October 10, 2010 by Buddhas Son
The world of private BitTorrent trackers revolves around basic principles of trust, friendship, and sharing. To break into the world of private trackers, it all starts with one invite. One account made where you realize what it takes to seed a torrent to a 1:1 ratio, what a pre-time is, what an announce channel is, the works. What happens when you are ready for a new tracker, when you have sucked the current tracker bone dry? Well the answer is that now it is time to go scrounging for an invite. Hmm, how do I get an invite? Well a normal person would get their invite from a thread in their tracker’s forum, or they would ask a friend, or they would start working their way up in one of the million tracker invite forums, or they would try to jump into a recruitment irc and get in to a tracker that way.
Yet… as time goes on, you realize that the trackers you really want to get into are becoming harder and harder to get. You are requesting invites, making friends, and yet you still cannot get into your favorite tracker. You tried following the rules, you tried politely waiting and seeding so your proofs became better and better, but now you have hit your wit’s end. Now the black side of torrenting comes into play…
The Dark Side…
While you could have taken the light path, and waited patiently until your invite forum, friends, or favorite tracker provided you an invite, you have hit your wit’s end. You look in the rules of your favorite tracker, and you see something that peeks your interest.
Trading and selling invites is strictly prohibited, as is offering them in public - this includes on any forum which is not a class-restricted section on an invitation-only torrent site.
Wait? You can trade invites? How does that work?
Well if you want to know how the shady, illegal (according to pretty much any tracker who will definitely ban you if you do this), and overall destructive practice is done, keep reading for a wild ride into the world of the scum that are the bane of any tracker staff.
Tracker Levels…
When you barter, you expect to get something of equal or greater value in return for what you give. So if you are going to be trading invites/accounts, buying invites/accounts, how are you going to know what is worth what?
Glad you asked! Every tracker has a "level" according to how hard it is to obtain.
SB-Innovation, one of the largest trading sites on the net, provides a standard listing of the tracker levels. Keep in mind that the higher the level, the harder to obtain the tracker is, and the number in brackets next to the name is the overall rating on the tracker.
So what makes my trackers valuable? There are a huge amount of factors that go into what is going to make someone want to trade you for your trackers.
If you are trading accounts, generally the more established your account is, the more it is worth. The higher your buffer on the tracker (amount you have uploaded more than downloaded), the amount of invites you have, the higher your userclass, how long you have been on the tracker, all these contribute to the worth of that tracker.
So we have learned what makes our account/invite valuable, (tracker level, tracker rating, buffer, invites, user class, seniority) so how do get people interested in my trackers I want to trade?
The Underground (Torrent Trading Forums)
FileSharingTalk.com — One of Internet’s oldest BitTorrent Forums still in existence, FST still proudly allows invite (and account) trading, much to the embarrassment of most private trackers. Activity in their Trades section is still strong but not at all like it once was back in their 2007 heyday. Overall forum activity in all areas has declined steadily over the past year, partly to blame would be the trading section. Longtime established regular users - even their own mods - have consistently voiced their complaints about trading which has fallen on deaf ears; and so they’ve moved on to greener pastures. Here was once a haven that tracker staff could call home in order to get the word out to members. Tracker admins & staff, official representatives, even recruiters - FST was a popular public meeting hub between staff & members. Those days are gone. Is trading to blame? Who can tell. Not all boards flounder because of trading; others prosper. But make absolutely no mistake about it: private trackers want little to do with forums who don’t play by their rules.
BTRACS. Here’s a site that can’t blame trading for lack of traffic to the board. Before adding a forum, BTRACS was known as a well-respected service "to find trackers with open registration". Quite the contrary is going on behind closed doors; trading (and selling) is their real modus operandi. While they’ve recently removed the option for non-members to view such threads (shown below), make no mistake about BTRACS forums. There were a few changes made initially, including a forum post made by Slevin to outlaw trades/sales of private tracker accounts & invites. Unsurprisingly these new rules didn’t exactly come to any real fruition, and soon after the board continued to allow the selling of invites/accounts. In reality it was just a couple of weeks before things got back to normal. And then there’s this announcement. Check out the dates below:
SB-Innovation.de — A general all-purpose filesharing board, SBI is German-based but has attained quite a following among English members. Besides being a forum that supports the discussion of ratio-cheating BitTorrent clients & uTorrent mods, SBI has a popular invite trading section that’s open to everyone (including Google).
RealPoor.com — Lately, overall traffic has somewhat declined to the site but trading is still popular in their BitTorrent section.
forum.bratva.ws — Another brainless idea that went nowhere fast; here’s a Backie project that went down the tubes the same way his shitty blog did.
Inviteshare.com — The site has been in a state of total chaos lately; various invites/acounts are blatantly offered for sale in the wrong community sections (torrentleech.org and hdbits.org threads are spammed rampantly by resident repeat sellers).
Invitescene.com — Here, tracker names have their own threads where trading is conducted directly through each. Their ‘invites & accounts exchange‘ section is by far the most popular area on the board. If you can look past that, InviteScene is actually a decent forum in their own right.
Torrentinvites.net — Sales, trades - you name it, it’s going on here. This board pertains almost entirely to ‘invites and accounts exchanges’ with little else going on. Money being the primary factor here, open registration has been closed for the past 6 months now - $5 or $10 gets you in the door. Sheesh, if buying invites wasn’t bad enough, now you have to buy your way into the forum before being able to buy invites.
Torrentinvites.org — A full-featured popular torrent destination, TorrentInvites.org offers a little bit of everything (selling/buying/trading). More than one-third of all forum posts are within those sections; clear evidence of what their members are seeking.
Torrent-Finder.org (forums) — Not all that popular, but worth including nonetheless. Sales have recently been banned here, but trades continue unabated.
BravoList — Trade/giveaway section isn’t all that popular.
You want to trade….
Well all you have to do is look above for some of the myriad of options when it comes to trading invites. How do I post? Well every forum seems to have its’ own method for posting a request. Usually it follows the format of, "Want (Tracker), Have (Trackers)" With the request made, the stage is set to pick up someone who wants what you have, and has what you want. So how do we trade without one of us scamming the other one? How can I make sure that I am not going to get banned?
The answer is that most forums have a middle-man system where by the invites/account info can be sent to a third party who than exchanges the information back to the intended recipient. With someone mediating the transaction, you can trust that you will not be ripped off.
Eventually, following the system, you can trade your way up the system ladder, and some traders get to the top levels of the tracker level chart.
So what do you do when you have gotten everything devilishly? You have invites everywhere but you do not need to trade for anything? Well now it is time to make some cash on the side, what a gangster.
The Market (Selling/Buying Your Invites)
TorrentAuction.com — Anywhere ranging from 10-100 euros, torrentauction is an example of the final place where the tracker collector/trader can finally sell their wares. As well, new members or recently banned members can easily buy into or back into the system for a flat rate. In an ebay-like auction style system, torrent auction is the flagship of an even more insidious way to break the rules. Where as other forums just let you fend for yourself when selling invites, torrent auction provides an official e-marketplace. Trackers are arranged by level, and they are priced based on their factors of value (as discussed earlier). Selling invites and/or buying them is a quick easy way to trade money for the time it would take to go looking for the tracker originally.
http://invites-shop.com — A Russian site that sells invites to trackers and other invite-only services/sites. Members are also able to sell their own invites to the site, although we’re not really certain how this works exactly.
Wrap-Up
Sellers, traders, cheaters, everyone who purposefully violates tracker rules for their own gain hurt the entire tracker community. There are avenues to the black market, but they are simply a way around patience. If you think trading or selling/buying is a good idea… think again. In fact, trackers pool their resources to blacklist wrongdoers. A working example of this would be What.CD’s Torrent Celebrity userclass which offers access to known IPs that are not in the best interest for any trackers.
Almost all of the accounts banned on all the major trackers are as a result of doing any of the fore-mentioned dirty acts. They will eventually catch most people, and if you cannot do the time, do not do the crime. There are a million ways to break the rules, and there are a million reasons to follow the rules.
Happy Torrenting My Friends
[[ And this concludes Buddhas Son's contribution to FSF, for now. FSF edited some minor portions of it for clarity & site compatibility. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily my own. ]]
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