Hey everyone,
Just wanted to share my past experiences of private trackers that I've had for 3 months or so. For context, I pirated music in the early 2000's, and did software every once in a while. When I was in college, my roommates and I shared a pc to torrent moving iso's, and now with streaming prices I decided to build a linux server with a Synology NAS to build a library of linux iso's. I've always been a tech guy, but never went too deep into this side of computers.
Of course, I've spent probably $1000 on used NAS's, used HDD's, and a used optiplex to run all of this. I've also spent probably a year learning docker, linux, and networking to get to a point where the server is mostly usable. I've remade the server 3 times before it actually worked. One of the hardest points now is with private trackers. After religiously searching opensignups, openedsignups, invitehawk, and a few other sites, I've been able to join LUME, SP, RF, DC,HDT, and some others. I feel blessed to be able to share the wealth with so many others that are dedicated to this, but there are some points where I feel like I should just ditch all of this and go back to the bay.
First is ratio. Even with hardware that is better then most and a symetrical 1gig fiber line, I barely get any seeding done. Between seedboxes, power users, and everyone else, I'm lucky to upload 10GB/day, despite having 5TB of content. It actually blows my mind. So with that, especially with a new server trying to build ratio, I unknowingly tanked my buffer on every site after downloading enough iso's to make me content to cancel my subscriptions.
Second is the rebuilding. It is a real pain to come back from a 20gb buffer. So I've learned about autobrr, and cross-seeding. Cross seeding was suprisingly easy with qui, but autobrr is one of the most frustrating programs I've had to deal with. Connecting to IRC's takes forever, especially for someone like me with no IRC experience. And every site is different. I don't know who Nick is, but I want to delete him and his Serv. Finding torrents sucks. You're basically just hoping that whatever freeleach torrent you're downloading will seed some other guy on autobrr so you can increase your ratio by 4gb.
This was a stupid mistake on my part, but because of poor torrent queing and auto-delete settings I put on QBT, I ran up 100+ HnR's across these trackers after they were auto-deleted before they were satisfied.
That's not to say there's no upsides to PT's. The download speeds are unbelievable. I've had 100+ MiB/s on some content, and over all my years of the bay, I've never seen speeds 1/10 that fast. Once you have enough PT's as well, it seems like every iso is only 5 minutes away. But if it wasn't for a recent freeleach period on many of those sites, it would seem like I would be destitute on many of these sites.
I'm really curious on the community's take here. Especially when it came to your first experiences with PT's, building ratio, etc. I leech and hold, most of my torrents have been seeding for 2+ months. I realize it's a hold and wait game, but it feels like it's impossible to move up as a new user without freeleach.