BitMeTV Implements a ‘Global Ban’ of Romania

December 31, 2009 by sharky

Chalk up another private tracker that brought out the banhammer against Romania. Two months ago, BitMeTV issued a warning to their Romanian users of a possible "global ban". Consider this to be some sort of "trial period" in which if Romanians didn’t clean up their act, further action would be implemented. Yesterday, BitMeTV made good on their threat, and has now globally banned Romania from the tracker - albeit this ban is only temporary (for now).

BitMeTV’s ‘Mass PM’ sent out on October 27th, 2009:

ROMANIA:

 

For some time now we have been flooded with account stealing and ratio cheating largely from Romania.

Most of Romania have fiber connections, so we do not understand why the rule breaking has been so MASSIVE from this country.

Sure there are also some great Romanian members but the amount of account theft and cheating going on is far outweighing the good members.

 

THIS IS A WARNING.

 

This needs to STOP or we will have to take further action on a more global scale.

This time around, there was no ’site announcement’ or mass PMs sent out to Romanian members (or anyone else, for that matter). It was quietly added on December 30th into a thread entitled "Romania Issue" on BMTV’s forums:

Romania has now been banned but exceptions can be made for Static IP’s.

 

This Ban unfortunately had to happen but it may only be a temporary measure to show that we were serious.

 

So don’t just vanish and think you can never come back :)

Here’s the browser message that Romanian users are seeing now:

Forbidden

 

You don’t have permission to access /browse.php on this server.

 

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

The reality is; that this is just another preliminary step towards applying a full permanent global ban on Romanian users, once and for all. BMTV is simply doing it in stages - as opposed to applying the ban in one fell swoop [first, a warning - next, a temporary ban - lastly (yet to be announced), an imminent global ban].

According to nkfy.blogspot - more than 80% of cheaters on BitmeTV are Romanians, and that 65% of all Romanian torrenters are considered bad members (we’re not sure how or where they acquired the stats for that last part, but we’ll go along with it).

After doing some investigation in BitMeTV’s IRC help channel, it turns out that this "global ban" is set to last for at least a week, if not longer. All Romanian members who join BMTV’s help channel receive this information:

Again, exceptions can be made for those who have a static IP, or for those who own a dedicated server (seedbox) and are able to access their BMTV account through it. More info can be found on BMTV’s IRC help channels:

• irc.bitmetv.org/#bitmetv.help (hotlink) or:

• irc.lostirc.org/#bitmetv.help (hotlink)

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