April 28, 2009 by sharky
• http://www.thepiratesociety.org/register.php
Things have really changed from when we first reviewed TPS two weeks after launching. Since then, many more Community Reps have joined up offering recruitment to their own trackers (there’s now 92 CRs in the Rep Deck), tracker reviews are exceptionally well-detailed (and total in at an impressive 266), and the ever-popular seedbox reviews/offers are honest and thorough. At any particular time there’s upwards of 100 active members in their main IRC channel where new invite giveaway threads are announced, as well as the latest P2P news.
TPS may just be the busiest place around for tracker invites & requests, which is why they’ve recently added "tags" to help organize the giveaways. Shown below, members can click on the green tags to arrange giveaways by available tracker genres.
TPS - From Humble Beginnings…
The following is an excerpt from skindoggi, a Dark Pirate at ThePirateSociety.
TPS was conceived on 7-July 2008 by N3v3R. The first decision to make was a name for the forum. He narrowed it down to two choices - The Pirate Society, and The Pirate Union. Obviously, the first was chosen, "not sure why but it seemed to flow much better".
While there were already a number of similar forums out there, N3v3R felt that these forums were suited more for those people who were experienced BitTorrent users already, and the newer users, rather than being helped, were being ridiculed by the rest. "The goal from day one was to gather a mature, helpful, and fair staff for the members and also the trackers." - N3v3R.
To achieve this goal, TPS became possibly the first forum around to respect the wishes of trackers. Trading was strictly prohibited from the beginning, as was the selling of invites. The recruitment of Community Reps began. We got our first active Community Rep (BeYonD) around two weeks after opening, and as of this moment we have 92 Community Reps.
The first post came on 8-July 2008. After the first day, the site grew to 9 members, so understandably it was a little less quiet than it is currently. But word caught on, and members did some serious recruiting.
The Rules
From the start, TPS has been a non-trading community. However, there have been a huge number of rule changes (as outlined here), which make TPS what it is today. When TPS started, the ‘tracker levels’ system seemed to be the bible to most private tracker users. TPS went with the flow, and accordingly, one of our rules was something like:
- New Recruits can request trackers in levels 1-4
- Captains can request trackers in levels 1-7
- Dark Pirates can request trackers in levels 1-10
For a while, there was talk of development of a new levels system to work better for the Captain/Dark Pirate format we had. Not long after however, it was realized that tracker levels were designed for traders, and TPS possibly led the way by shunning the ‘tracker levels’ system around the end of July. The rules were changed so that only Captains and above could request sites such as ScT and FTN. This meant that the level of ridiculous requests was kept at a minimum, and also steered clear of the levels system.
From the early days, the list of No-Movement Trackers has kept the more ’secret’ private trackers off our backs. The list is what differentiates TPS from other invite forums. If a tracker doesn’t want their invites to be offered on TPS, then they just PM one of the staff members here, and get added to the No-Movement list immediately and without question. There has been some complaining by members in the past that the No-Movement list is getting too big, but it is the backbone of TPS, and is what separates us from other forums. It is also the reason there are 92 Community Reps here, and a huge number of recruitment threads.
The Contests
The first contest began 10 days after the opening of TPS. The prize was promotion to Captain. The end of the thread was lost in the crash in October (see below), but there were a number of promotions to Captain, and it really got the site active. The second contest was to encourage people to invite others to the site. The prizes were huge:
- 1st - 500 GB HD, 2 weeks seedbox axx + captain
- 2nd - 2 weeks of seedbox axx + captain
- 3rd - 1 week of seedbox axx + captain and 4-10 captain
The lure of the prizes got a lot of people coming to the site as well as sending invites, so the number of members sky rocketed over the period of the August/September contest.
Since then, there have been a few other contests. The "give me piracy or give me death" slogan you see on the banner is the result of a contest. In March 2009, a contest ran for a week in an attempt to get people into IRC. In the early days (July-October 2008) the max IRC users would usually be around 20-30, but during the contest I think we got to around 112. The winners were announced, one gaining Captain status and the others gaining rep. Subsequently the first and second place-getters have been promoted to Interview Moderators, so the contest was a major success.
The Server
The site has grown significantly since July 2008. With new members comes more strain on the server. The first server upgrade was on 23 July 2008. Before the upgrade, it was running quite slowly because of the chatbox and the arcade, which had to be taken down to speed up the forum. The site was down for a few hours, and came back up along with the chatbox and arcade. A few weeks later, the huge number of invites being sent out for the contest meant the chatbox and arcade had to be taken down again. At the end of September, the second server upgrade was done.
At the start of October, signups were closed and we went invite only for the first time. Everything went pretty smoothly, and by 19 October we had well over 2,000 members. But on 19 October 2008 the server crashed and all of the data was lost. That week was a huge week in IRC, as most people went there to find out why their beloved TPS wasn’t working. Staff remained optimistic and wouldn’t say exactly how much was lost.
On 25 October the site came back up. The logo had been updated, and we had a new front page - the same one that is there today. However, due to a mix-up between staff, the last backup that had been taken was 23 July 2008 - just over two weeks after the site had been opened. Thousands of threads and tens of thousands of posts were lost, and thousands of members had lost their accounts. Some people were lucky - those that joined before 23 July still had their accounts, but had lost a significant number of posts and reps in most cases. Signups were reopened, and people had to rejoin TPS. There was an Appeals Thread which was used to get member’s post and rep counts fixed.
Most people were shocked and a number of angry people didn’t come back, stating that there are better forums out there. However, those who did come back were the ones who were dedicated to TPS. There were over 500 signups within the next few days. This data loss even consumed some of the moderator’s accounts. However, this only made TPS stronger, and with the staff always learning from their mistakes, we haven’t seen another large data loss since.
In January, there was a little bit of downtime, as the membership base had outgrown what the server could handle. The chatbox disappeared for a while to compensate, but another server upgrade means that now the chatbox and arcade can run and the server can handle the thousands of members simultaneously.
The Staff
Obviously, the first staff member here was N3v3R, the creator of TPS. bmick was a good friend of N3v3R’s from P2PTalk. The other staff (except for Danmaxito) joined TPS and started off just like everyone else. Soopy and T3 were brought on as staff quite early, but I still remember their days as New Recruits. Beagle spent quite some time as a Shipmate before making the transition to Moderator, and later to admin.
One story I remember is about JTM, who is now one of the Admins here. JTM was just an active New Recruit, until one day he came up against N3v3R in a Gator Hop tournament in the Arcade. N3v3R got a huge score, and Soopy said something like "+rep if you beat that score", and then N3v3R said "forget the +rep, if you beat that I’ll make you Captain". With the added incentive, JTM beat N3v3R’s score and true to his word, N3v3R made him Captain. Soon after that he was made a mod, and later an admin.
The Future
Sometime in the near (or maybe far) future we will see TPSv2, which promises to be an improvement on the current design and functionality of the forum. Lately, the site has been improving anyway, with new concepts such as TPS Seedboxes. There is an exciting future ahead for TPS, so stick around and watch as history unfolds.
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