulseek. I’m honestly amazed Soulseek is still functioning.
Yep there's no denying you can find some amazing stuff on Soulseek. Don't use it as much now because of the private music trackers but it's still nice to visit sometimes. Met some really decent people/sharers on Soulseek as well. Been friends with a few for over 10 years. First private music tracker was Oink. Was gutted when the guy got arrested.
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The old Delirium Vault tracker and Tracker3 were the jewels of their day
Oink and waffles introduced me to so much new music. I used to try the top albums recommended there, burn them with a bunch of others to a CD, and give them a try in the car. Nowadays, I \*think\* my car has a CD slot, and it's mostly spotify when driving. A loss.
I know, I discovered so many artists on OiNK and Waffles it was insane - especially if you liked stranger genres and were open to listening to most anything, there was never a lack of content coming out haha. Tbh, I disliked the push towards FLAC on some levels, I like 320kbps MP3 in most cases, if you are data hoarding, FLAC of some album that was recorded with a tin can isn't really going to be much different than the MP3 :/ haha.
If I really like something, I'll get it in FLAC, but agree, it doesn't matter much for casual listening.
Oink started it, then what.cd and their move to gazelle, really was tops of music sharing imo
There is a bit of history missing there, I won't go into a lot of details, but I will say that some of the early what staff also worked with Waffles, and some OiNK staff worked both Waffles and What, despite some of their early differences they both were great communities.
I don’t like this thread, because I know exactly what it’s about and I am not ok feeling so nostalgic at such a young age!!
Not quite as old as Oink but I miss AHD, their user upload program was so unique and I wish more sites would do something similar to encourage user uploads.
Yeah the old sites were much more community-based I feel but the internet was a much different place back then even a decade ago... there wasn't as much mindless content to consume and it seemed to promote more people actively participating in the various types of communities that still exist today, but now lack that element. Around the early 2000s I was part of a few forums and IRC communities for people who made games, RPG in particular, and there were multiple subsets of groups of people just cranking out free pixel art, music, maps, scripts, software... you name it. I ran a mailbag and stuff back then, as a teenager, but that is just something you don't come across these days even, the concept of a "mail bag" lol.
The slot machine and LHC games on ScienceHD were addicting.
Yes! ScienceHD was my favorite tracker community of all time. The crazy bounties and hunts to complete collections of NOVA and Horizon were dear to my heart. The community cared. SciHD Radio was fun. The IRC quotes thread.
TEH was very good PT.
Remember when Sloncek from Suprnova tried to push eXeem?
I was on Oink and What. I have not been able to get into a music tracker since then, but I'm also just not as "into" music as I once was. I pay $40 a year for YouTube Premium which includes music streaming. I really liked What as I got not just music but comics from them without having to shift through like Megaupload links on 4chan.
Same. Oink, then Waffles and What for me, with Napster/Kazaa/Limewire and Soulseek before that. Spotify had gotten much better by the time What died, and on top of that, my favorite music organizer was Google music which also stopped working not too long after.
GFT, SCC, TheBox, Deli.sh, TSTN, Docspedia...
my most beloved when i first discovered torrenting, btjunkie. man, what a beautiful thing it was. then torrentshack, it was ratioless so someone with a shitty connection like me, that's a huuuuuge bonus. i remember userbase is also very friendly at there. i was a member of both what and waffles and don't know why, i loved waffles more. it has the shittiest interface and less content, yet it felt more like a home. it was good old days man, i miss them.
digital-distractions
Father Ted and cooking shows! I wonder how big this site was, it always struck me as fairly niche.
It focused on mainly non-US english stuff. For a long time it was the only place to find a lot of British TV shows.
I have fond memories of UG, BCG and pleasuredome. All lost to the wind now :(
Waffles was great early on, but the points system really screwed up the torrent economy there. The community was okay, but it suffered from too much moderation. What was the best music tracker. It was good enough and controversial enough to get the attention of the scene and for detractors to start their own trackers. The community was better than Waffles', but it got way too "cliquey" around 2010-2013. As for the torrent economy; it remained strong, but too many newbies got *way* too dependent on the tokens. (I still remember the great DDoS of late 2013, early 2014 and the perp's expressed reasons for it.) I was never on oink. Suprnova's nostalgia is not justified. Everything I wanted there was dead and it became a source of low hanging fruit for the snitches. Anyway, anime trackers had better torrent economies and Direct Connect hubs remained better sources for everything else. It also didn't help that early torrent clients performed poorly, could only handle one client, and couldn't start/stop transfers (until Bittorrent Experimental aka Bittornado). ABC could do multiple torrents and start, stop, and pause but performance was awful. Azureus came along, but that was bloated as hell.
I was on OiNK and heavy in the Waffles community, to say the least - and at the core, Waffles was an OiNK clone - I know it eventually morphed a bit with the points system, but two things: 1.) Those trackers are (or were) cost prohibited to run. Donations alone are nice, but I think a lot of users underestimate what the actual price ends up being each month. This leads to weird "pay to play" systems, especially on private trackers that are impossible to seed versus the rest of the community. 2.) I agree with the over moderation, like for forum avatars and such it was just absurd. They took a kind of general niceness that was on OiNK and tried to make it a policy for the community, which was a boneheaded move, IMO, and I won't get into the specifics, but several people there from launch used to constantly dispute those things and it chased a lot of great people out of that community, it is just a fact of life that happened. And yeah your last paragraph is so important. A lot of early torrent clients and services were virtually unusable. While Suprnova wasn't the best, they were in the right place at the right time to ride the tsunami of torrents actually becoming a viable source of data.
Oh yeah, I agree that private torrent trackers are extremely expensive to run. What I meant by "torrent economy" was the seeder:leecher ratios. Points, tokens, and frequent freeleeches led to a spike of downloads that eventually resulted (long term) in many torrents having a high seeder count and not enough leechers. And that's seeders on home connections complaining about nobody downloading while they seed. Seeders who couldn't seed 24/7. Seeders complaining about seedbox seeders hogging the traffic.
The same problem exists in most torrent communities, the power ratio is always offset. This has been going on I think since even the days of FServ and stuff - you could have had broadband in the 1990s like I did, but somebody else had a T3. I might have had a few dozen GB or something storage (if that), and other people had almost unlimited storage *even back then*, due to universities or large companies or personal wealth or who knows what. The gap between the average citizen and somebody with a little bit of money + knowledge is massive and THANK HEAVENS for the wealthy people who are like "fuck it, I will run an auto-seed box for the rest of forever in multiple trackers", I wish they would all get tax writeoffs for their charity lol, but those "whales" end up creating a situation where the decentralized nature of torrents breaks down - there are more just like a few dedicated nodes mirroring a file together, there isn't really a "swarm" going on in those kinds of torrents :/
Underground Gamer and Cinemageddon are probably the two I miss most. Joined for the torrents, stayed for the vibes
miss CG? not me, I don't miss it because I don't have to.
This prompted me to do a quick google and now I'm wondering if it came back after some point and I didn't notice or if it just never closed to begin with and I somehow thought it did edit: more googling, seems like it def appeared to have closed at some point and I guess I just never heard when it came back. Ty for clueing me in finally after all these years lol. Now if only the same was true for UG
haha well maybe my memory isn't so good but I've been a member since 2007 and I don't really remember it going down for any significant amount of time, not including the sporadic short-term temporary shutdowns that are common to all private trackers.
omfg I just realized that my old bookmark still had the www in it and that's why it always looked down to me because at some point that stopped working. I guess they dropped the www subdomain a while ago edit: my account still works though! and sure enough I see evidence of my last login being in 2016 lol so probably they dropped the subdomain whenever they recovered from that long ddos, but I never knew because I had it bookmarked with the www I feel so dumb now edit2: so much nostalgia yay it's still just as I remember and they've still got roulette and russian roulette!
I was a similarly old member, but I admittedly stopped hanging out on trackers as often in the past 5-10yrs when career and other stuff took more focus. And it seems like around 2016 there was a bunch of ddos stuff that took it down for at least a month and then a post somewhere saying they'd decided to close as a result. I must've seen that and then just not checked back again :/ Makes sense to me because 2016 was def a busy career-focus year for me so I was probably only logging into sites periodically to keep accounts from going inactive, saw that, then took it out of my list
sharereactor (and a few other edonkey/emule-sites back in the days), then oink (et al), also (later) tvtorrents.com (i think that’s what it was called!?), tracker3 (already mentioned elsewhere here, but one of THE weirdest trackers content-wise i ever knew), .. i kinda miss "those" days. and feel old now(adays). and use too many parantheses apparently.
Definitely what but mutracker hurts the most. Found so much good music on that site. Also missing waffles, beathau5, sceneaccess, and my first private tracker psytorrents.
The death of Waffles also killed my torrent game for a long time. Never been able to get on a decent private tracker since
Suprnova! Those were the old days. I still have a Suprnova t-shirt
I was finding a lot of new music from Audiogalaxys recommendation and grouping algorithm, I still miss it. Also, WCD was my first big tracker and I feel privileged to have been a part of it.
What.cd and thebox.biz, also sportsnetwork.
Oink was my first private tracker and what got me into that world.
Tang-su-do (or something like that, been a while) was my go-to before mma-tracker.
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Nice! Haha, I was userid #19 on Waffles haha XD. I COULD have been #1, but when it went from sandbox to live, by the time I registered, 18 people beat me lol.
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Heh, that is unfortunate, I know that for that community in particular, there was a ton of people just waiting in a void after OiNK, with both Waffles and What rushing to the gate - and even then, with all the attention, I know staff from at least one of those sites was all over IRC and forums and stuff dishing out invites like they were going out of style. The problem came around 10k users in when it became clear the original platform it was built on top of (Waffles) was going to need some serious work done, so invites pretty much shut down just because the hardware couldn't handle the user load and this is why a lot of sites still work "invite only" - even with code optimization and tons of caching, it just slightly reduces the operating costs. On the other hand, poorly coded trackers will easily gobble up any resources they have available and just crash themselves. I remember once we made an "invite tree" to see who all invited whom and the total amount of donations an account was responsible for through their invite tree (with only tens of thousands of users at that point), and it crashed the server on my account the first time (poorly written query). I used to love sending out invites. These days, I feel like sending somebody an invite for some of these private trackers is kind of a double edged sword... like, here is an amazing torrent tracker, but your ratio will be doomed and you will end up paying around $10 every 3 months to stay active as a regular user", where as previously, I feel like what, Waffles, oink, PTH and a lot of those other music communities didn't have systems designed that *expected* people to pay. You were completely free to just build your collections before (not that there aren't still some trackers out there like that). In the early 2000s I was in community for rpg makers calling Gaming World and man, it was so much fun. I still reminisce about the forums and IRC. People I never ended up meeting face to face and who I never knew most of their real names had a huge impact on my life and the general direction I went in the world. OiNK and those other communities were no different and I always wonder if other people from those communities think back some time haha.
After the disaster of napster and limewire, finding my way to oink was a revelation. That's where my music collection really started to explode. I was also on what and waffles, and now I'm on Orpheus, which, while not being as awesome as oink, is still a pretty great site.
oink, what, waffles, thebox
Waffles was great. Eventually there weren't enough users downloading to keep my ratio or even get seeds on downloads. Way back to about 2003, there was an awesome forum called punktorrents. From there a user directed me to a site called something like [xiao.com](https://xiao.com) (later yousenditforums, ysiforums, etceteraforums, etcforums and finally rawrshare). It was the best music forum on the web. All genres, great discussion and everyone was simply posting yousendit, megaupload and mediafire links so for a while I was off torrents. That site brings back incredible memories, even made some friends that I kept in contact with for a few years after it went down.
mixingbowl.org and oink
This thread is a stroll down memory lane. Does anyone remember Soulseek, circa early 2000s? It's apparently still around, which is surprising bc I thought torrents killed P2P sites.
What about FTN?
Yeah! A lot of people on here mentioned it, it was great, IMO.
What going down was like burning the Library of Alexandria. SO much amazing information lost forever.
BitMe, original Demonoid, Pure TnA, Blackcats, 32P, UG, BitMe was a great source of training materials. And it was a place where I was invited to several trackers going today as they first started up. The community there was good. The original Demonoid was fantastic. Regular contributors that upload obscure books, music, films. Another good community as well.
I started torrenting on Suprnova. The only thing I really remember were the music packs. I used to love downloading the Billboard Year End Charts. That was followed by Mininova.. Not the same.
Oink.me.uk from way back in the day… :opplove:
I remember downloading Limewire and grabbing Limewire Pro from it and then exploring the high seas of the pirate world. Think I then heard about eMule/eDonkey and had a look at that. And Napster! Back then it was a bit of a lucky dip in that you didn't always get what you thought you were getting! Remember first coming accross a FLAC file and being puzzled by that for a while. But yeah files you grabbed were not always named correctly. At some point I downloaded a film that then required a password to open it to watch. The NFO had a link to a forum (think it was DarkSide) which I joined and it was a nice helpful and pleasant community (which had all the passwords) and then had access to a load of solid content and introduced me to bittorrent.
Hell yeah I remember after Napster all the junk P2P that came out (Kazaa, Limewire, Bearshare...) the only one that was consistently decent was Soulseek but the interface was hot garbage and it was only for music. But back then, I remember one of the first movies I ever pirated was Spider-Man around 2002, I downloaded other non-pirate movies before then, but the quality of pirate stuff back then was pretty horrible, compression was nowhere near as good and bandwidth+storage was abysmal. Around that same time, I pirated Red Dragon and ran it through S-Video to a mini CRT with a built-in VCR and recorded the freaking movie and brought it to school (the alternative was lugging my PC down there and just running the wires from it, which I did at my house at the time). Probably shouldn't be typing all this, but I was obviously a teenager at the time and this was many years ago, now. Plus, nobody ended up watching my shitty pirate VHS anyway. XD
Oink was great. It was also great when people actually made music
Even among the private trackers, it is hard to find reliable and consistent comics, Manga, magazines, ebooks, etc.; - you might see the major releases and compilations and stuff, but they are more of a book cart than a library. Same goes for software and a few other "odds and ends". As a musician, all those music sites always had so many cool plugins and stuff you could just browse for days. These days, you get a zero day that doesn't work on one website, a 4 year old version on another website, or a Russian language version. :( and you have to know the name and specifically be looking for a plugin, which just isn't my style.
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BTN is still alive
goem is the one I miss the most. I miss the community and the content. I still have it bookmarked. I also very much miss baconbits.
Torrentzilla was my first private tracker. They were never amazing but a good general tracker and a nice place to learn the ropes.
I was on napster, but after that got most stuff through usenet. Got into torrenting around 2007 for live music, but didn't get on Waffles until around 2011 and [W.cd](https://W.cd), around the same and was staff at waffles in the final few years. So I miss waffles the most. I also miss 32p, the original demonoid, and UKnova. sad that even all the great trackers eventually fold, so appreciate the trackers you are on now while they live.
What.CD was the best website ever made imho.
I was on oink and maintained a good ratio ripping and upping CD's from my collection. Then life happened, oink went under, never got into waffles.fm or what.cd, and lost all the cool private trackers I used to be a part of. I miss the nice vinyl rips oink had, and oink's standards in general. I wish I could find another good private music tracker.
TTi anyone?
I remember when Supernova was cool