This is my first “private” tracker and I’m overwhelmed by the amount of bizarre rules.

I always thought private trackers are just some sort of elitism on piracy so I always refused it, but due to lack of options I decided to try it.

I don’t understand how just seeding back isn’t enough, but they have dozens of weird rules, if anyone can explain me, I’m afraid of asking there.

  1. They have something about changing IPs, it seems you can’t change IPs too often and you can’t have multiple accounts in the same IP. Why? How does changing IPs affect the seeding process? You’re seeding, how is this not enough?
  2. They absolutely not allow mobile client, which means, you need to let your PC on all the time, sum this up with the fact that they require 72h seed within the next 30 days, this is a t least 2.5h of seed daily and if you miss one day for any reason it’d be even more for the next days. But my question is about the mobile, why the hell can’t I use my phone to seed? I talked to a mod and they argue mobile isn’t reliable due to battery optimization and it might kill the client. What does this even mean? The way I’ll seed isn’t of their concern as long as I seed the shit, why does they care about how I’m seeding?
  3. Why the torrent clients are so limited even the version you can use? What it has to do with anything at all? Again, is not seeding just enough?

Where is all the freedom on that shit? So many strings OMG. Is it not simple as:

  • Detect the user seeding
  • Track the amount of seeding
  • If he’s not following the rules, block account, end of story

Why does the means of this process even matter?

I really didn’t like that, it’s such a bizarre elitism. It’s nothing about “sharing”, it’s about putting so many strings that it’ll end up even affecting the ways you can contribute.

I’ve a 128GB smartphone and I never used half of it, if I could seed via my Android on my own terms I could easily seed ~100GB of files 24/7, I’d gladly do that, but it seems they don’t allow it. Their argument about battery optimization makes no sense, since even a desktop (laptop) could stop seeding at any moment when a person closes the lid or left it idle then the it enters in suspend mode.

No I’m not renting a seed box just to seed a few ebooks, I’m talking about ~100GB because I can do that and it’ll almost free for me.

  • LocustOfControl@reddthat.com
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    4 days ago

    I’m on MAM + other private trackers. MAM isn’t particularly strict on rules, and it’s ridiculously easy to have a positive ratio there what with all the freebies.

    Private trackers are designed to make sure there’s always plenty of seeders. They mostly do that by enforcing that people maintain a certain ratio - i.e. don’t just hit and run. (There’s other advantages like that you can request re-seeds and the system will message previous seeders but that’s besides the point) You can’t force people to maintain ratio if it’s easy to game the system - that’s why there are these rules about IP addresses.

    Many torrent clients are broken, or just lie about their upload stats. Those clients are banned, as are other that are broken in ways that cause others problems. Phones are a terrible source to download from - signal issues, limiting battery usage, etc. They just waste download slots that could be used for real clients on real connections.

    Where is all the freedom on that shit?

    Are you serious? You’re getting this stuff completely for free and you’re whining that there’s a few house rules. Entitled, much?

  • Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    this is a “you” problem, not a platform one.

    not a single rule there exists that’s not rooted in technological limitations and choices.

    no, it’s not about “just seeding back”, it’s also about protecting the community from people - frankly - like you who don’t bother to look into CSVs or platform limitations.

    What you call “freedom” is a claim to do whatever you want no matter the impact on others.

    the shout box on MAM would have helped you with setting up or any questions you might have.

    but I don’t see any questions, just complaints qjd entitlement with question marks at the end.

    • esc@piefed.social
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      3 days ago

      This reply is a great example of why private trackers are cancerous.

      • Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 days ago

        oh you’ll get this reply from me in any community that you’ll attack without attempting to join.

        MAM is one of the friendliest places in existence and instead of interacting with the people and just asking for help the statement is “you all suck”.

        we’re not taking about elitist bullshit but about entitlement. My tone was way more friendly than the one OP chose after all, consciously though.

        If they’d said “I don’t know what to do” the answer would’ve been very different.

        Your comment is just … fitting. Calling me a representation for a cancerous behavior that I called out in OP: unreflective entitlement “my ways are correct”.

        I don’t engage with private tracker communities beyond mam for that reason:

        single sentence judgments, no explanations, blaming others…

        • Marafon@sh.itjust.works
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          3 days ago

          I don’t understand how anyone could hate on the home of Friendliness, Warmth, and Sharing. Such a wholesome, wonderful community.

  • turdas@suppo.fi
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    4 days ago

    MAM is unusual, but not really for any of the reasons you mentioned. Every private tracker I know of only allows a narrow list of desktop clients.

    The expectation on private trackers is that you’re seeding 24/7 or as close to that as possible. Not that you just seed when your laptop lid happens to be open. If you want a cheap low-power seeding setup, get a Raspberry Pi or some other single-board computer and connect it to an external hard drive. Seeding from a smartphone, especially one you actually use day-to-day, is just not going to work and battery optimizations are only one reason why.

  • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    4 days ago

    Only here for the comments 😅

    But also, reading all the comments, suddenly my total upload amount of 120 terabytes with a ratio of 25-ish on public trackers feels… Unappreciated? 😂 Can somebody please pat me on the head, telling me to keep seeding? :3

  • Bongles@lemmy.zip
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    4 days ago

    I don’t know MAM, but I always assume these rules exist to stop abuse or a headache rather than some kind of elitism.

    Multiple accounts with the same ip? You get into ban evasion and the argument of “ThAt’s NoT mE, tHaTs XYZ” if you just ban them all.

    I’ve read reasons about the client thing, but I don’t remember any, and the mobile thing, probably just stops an argument about “I’m trying, my phone just keeps killing it”. Could it be simpler? Of course, but if you deal with people all the time sometimes it’s just easier to make a rule and be done with it.

  • tgr819@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    MAM is great though, compared to a lot of other private trackers, it’s easy to maintain a good ratio and the community is super nice and helpful

  • Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip
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    4 days ago

    Don’t bother arguing with the mods. The restrictions are not ideological, they’re technical. They would’ve been fixed a long time ago if they knew how. They won’t admit that tho. They’re stack is quite outdated.

  • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    I’m not on that specific tracker but some of the others have similar sort of rules

    They have something about changing IPs, it seems you can’t change IPs too often and you can’t have multiple accounts in the same IP. Why?

    That’s generally for detecting ban evasion / duplicate accounts. But I think with most private trackers you’d just need to let staff know if you’re in a shared IP situation.

    They absolutely not allow mobile client, which means, you need to let your PC on all the time, sum this up with the fact that they require 72h seed within the next 30 days, this is a t least 2.5h of seed daily and if you miss one day for any reason it’d be even more for the next days. But my question is about the mobile, why the hell can’t I use my phone to seed? I talked to a mod and they argue mobile isn’t reliable due to battery optimization and it might kill the client. What does this even mean?

    The mod is sort of right about that one. Most mobile users aren’t even connectable (port forwarded) so that’s problem number 1. And problem 2, yes Android does pause apps for battery optimization - but technically you can configure your Android to not do that for specific apps, not sure if it works for all phones but in mine I just bring up the App Info, go to App Battery Usage, and make sure to enable “Allow Background Usage”… most people wouldn’t really want to do that and run down their phone battery constantly but I guess it’s an option. Maybe bring that up as a tracker suggestion/rule change though it does seem easier just to tell members not to use mobile clients.

    Why the torrent clients are so limited even the version you can use? What it has to do with anything at all? Again, is not seeding just enough?

    Maybe specific to that tracker, not sure. But usually torrent client lists exist because the tracker staff tested those clients against the private tracker software to verify that stats are being tracked correctly. And sometimes they do ban clients due to being buggy, being used for ratio cheating, that sort of thing.

  • Throbbing_banjo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    I honestly don’t know what OP expected here. Honest question, how does one get access to a private tracker? I run a seedbox (not a fucking mobile phone) on a 10 Gbps network in Europe, my ratio is ridiculous.

    • JohnDarlen@lemmy.todayOP
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      3 days ago

      Ratio doesn’t mean shit when you’re downloading 1-2MB ebooks. They want availability, I was seeding for 12h and didn’t upload a single bit.

      • Throbbing_banjo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 days ago

        12 hours isn’t a long time though? If you’re on a private tracker, whatever you’re seeding on essentially needs 100% uptime. There is literally no point to allowing users who don’t seed constantly, public trackers already exist for those people. If I download a book I’m seeding it 24/7 for the next year, because I don’t seed on a phone

        • JohnDarlen@lemmy.todayOP
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          3 days ago

          It’s unrelated, I’m just pointing out your comment saying your ratio is ridiculous. Ratio means nothing, a person with 1.0 ratio may be doing more than a person with 10.0 ratio. And the books I download are so niche that it’d very likely take me months to reach 1.0 ratio, because nobody is looking for them.

  • DecentM@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 days ago

    There are lots of answers here already so I’ll just comment on the trackers detecting seeding.

    Insofar as that’s not directly possible. Torrents are peer to peer, and that’s not some kind of code word. Your client is literally talking to someone else’s client. No server in between the two, no gateway, or anything (meaning one of the two clients need to have a port open too!). So a tracker cannot measure the amount of data flowing between two clients (aka. peers).

    So the way trackers know how much you upload is that your client self reports that to the tracker. The tracker has no way to directly check the ground truth, other than relying on what the other client is saying about how much it downloaded from you.

    Old or unknown torrent clients may have bugs in them which cause the client to report incorrect data. When a client overreports (reports more than it actually uploads), that breaks the equation that private trackers rely on to make sure there’s enough users on a torrent. So by using an old or unknown client, you might inadvertently damage the functioning of the tracker.

  • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    I’m not in MAM but the others I’m in have much stricter seeding requirements (like 4 days of seeding in 2 weeks). Like others have said, these rules are there to keep people from creating headaches for the volunteer staff as well as ensuring that you’re contributing something too. These sites have a fixed number of users and if everyone else is constantly offline or doing hit and runs, the whole thing falls apart.

    If you’re not setup to where you have a server running 24/7 or can’t get a seedbox, you might use public sources. For music, SoulSeek is a great option and doesn’t have rules like this.

    • Chronographs@lemmy.zip
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      4 days ago

      I’d check out audiobookbay, I’ll usually go there first because MAM is such a hassle to deal with

    • JohnDarlen@lemmy.todayOP
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      4 days ago

      It’s unreal, I’m feeling more monitored than using the Google ecosystem. This can’t be right. I now need to seed a 1MB ebook for 72h ON MY PC. I don’t use PC that often, some weeks I barely boot my PC.

      So much strings man. I’m really sorry, I always seeded as hell everything I download, often hit 3.0 on FitGirl games, but now? I only see reasons to try to bypass it with some VPN, fake answers for the interview, download my shit and leave. I’m really sorry, but I’m a pirate, being attached to so much rules isn’t for me.

      • cecilkorik@piefed.ca
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        4 days ago

        As an analogy, consider it like joining a gang. If you’re truly an independent free spirit, you truly don’t belong in a gang. This may be not the right path for you. Gangs have rules, often even stricter and more harshly punished ones than the actual laws they’re breaking. If that’s surprising, you probably don’t understand how gangs work. In doing the dangerous stuff they do, they also need to protect themselves (and their shit) from a lot of just-as-dangerous people in addition to the lawful people who want them shut down and imprisoned. They are not places of freedom, they are places of ultraviolence.

        That said, if you happen to be the sort of person who wants, say, some of the really interesting drugs the gangs are involved in trafficking, well then, you either have to join the gang, or stay on their periphery and keep a few loose connections with them without ruffling their feathers.

        Obviously a private tracker is not quite as violent and high stakes as a gang, but some of the same basic principles more or less apply. You want their loot, you gotta follow their rules, or at least make a plausible attempt to. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Get in, get your stuff, and leave. If you don’t want to join the gang, don’t make a scene, don’t make friends, just keep your eyes open, do your business and then go home and enjoy what you found. It doesn’t have to be that complicated, but don’t oversimplify it either.

      • James R Kirk@startrek.website
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        3 days ago

        It’s also pretty much impossible to seed enough since every file has hundreds of seeders and only gets a handful of downloads every month, you need to seed it for over a year to break even on 1:1 ratio.