I’m making an ongoing series of posts where we discuss something as a community, then I add it to the mega-thread for future reference. This has been an reoccurring question so figured I’d cover it next.
Where do you guys go for news and updates regarding open signups?
The two places I’m aware of:
Opentrackers.org - Updates have seemed a little lacking lately with many open signups being posted with a long delay or not at all.
OpenSignup Telegram Channel - Much more up to date but with the downside that sometime it gets flooded with junk/ads/spam.
You must log in or register to comment.
I don’t have a direct answer to your question because I don’t really keep track of trackers other than the ones I use often, however I have seen that lst.gg has open signups for another day or so.
It says I need an invitation link. Also what is the “proof” they need in their application?
I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here so I’ll use a reply that was on Reddit:
“If you aren’t in any private trackers yet, those two things don’t really apply to you. Typically, you are asked for both a profile URL and screenshot on a private tracker as a way to price that you can survive on a more prestigious tracker, so that only applies to upgrading to “better” ones. This is also what is meant by proof of ratio, your ratio for everything you have downloaded on the site is in your profile. You can try an interview with screenshots of your torrent client if you think they are worth it, but most sites won’t accept them. What you want to do is try to find an open invite/sign-up tracker and learn the ropes on that then once you have a bit of use in that and feel confident you know what you are doing you can start applying for closed ones (although most trackers have an invite forum accessible after you prove your value by seeding the correct amount and other metrics specific to the site, often time on the tracker and amount downloaded). Remember that the “lower-tier trackers” such as those with open invite/sign-up aren’t necessarily worse, in fact a lot of them are nearly on par in terms of new releases. Don’t feel like you are missing too much of you don’t race to the top thinking that more exclusive trackers are better. Enjoy the journey, if you stick with private trackers then you will “upgrade” fairly naturally and without a lot of stress. Last thing, I wouldn’t recommend joining IPT if you want to move to other trackers. It won’t actually hurt your chances, but they don’t have a good name in the community and very few people take a profile on there seriously as proof of anything.”
Thanks for the insight!
Most welcome!
I mean you did bring up a valid answer, word of mouth, aka here lol
What’s the benefit of private trackers?
Do they really have more content and better speeds?
I’ve seen claims of better privacy but just over the last month iirc there were a few in trouble.
Most of the torrents would be better seeded than public trackers. Download speeds will be great too and some public trackers have a vast amount of content too.
Better content by a mile if you’re in some of the good ones. Speeds are always good on private trackers but public trackers can have good speeds on popular things too.
Some stats (I edited the name into each one so it would be easier to differentiate):
- RED (1st largest music)
- OPS (2nd largest music)
- BTN (Television)
- PTP (Movies)
- HDB (All HD content)
- GGn (Video games)
Better privacy is objectively true but it’s only security by obscurity, so it’s ~99.9% bulletproof. You can generally torrent without a VPN on private trackers, though some of the larger “semi-private” mega trackers like IPT/TL/etc may still have a tiny chance of getting ISP letters. For a copyright holder to serve your ISP a letter they need to be in your swarm with you. Private trackers are difficult to get access to and have much smaller swarms than public trackers, so copyright holders usually don’t bother. The easier a community is to get access to, and the more users that are hanging around in swarms, the more appetizing it might be for them.
Edit: Retention is also really good on private trackers. Most people seed everything forever on private trackers, so you don’t have to worry about content being “fresh” for it to be available and seeded.
Been torrenting on IPT & TL for a couple of years now without vpn, no letters. I did get 1 when I tried torrenting off of fully public trackers though.
Yeah I’ll rephrase that - it’s still very unlikely for you to get letters on IPT/TL but there’s relatively a much higher chance than other smaller private trackers
I could probably drum up a lot of reasons, but if i had to pick one, I would say retention. I can decide I want to download an obscure movie that was uploaded 15 years ago and not only is it still on there, but I can usually even download it at full speed.
Bad news: The OpenSignup Telegram channel hasn’t been updated since October 2023
