There are two kind of Bittorrent trackers - public and private. Public
trackers are the really famous ones like Mininova, Piratebay etc. Private
trackers are - by there very nature - much smaller (in terms of number of
users) however they really are the most effective way to use Torrents.
Basically they are trackers for which you have to register. When you
register you have a ratio of 0.00. They usually have a grace period (well
data transfer quantity) during which you have to get a decent ratio. For
example, they may say that once you download more than 2GB you must have a
ratio no lower than 0.4. They usually expect you to have a ratio of at least
1 - if you look at most users they will have a ratio > 1. If you continue to
break their ratio demands and leech like fuck (e.g download 20GB and upload
100 MB) they will delete/suspend your account. Sometimes they just suspend
you download ability... sometimes they restrict how new the torrents you
download are (e.g. you can only download torrents more than 3 days old).
Really clever stuff and means that everyone seeds, no-one leaches and you
can get super fast download speeds.
There are private trackers for just about every area of interest -
mainstream movies, e-books, music videos, electronic music mixes, UK-based
non commercial TV programmes, football matches, warez, porn etc.. Some are
legal, some are semi-legal (i.e. technically copyright infringement
justified by certain restrictions) and some are blatantly illegal.
The problem with some of the really good ones is getting into them. Often
they restrict the membership size and you can only join during open sign-up
windows or via an invite. I've been waiting to join
BitMe.org for about a
year and not been able to.
Another minor problem sometimes is actually getting a good ratio. Because
everyone seeds, supply exceeds demand and no-one wants/needs to download
from you.
If you want a few recommendations, get my addy off Marco and email me.
