I decided to share this here too since sailors don't seem to visit !opensignups@lemmy.ml and the murky waters of the orange sea should be seldom visited anymore.

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Links to more info about private trackers here:

• https://opentrackers.org/
• https://hdvinnie.github.io/Private-Trackers-Spreadsheet/
• https://inviteroute.github.io/sheet/
• https://ripped.guide/Scene/PTs/
• https://ripped.guide/Scene/Scene-Glossary/

Taken from the orange seas wiki which we don't seem to have here?

► What is a private tracker?

Private trackers are loosely defined as private torrent sites where a membership is required in order to download their torrents. An accurate description would separate private trackers into 2 parts: the tracker itself and the website that accompanies it. A torrent tracker is a server that tracks peers in a torrent swarm and assigns/connects peers to each other based on its own internal criteria. The tracker then reports to the website which, on top of providing a download link to the torrent file, will display all relevant info for that torrent, including peer/seed counts and optionally a peer list if the website operator chooses to include it.

Unlike public trackers, these are not a free-for-all buffet. You need to contribute back (by uploading) a certain amount proportional to the amount you have "taken" from the tracker. This arrangement can vary a lot from tracker to tracker. Private trackers track this balance of contribution by a "ratio", which is simply a ratio of uploaded data, divided by your downloaded data. If you downloaded a total of 2GB and uploaded a total of 4GB, that would make your ratio a 2.0. Trackers will sometimes have different methods of maintaining an acceptable ratio, either by offering bonuses the longer you keep your torrents seeding, to providing "half-leech" or "freeleech" content. Freelech content is the most commonly used method, which means the torrent that is marked as freeleech is free to download, meaning it does not count against your Download stats, giving you an opportunity to gain upload from it without sacrificing any "download buffer". Some torrent trackers are "ratioless", meaning they don't require you to maintain any sort of ratio in order to keep using the site, they just require a minimum seed-time on all downloaded torrents (which is usually also a requirement on ratio pure trackers, but typically the seed-time isn't as lengthy as on ratioless trackers).