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I had to get a backup private tracker in case things went south with TB. And browsing the forums over at the now defunct FL I found an invite thread for the much touted TL. That is the unfair advantage of being a member of the right trackers I guess.
I have to say though that TL was a bit of a disappointment. At least given my style and bandwidth. And the moderators and VIPs from what I’ve seen so far are completely incompetent asshats who pass the time deriding new member and defend their inane rules to the bitter end, even when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
But lets start at the beginning shall we. TL like many private trackers employ a "wait time" for new users in order to discourage hit and runs. In order to break free of that you will need to have uploaded 7 GB currently (at a 0.8+ ratio). That makes sense we all know and support this. But then things get iffy. The normal way most people build that upload and prove themselves is to download new releases from elsewhere and seed them back to the tracker in question. This works because wait times do not apply to seeding, only leeching. But only if you have 100% of the release. And here I ran across the first problem with TL. Because no matter how fancy the source tracker was, the files I got would not complete hash checking, and would thus not register as 100%, and would thus not allow me to seed while the wait time was still in effect. Asking the forums was like talking to a (very stupid) wall. I’ll admit no one was impolite or derisive but the advise given was pretty scrawny considering that these are site operators and that this question is one of the most common with TL.
In the end I had to figure it out myself. And it turns out the .sfv files differed sometimes. And quite often .sfv and .nfo files were using Unix line feeds whereas the releases I had downloaded didn’t. I don’t know who to blame but at least as far as the line feed issue, the standing advice should have been to check for that and resave as the appropriate format. That is what I did anyway and it enabled me to finally break the upload quota.
While doing this and looking for suitable files to upload I came across my old friend Mr Partial Seeder again. Yes, you know the one that for one reason or another doesn’t seed a complete torrent and thus statistically speaking is counted as a leecher. Very confusing and very very annoying. TL has a massive amount of these partials. Perhaps because unlike TB they don’t prohibit partial seeding. Or perhaps because people ran into the same problem I did with hash checks and line feeds, couldn’t fix it and even though they weren’t bound by wait times decided to seed 99.5% so that they could continue seeding the same files to several trackers at once.
This of course brings me to perhaps the biggest problem with TL. Overseeding. The asshats in the forum are all drinking their own Kool-Aid of course, repeating the mantra that "overseeding is a myth". The reality is of course that it is a very real and potent phenomena that has loomed over bandwidth challenged torrent users since the dawn of time. Whereas TB has prudently prohibited overseeding, TL applauds this mischief.
To be fair, a minority of users probably benefit from the abundant bandwidth within the swarm and obviously if you’re a VIP or anointed one like the Kool-Aid drinkers you don’t have to worry about bungling up the ratio on a few scattered torrents. For the rest of us, even if we overwhelmingly keep a positive ratio, a stray "hit and run" will produce a warning and possibly a ban. And by "hit and run" I mean jumping on a torrent that for one reason or another isn’t seeing any action in the upload department. TL arrogantly ignores this and requires users to seed for 60 hours consecutively … just because. If you take more than a 30 min break you get a warning. I mean, why not let the bragging idiots with seed boxes do the seeding in this particular case. Since they are the reason for this entire problem with overseeding in the first place. The other magic TL piece of advise is to either donate to become a VIP (and help cover TL’s hilarious 6000 euro monthly operating costs) OR limit your download speed to match your upload in the case of and asynchronous connection. But what good will that do? The less you have of a release the less likely it is that you will match a request for a torrent piece. You will be able to keep up a 1:1 ratio for a while yes, but I doubt it will work in the long run as seed boxes and people with more upstream bandwidth grab the seeding opportunities. Seeding in my experience is only good for the first couple of hours and the only thing this will accomplish is to have the option to jump ship if you see that seeding is going south. But then you still wont have the complete file and what is the point of a torrent tracker anyway. Which again is why private trackers never will be the answer. At least not if they’re run like TL.
So in summary, the buffoons over at FL treat their closed little world as some sort of pyramid scheme, laboring under the delusion that there will always be new leechers forever and ever and that putting in massive amounts of bandwidth at the top wont have any effect at all for the poor sods at the base of the scheme. A few key uploaders with seed boxes can be tolerated especially to keep the torrent alive long term and the occasional ratio building is one thing, but for the good of the system most users should be encouraged to maintain no more than a 1:1 ratio. Less on a per torrent basis if the torrent in question clearly is going nowhere. A little bit of revolution seems to be needed everywhere these days.
