An Interview with TorrentLeech - A Living BT Legend

November 23, 2009 by sharky

Demonoid aside, few will contest that TorrentLeech.org is the most successful & popular English private tracker of all time. Coveted by millions and enjoyed by 180,000 - TL’s enormous fame is widespread - here’s a tracker that lives up to the hype. FileShareFreak caught up with w00t, the owner/SysOp of TorrentLeech, who was kind enough to share with us some of the inner workings of one of BitTorrent’s greatest success stories. Not to be missed; we’ve got some interesting info, exclusive stats & history, and what’s in store for the future of TorrentLeech.

TorrentLeech: The Early Days

Sharky: What prompted you to start up a small private tracker by the name of TorrentLeech, and when?

w00t: TorrentLeech was never really planned beforehand, but the idea for TL came to me back in mid-December of 2004. By January 9th, 2005 we were online.

First Two Months — Like most private trackers, TorrentLeech was initially ‘open registration’ to anyone wanting to sign up. In their first two weeks, on January 25th 2005 TL had already amassed 4,629 members sharing just 159 torrents. Word of mouth spread fast; and just two weeks later TL had achieved 17,736 members with 300 indexed torrents. By March 2nd - after being online for just 7 weeks now, TorrentLeech hit the 40K user milestone (& 383 torrents) and temporarily closed registration for a few days to do a server upgrade. Can you imagine a tracker with 40,000 users and less than 400 torrents? Ah, this was certainly the golden age of private trackers. Since the very beginning, TL was offering monthly prize draws for random VIP members; a tradition that still exists to this very day.

Three Months — After just 3 months there were 67,000 members and still fewer than 400 total torrents. By now, their ratio system was fully implemented, forums were online, and they added slot/wait restrictions (24h on new torrents) to thwart the growing problem of Hit & Runners from new members. Not that they had a problem with available seeders, since on April 11th TorrentLeech had just 382 torrents with 8,878 total seeders (that’s a whopping 23 seeds per torrent!).

Four - Six Months — Online for just 4 months, TL listed 82,674 members. One month later after doing some cleanup of inactive members, they trimmed it down to ‘just’ 73,118 (with 620 torrents) and on their 6-month anniversary, TL’s stats were 70,647 users with 787 torrents. This is also around the time that they began to limit registration (aspiring members who weren’t able to sign up could always check back later). By now, TL’s FLS team was streamlined with multi-language support, the invite system had been fully implemented, and they even opened a help channel (#tlhelp) to go along with #torrentleech in their own IRC network (irc.torrentleech.org:7011).

On September 29th 2005, nearly 10 full months after first opening the door, public registration was closed. One year later, TL totally redesigned the site & logo which resembles how it appears today.

Up Close & Personal with w00t from TorrentLeech

Ed. Note: w00t is one of the most personable and approachable sysops that exist in all of BitTorrent. He’s just a regular guy that happens to run an iconic tracker, and can often be found chatting with regular members in IRC, handing out invites and whatnot.

Sharky: Congratulations for turning TorrentLeech into one of the best trackers around. How many people does it take to keep everything running smoothly?

w00t: Thanks! TL has 400 staff members, 90% of them are FLS (Front Line Support), the rest are moderators, mostly.

Sharky: What about uploaders? With so much new content coming in every day, how many dedicated uploaders does it take to keep a constant stream of fresh torrents?

w00t: We have 156 uploaders.

Sharky: That’s crazy! There’s been a lot of trash-talk that TL’s uploaders rip off releases from other scene trackers. Is this true?

w00t: Not at all. All of our uppers are obligated to have their own axx, and that doesn’t include accounts at other trackers. Uploaders MUST possess their own scene axx, or else are not allowed to upload here. The only exception to this rule is for TL internal rippers and non-scene groups (DEViSE, FLAWL3SS, ViSiON, etc) who do not require their own scene access to upload.

Sharky: Thanks for laying that to rest. OK, aside from your uploaders does TL have its own scene axx?

w00t: Absolutely. We race everything, but our strongpoint is for XviDs and Games (PC, Console, etc) - non-spam releases.

Sharky: I notice that TL has some nice daily 0Day apps packs.

w00t: LOL, I started that whole thing when I was an uploader for another site before TL was even around. I was the first guy ever who upped 0day appz and 0day mp3 packs.

Sharky: Now, with all that - the sceneaxx, the uploaders with axx - it’s well-known that TL is quite competitive for pretimes. How come you don’t publish the pretimes along with the torrents?

w00t: We don’t put pretimes on the releases, since we’re not trying to compete directly with other trackers. It just looks like bling-bling. ScT has a purpose, SCC has a purpose, even Demonoid. And of course, TL has a distinct purpose. I still believe that people who care about pretimes don’t "play" with torrents. And for me, even if I leech the latest Heroes or House episode 20 seconds after pre or 2 mins after pre makes no difference. Putting "upped xx time after pre" brings unnecessary attention (from other trackers), and that’s the last thing we want. I’m not even sure why other trackers see us as a "threat".

Sharky: That’s because you’re unbelievably popular. Speaking of popular, how come TL doesn’t carry any adult torrents.

w00t: We used to. Actually, way back then we deceided to keep TorrentLeech a family and work-safe site, thus the creation of PussyTorrents.org (which has always open registrations) for our… mature friends. :)

Sharky: That must make it easier on TorrentLeech, no?

w00t: Not really, now it’s 2x the trouble, haha. It’s not the same staff on PT; if it were it would seem like work - monitoring two sites instead of one (more admins, staff etc), and TorrentLeech is just a hobby. For fun, y’know.

Sharky: You may have noticed I recently wrote that TL’s VIP status could be better - any thoughts?

w00t: VIP members bypass the slot restrictions & wait times on new torrents - something that we originally introduced to stop the problems with H&Rs. Donations are the foundation for our growth, the reason we’re able to host TL on so many servers. But VIPs also get free webhosting from centelia.net (the economy package) for three months, or for however long you’re VIP at TL. After you donate to TL, just click the "activate my webhosting" button and Centelia will email you the login details to your shared hosting. If you renew your VIP, your webhosting also gets renewed, so it’s like you’re getting the VIP for free (or webhosting for free), depending on how you look at it.

Sharky: What about the monthly draws? I’ve seen some nice prizes handed out.

w00t: Yeah there’s also our monthly draws - chosen randomly (really!) from our VIP members - for real prizes to be won. PS3’s, XBOX-360’s, digital cameras, video cards etc. Donators, VIPs are automatically added into the draw, as well as a lottery. Unlike other sites, we really DO give the gifts.

Sharky: Some have considered that TL is a pay-to-leech site because of the donations.

w00t: I’m not in it for the money. As long as the servers are paid for at the end of the month, that’s all I ask. Just as long as I’m not paying out of my own pocket, I’m happy. We’ve never asked for donations, we don’t mass PM members begging for donations. If you can help out - great. If not, just enjoy the site anyways!

Sharky: I can’t help but notice that ’site stats’ are not published at TL. Could you provide some internal info?

w00t: Sure. As you probably know, we have about 180,000 members - and over 800K total peers. We should be able to cross 1 million peers in 2010. Current stats — Peers: 816,500 (Seeders 749,270 - Leechers 67,230 - Seeder/leecher ratio (%) 1114).

Sharky: That’s some big numbers! I’ve noticed that when compared to other trackers, TorrentLeech members tend to stay there. Obviously, membership at TL is cherished and users aren’t so easily persuaded into giving up on their accounts. Since the beginning, how many members have you had in total?

w00t: Since 2005, we’ve had 843,119 users signup and confirm their accounts at TL. Compare that to PussyTorrents where we have 321,354 users and a total of 1,279,543 people have signed up, but that’s pr0n, a totally different story.

Sharky: May we ask if you ban specific countries from TorrentLeech?

w00t: We’re probably one of the only major trackers that doesn’t ban Romania or other country IPs. Certain IP ranges might be banned (which I won’t elaborate on) but not entire countries, no.

Sharky: What about invites? I can’t seem to figure out how you opt to give out invites to qualified members.

w00t: We give invites to PUs (Power Users) from time to time, usually one a month. VIPs are given two each month, and also when initially donating they receive two invites.

Sharky: We’ve seen some recent opportunities for non-members to get into TL from IRC invites. How successful is that?

w00t: Our last major "IRC invite" promo brought in 17,000+ members in less than 48 hours. Of those, 14,000 are still members here; something that we’re happy to see.

Sharky: I can see that you don’t exactly announce that you’ll be doing the IRC invites (or need to). Are you planning on doing this promotion again anytime soon? And if so, when?

w00t: I’m waiting to see what’s happening with Demonoid. If they’re down for a third-straight month, we may open the invites via IRC again to gather people from there. So yeah, it could be real soon! I’ll try to give you a headsup on it.

Sharky: There’s been some rumours that TL may include SSL. Any truth to it?

w00t: It’s not going to happen on either the site or the tracker. No tracker can support SSL with more than 1 million peers anyways. And for the site, a SSH tunnel must be created for each and every connection or request. We’re not a site that has a 20K user database, we have 180K active members. HTTPS would take an enormous amount of resources.

Sharky: Any future plans for TL?

w00t: Oh yeah, something we’re all very excited about - but I won’t reveal what it is just yet. If you’re a member, you’ll notice some big changes coming soon!

Sharky: I’d just like to say a huge thankyou for the informative details. Truth be told, TL is my most-used private tracker - one that I visit every single day. I wish you, personally and TorrentLeech, all the best in the future. Keep up the great work!

w00t: Thanks! TL is truly one big family with great members. If not for our members, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

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