January 12, 2009 by sharky
We could only speculate on the future for FunFile.org, albeit it would appear somewhat dim. Absentee ownership; the last-minute cancellation of the highly-anticipated CDN, squandered funds, and the recent mutiny (and not-so-recent) of members & staff departures alike, have at the very least, spurned some incredible new private trackers - overall, this is good news for the BitTorrent community.
One thing that FunFile has taught us is that we shouldn’t feel bullied into donating to a private tracker. As a torrenter, it is not your job to assure that the site is properly monetized. The alternative is to just go elsewhere. Which is exactly what these ex-FunFile staff members & uploaders did, by starting up their own private trackers.
PreToMe.net
PreToMe… At A Glance
- — Tracker Type: 0day/general tracker.
- — Adult Torrents? - Yes, but set to "Off" by default. Users will need to put a checkmark to Allow Adult Content in their profile.
- — SeedBonus - PreToMe uses a credit (SeedBonus) system, whereby credits are awarded for seeding criteria (upload speed and time-based). Credits can be used to gamble in the casino, request torrents, pay off HnRs, buy VIP status, purchase upload GBs, buy invites, get a webmail account, and several other useful things. You can get credits by seeding torrents you download, donating, winning in the casino, uploading torrents (if you are an approved uploader) or idling in their main IRC channel, #pretome, for which you will receive .5 credit per hour.
- — Slots - New members have just two concurrent download slots. However, all new members start out with 100 credits, in which additional download slots can be purchased (the first one costs just 25 credits, all others are 250 credits).
- — Download speeds - Recently, speeds have improved drastically. DL speeds in our tests are usually between 300 and 600 KB/s (on a 1.0 MB connection).
- — Pre-Times - Very fast. TV release pretimes are usually between 1 and 4 minutes. Movies; anywhere from minutes to hours.
- — Ratio-free? Essentially, PreToMe is a ratio-free tracker, as there’s no global (overall) ratio. The seed rules comprise of seeding a torrent for 60 hours or attain a 0.75 ratio on the torrent. Failure to meet one of these criteria will result in a Hit & Run.
PreToMe vs. FunFile
| PreToMe | FunFile | |
| Active Torrents: | 6,530 | 7,643 |
| ‘Scene’ Torrents (Active): | 4,491 | 3,646 |
| Adult Torrents? | Yes (454) | No |
| Registered Users: | 19,623 | 24,196 |
| Max. Users: | 25,000 | 50,000 |
| Open Registration? | Yes* | No** |
| Users Online Last 24 Hours: | 6,349 | 9,258 |
| Online Since: | 05/16/08 | 10/11/06 |
| Alexa Rank: | 43,390  |
27,537  |
* PreToMe is actually a closed community now. However, you can still sign up using the link below (we’ve heard this ‘key’ is valid until January 23rd):
http://pretome.net/signup.php?key=36189347c93bf584e7c604ef5d1933f0
** FunFile often has open registration, but not at last check.
The Iota Project
Almost everything at TheIotaProject is considered ’scene’ or ‘P2P’ releases, and members are not directly allowed to upload torrents. Currently there’s 1,600 members at TiP, sharing over 200 active torrents. Registration is currently open:
— http://theiotaproject.org/signup.php
SceneRace.net
— http://scenerace.net/register.php
SceneRace Quote: "…everyone hates a site that moans about money… especially one that hides where that money goes."
As you may have guessed from the name, ScR is a 0day scene tracker. Pretimes are announced under each torrent listing, and currently all torrents are freeleech. We don’t suspect they’ll have a difficult time finding uploaders, as they’ve added 50 new torrents in the past 36 hours alone. SceneRace uses What.cd’s ever-popular Gazelle codebase, and there’s even talk of it becoming a ratio-free tracker.
SceneRace vs. FunFile
The following is SceneRace’s side of the story as to why the FunFile uploaders were banned:
braidN got in a personal conflict with another Funfile Uploader named spankkie inside of their IRC channel “thedome”… fully established as an almost entirely rule-less channel. It got dirty fast, and braidN reported to (another tracker) staff that spankkie was stealing their torrents (since he was) and spankkie a warning (afaik a verbal warning, not even the site mark thing). spankkie ran crying to FF’s staff, and Funfile banned braidN, Camedwardo, and spaceship9. The latter 2 were officially banned simply for being associated with braidN.
braidN was accused of lying to FF staff and covering up that he reported spankkie, a classic screwed-if-you-do [tell the truth], screwed-if-you-don’t [tell the truth] situation. FF threatened to report him to other sites for “stealing content” even though he has gained FTP access in recent times. FF likes to claim they wouldn’t have banned him if he told the truth, but everyone knows that he’d have been banned either way.
Ban reason for us is “troublemakers and abusers.”, so our theory is they’re just using the braidN situation as an excuse to ban us since we were quite outspoken against l0ckd0wn and the general CDN topic. We collectively started an uploaders strike with the other scene content uploaders when the CDN date was passed in December which lasted several days, until staff were forced to start uploading. spankkie was initially part of the strike but returned to uploading from staff “pressure”. Since then pretty much all the fast uploaders have left Funfile. braidN started uploading again about a week before the bans happened, but other then him spankkie was practically the only remaining non-staff scene content uploader on FF.
No rules were ever broken by anyone on our side of the battle (something even several of the less corrupt staff have admitted to us), and we’ve never been charged of any crimes.
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