Find Private Trackers with Open Signups: A Review of ‘Tracker Checker’ Sites

April 26, 2010 by sharky

Resources for discovering private trackers that are open for registration are virtually endless: blogs, ‘torrent invite’ boards, even tracker forums themselves. Apart from those - other online services known as tracker checker sites - can also provide invaluable current information on tracker ’signup’ status in real-time. Here we investigate older sites such as BTRACS, and also take a look at a couple of newer ones you might not have heard about.

http://opentracker.us

OpenTracker.us is a brand-new online tracker service that is showing some great potential. Unlike other traditional "tracker checker" sites that incorporate scripts & databases which automatically check the status of trackers with open registration, everything at OpenTracker.us is done manually. Using a combination of sources that may include info from blogs & forums, OpenTracker also includes their own unique results through complex Google searching (specific ‘operators’ with inurl:signup.php).

The Bad: No ‘autocheck’ feature in real time; no RSS.

The Good: Lots of good things to report about - lists can be sorted by criteria (country, date added, tracker category, description). Aside from the "Special List" and "Main List" on the homepage, be sure to check out their additional tracker resources as found at the bottom of the site. In contrast to most checkers, they provide a decent site description, tracker screenshots, as well as a superior current state column pertaining to the invite & status for each.

http://btracs.com

Online for years now & still going strong, BTRACS is the oldest and most reliable ‘tracker checker’ site on the ‘net. To quote, "BTRACS is an automatic information site which periodically checks closed community Bittorrent trackers for being open for signup." By default, the list (checker) is updated roughly every 10 minutes - and an Alexa ranking is shown for all entries, giving readers a clear indication of which trackers are most popular (the lower the number, the better).

The Bad: Nothing ill to report about the actual BTRACS service; however, their forums are morally bankrupt and thus something you’ll probably want to avoid. Invites & accounts are regularly traded (and even sold!) in their most popular forum section entitled the "Trade Center". Their forums were introduced last year and have quickly outshined the actual BTRACS service (in terms of popularity).

The Good: Aside from listing upwards of 500 trackers in the db, BTRACS most useful feature can be found in a separate section at the top of the page for rare tracker openings. Unsurprisingly, the ‘main list’ consists mostly of trackers that have continuous open signups (usual suspects include TorrentDay, Empornium, etc). All trackers can be sorted by genre/category, country & ranking - and individual tracker categories can be browsed using the links found at the bottom of the index page.

Update (May 7/2010): BTRACS now has a “no movement” list of trackers which are forbidden from trade/GA transactions.

http://opentrackers.net

OpenTrackers.net is an older project that started out as *.FR back in 2008. Open registration uptime vs. downtime is displayed as a percentage - something that users might find useful for determining their chances of signing up under a potential ‘open-reg’.

The Bad: The OpenTrackers project appears to be abandoned - the blog has been removed & there’s absolutely no user-interactivity (ie. readers cannot submit new trackers). It would appear that the list of trackers hasn’t been properly updated in months (case-in-point: Gamato, Animatoonic & Comic-Releech are still indexed, but why?). Furthermore, the db can’t be viewed as an entire list (readers are forced to browse by tracker name/URL) and no other options exist for filtering trackers by their genres or type. While OpenTrackers has both RSS and Twitter feeds, these are now badly outdated.

The Good: Each tracker can be manually refreshed in real-time, in addition to the site’s own auto-refresh which occurs at 4-5 minute intervals.

http://filesharingz.com/directory/bittorrent/open-trackers

In relation to extended info and overall functionality, FileSharingZ’s "Open Tracker" database is unquestionably the most thorough ‘tracker checker’ on the Internet. Open/closed ratio is displayed for each, and there’s even a handy “Rare Trackers” section at the top of the list.

The Bad: Our biggest complaint - the list of trackers is not kept up-to-date, and it’s missing some really key trackers (where is TorrentDay, Freshon.tv & PussyTorrents? - oddly, these are hopelessly missing from their master list as well), and most newer trackers are simply not indexed. Additionally, readers will need to "click in" on a secondary page for each tracker in order to find either the main URL for the tracker or the signup page; which is a time-waster when compared to other services.

The Good: The table listing for open trackers is fully interactive - users can filter/sort the table by any number of characteristics (country, genre, # of torrents, language). Inside of each individual tracker page there’s a plethora of info to be found (graphs, tracker stats, registration info, site descriptions and screenshots) among other items.

http://scrapetorrent.com/TrackerChecker/

No-frills ScrapeTorrent simply presents a list of 280 different private trackers that are checked in real-time by way of a browser refresh (open signup trackers are listed at the top) with direct links to each trackers’ signup page.

The Bad: No categories, filtering or other bells & whistles as seen on other tracker checker sites.

The Good: For trackers that are closed, users can opt to receive email notifications once the status changes to "open registration".

http://www.trackerchecker.com

Apparently there’s a new improved version (v3.0) of TrackerChecker.com on the way, although we can’t provide any further info. TrackerChecker indexes more than 300 sites and also has a Twitter page for the latest updates.

The Bad: No categories, no filtering options. Everything is listed alphabetically, thus open trackers are mixed in amongst the closed/offline ones.

The Good: Has a neat "View History" feature - changes for the status of each tracker is recorded/logged; users can view prior history to see when the last time a particular tracker had open reg, or use the info to gauge or predict the frequency in which they open.

Other Sites & Tips

• www.torrentking.org - torrent tracker list & database.

• Torrents Open Registration Checker (TORC) - software

• Use Google to search for open trackers (example).

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