What's your take on private trackers?

It's all I use. I feel like there's less risk and they're way more organized.
- The organization and typical submission requirements are what really put them over public trackers for me.
  Public tracker: It's this big and this many files. Figure it out.
  Private tracker: All the metadata
  Experience may vary. Post is overly dramatic for comedic effect
- If you are forced to disable your vpn there is more risk. I'm not sure if some permit a vpn but I wouldn't be trusting any of them without one.
  
  I use a VPN and it's on a kill switch, so if it gets disconnected for whatever reason, the machine can't reach the internet at all.
  I can't imagine why a private tracker would disallow you from using a VPN
  
  Usually they want only your IP while signing up to be able to see if they had already banned you and you try to evade it.
  Most times there was the rule that once signed up, you can turn it back on for both torrenting and browsing.
  
  Even with VPN, ultimately you're still storing everything at your house. Seedbox, preferably in the Netherlands is the way to go.
  
  I've been in about half a dozen so far and none have cared about VPN usage.
- Same. Plus the quality encodes are a lot easier to find and more abundant (assuming you care about such things of course)

I tried signing up for a few but they want me to disable my VPN ... nope.
- Those ones aren't worth having.
- I think I'm on a tracker with that rule too but I just ignore it. Not like they can tell.
  
  Unless you're on a self-hosted VPN (defeating the whole purpose), it's not especially hard to identify VPN connections. All of the common ones are known, and many use IP ranges and reverse lookups that clearly identify the VPN/seedbox provider.
  It's a bit harder when you are connected to one that resolves to a residential-looking hostname. But again, unless it's truly unique (defeating the purpose), simply sorting users by IP will reveal almost all of them.
  Some trackers used to do this to weed out people with multiple accounts. Some of the big ones still actively detect and block (or punish) anyone connecting to their website with a VPN (torrent traffic is still generally allowed, though)

Finding public torrents for audio books is utter bullshit in my experience. Myanonamouse has a massive selection, is friendly and well organised and doesn't have absurd rules, just reasonable ones.
I love the place.
For anything else not audio book related public trackers work just fine for me.
- I really want to join them, but "sign up with your actual IP" is an unconditional dealbreaker as far as I'm concerned.
  I don't consider a VPN optional for regular web browsing. I'm definitely not turning it off for something that's actually Illegal.
- I agree. It’s one of my favourite websites. Not just for the torrents but the community is really great too. The book clubs are super neat too!
- It is diverting the content from public torrents for the sole reason that no one can be bothered to make decentralised cataloguing work better than in the early 1990s in my very biased opinion.
- I also mainly use public trackers id love to get some good German films and so on but they are all behind a private tracker but I learned that after I setup by *arr sadly
  
  We talking German films or German films?
- My experience precisely. If I can't find it on mobilism.org, off to myanonymouse. Btw they're amazing and the servers cost a ton, small donations make a huge difference
  I've never been unable to find films etc that I wanted on public trackers, especially with the search function on Qbittorrent. Don't see the need for elitist wanks on private trackers
  I doubt they'd even have the obscure stuff that won't download.... Hold on...
  The only one sitting at 0% is "Vacuuming Completely Nude In Paradise", an odd British film. I doubt even a private tracker would have that
  
  Many private trackers, and even a few public ones, have a request forum. The private ones reward users that fill these requests, so they are often effective.
  There are some very accessible private trackers (sometimes referred to as semi-private) that meet these requirements. Once you get set up, they can be very set-and-forget. Just avoid the forums.
  
  Replying to say that I will check mine tomorrow. Too late tonight.
  Edit: Mine did not have this film. :(
  
  I don't even look anywhere else any more for book related content, straight there, I really like it there. Haven't been using it for long but already donated and will be doing so again when I am able to for sure!

So far there's never been a thing I couldn't find on a public tracker, so there was never a need to look into it.
- I feel this way too, and the only people I've ever seen talk about private trackers have always had a weird chip on their shoulder. It has very "secret club" vibes. I know the stuff on public trackers only comes out because of scene leaks, but the scene wouldn't vanish if there weren't any more private trackers. Bittorrent was made for widespread public sharing without risk of censorship or takedowns, you don't need to keep it hushed, it's already protected against that. So private trackers have always just seemed like social clubs to me (I mean that in a bad way)
  
  Yep, that and the fact that private trackers have buy-in or subscription fees and mandatory upload ratios.
  I value the anonymity of a public tracker that doesn't tie me down with any means of fund transfer or prolonged upload through which I could be exposed if my VPN dropped or the payment channel got compromised, crypto or not.
- I would and for the most part have used private trackers for either a specific type of thing or a specific kinda obscure or not very popular title. I find that the more not well known a thing is, the more likely it's going to be found and (re)seeded on a private tracker.
  
  Exactly my experience. I'm in a private tracker for books and audiobooks that sometimes has content that's not on other sites (audiobooks, in particular).
  I also just joined a different private tracker that specializes in pre-organized .img files pre-loaded for emulation setups. Like, a one-file 1TB image ready to roll with everything preconfigured.
  For popular TV/film, private trackers are unnecessary, unless maybe you're very particular about 4K/8K REMUX quality or something more specific.

Childish and against the spirit of piracy. Always have been.
- Public trackers are shit because of freeloaders and Stremio. This is why we can't have nice things.
  
  Stremio is bad?
- This is how I feel about people on soulseek who lock files, even more so the cunts that want things like bandcamp vouchers in return for accessing something they have. Cunts.
- Being open to all and then shut down by police after 6 months doesn't help piracy either. The upside to closed trackers is that stuff can be archived for years.
  
  Until it gets nuked by pigs stealing everything. A decentralised pirate catalogue based on Musicbrainz is something I want to see before I die. People diverted their efforts into vulnerable private trackers instead.
- I guess you never heard of what.cd
  
  I have. It was a cult.
- Single point of failure also. What.CD was the best vaccine against them: those naive idealists had hosting in France…

Great as long as it's easy to maintain ratio. And by "easy" I mean basically not having to do anything that can't be automated. I also don't care enough about the harder-to-get-in trackers that I would spend a lot of time sending in screenshots of profiles of other trackers I'm on or whatever. I'm not trying to get internet points for being on the very "coolest" private trackers.
The good thing is that decent private trackers have a well maintained catalog and most content usually has at least one or two seeders even months/years after the torrent was created, and these seeders often have a ton of bandwidth.
In contrast, public trackers often falsely advertise the amount of peers in the swarm (so a torrent that's supposedly alive is often dead). I'd say I'm grabbing about 80/20 from private/public trackers, and I seed each torrent for around 30 days. Public torrents are often so starved for somewhat decent seeders that I regularly have a ratio of 20+ after the 30 days I'm seeding for. And that's without a seedbox, just a normal Internet connection.
In the end, both are fine. When you setup your *arr tools correctly, they usually choose a decent release automatically, whether from private or public trackers.

Some of them are designed for having people buying upload credits. I'm into one where only the admins are allowed to post new torrents, and they keep everything on 5 seedboxes. It's almost impossible to seed back, as their own seedboxes are pushing too much upload, then old torrents are removed and re-uploaded "to gather interest", but that means you will never find new peers. And then they always send messages complaining that they're spending 500 a month for those seedboxes "to guarantee fast downloads" and everyone should become a donator or the site will close. Assholes, those seedboxes are indeed guaranteeing fast downloads, but also are guaranteeing zero upload back

I just don't have the time for it or well, I do, but I don't wanna put effort into mantaining ratios and whatnot. I have stuff to do that I enjoy more than be part of a internet club.
But that's just me.
- Out of curiosity, what effort is needed to maintain ratio?
  
  At the very least, you need to keep an eye on it. Just seeding can be insufficent because of speeds, competition and popularity of things you download.
  Is it a lot of effort? Probably no but in my case any effort is too much effort. Is just not my thing. I admire the spirit but I don't have it in me.
  
  My experience is that just seeding what you like indefinitely is not useful. You have to be proactive and find popular torrents to seed and accrue any meaningful upload amount.
  The tracker I use has a bonus point system to encourage all seeders even of unpopular releases but it's slow.
  I found that the perfect solution for my use case (music) ended up being Soulseek. I don't have much money for seedboxes or buying extra storage so I feel like I'm priced out of private trackers.

I think it depends on why you pirate. Are you doing it because you don’t want to pay? Then services like usenet and private trackers, where there is some expectation of payment (be it monetary or bandwidth) are probably not for you.
Do you pirate because you hate DRM and want to self host a robust media library that you can curate without fear of media being removed because of an expired license or something? Then you might be more into private trackers and Usenet. I spend almost as much on hard drives and Usenet subscriptions and PT donations as a Netflix account.
- Or if you want films or série in a specific languages with decent quality and not too big file size

If you're going to Torrent you need to keep one in your pocket at a minimum.
Public or private,you should be running hiding your ass through a VPN or seed box.
Private trackers run ratios to make sure that content stays available. Well you can find most of what you want on public trackers there are always a few things here and there that are much easier to find in private.
Security-wise I don't really think there's much of a difference. Private trackers get infiltrated and shut down they're just much smaller when it happens so you don't hear about as much.
- I always wonder how IPtorrents is still running. It's a bit bigger and has a less than savory reputation, so I figure it would draw more attention.

I'm not really a fan because in a lot of cases it forces you to download stuff you might not want just to establish and maintain an acceptable ratio so eventually you can get the stuff you do want.
if I wanted something obscure and not really interested in the popular thing I'm either wasting bandwidth and/or server space starting out or searching for that thing on a public tracker.
the one private tracker I do use is extremely generous with upload credits for newbies and I was able to take advantage of that plus contribute something right away so I didn't and still don't have any issues but I know that's not the case with some people.

How do you get membership to a private tracker when they are always invite only?
- Making friends on sites like this can sometimes yield invites. There are also usually communities specifically dedicated to giving out invites. And if all else fails, some trackers have open invitations (either time-limited or with some kind of interview).
  A common method is to get your feet wet with an easier to get into private tracker and use the invitation threads in it to get into the ones you want.
  
  And how do you make friends on these sites?
- I was able to ask for an invite on a public forum, and I was able to use my demonoid (remember demonoid?) stats as proof back when they were semi private.
  if you can show that you are a good and consistent uploader someone usually will sling an invite your way.
- there are trackers which has interviews for invites. from there you can start using, gain ranks and get invited to other trackers.
- Some sometimes open up for a time.
- A lot of them have interviews in their IRC channel. That's how I got into MAM.
- Probably not a very practical answer, but I moved to a city known for being full of tech bros, then went to a bunch of general interest meetups organized mostly by tech bros, where I made friends with tech bros, and one of them randomly offered me an invite.

It's mainly all I use. The consistent quality is super nice. Though when PTP was down for a month or two I ended up back on Usenet too.
BTN and PTP aren't hard to maintain ratio on.
Redacted can be a bit of a pain, and I've had to fix my ratio there a few times. But I had a few CDs from some small local bands I'm using Usenet more for music at the moment so lidarr doesn't tank my ratio so quick.

They’re extremely good for higher quality content such as 4K REMUX files. I have access to a private tracker that I use regularly. I only search public trackers if what I want isn’t available in the private one…which is rare.
To me it’s not about price or openness or anything. Piracy is a service issue. Private trackers have better service than public trackers. Better curated content, better seeders, and fewer (if any) shit quality re-encodes by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

If anyone has invites to a decent tracker, hmu.
Just shamelessly begging, I haven't been on a private tracker in over a decade but I should probably step up my game again with the way that streaming services are headed.
My previous experience was that I was completely incapable of maintaining a decent seed ratio on my home connection. I felt that many users were using seedboxes with really high upload speeds and hogging all the seeding. But I still felt it was quite a valuable community because, as people have already mentioned, the organization and quality of the torrents is infinitely better. So I basically used it sparingly for stuff that was hard to find. They also had a bunch of free-leech torrents that didn't affect your ratio, which was a really nice feature. Honestly can't remember the name of the site though.
- /r/opensignups (sadly the lemmy version seems abandoned at the moment).
  Monitor that daily if you can. Torrent leech in particular should be opening their doors soon for open registration (they usually do in spring, if not it won’t be long as they do so twice a year anyways). TL is a great starter and honestly many people will never need more. Very easy to maintain on with great free leech on anything over a certain size which ends up meaning all remuxes and most TV show seasons.
  
  Thanks for the lead 👍
- Same, also looking for private tracker invites, ideally where you're rewarded for both seed ratio and time kept alive.
  I just built a 24 TB NAS (expandable to 432 TB over time) with arrr services. I also tend to take existing content and add complete metadata for higher quality files (mostly FLAC audio files).
  
  /r/opensignups (sadly the lemmy version seems abandoned at the moment).
  Monitor that daily if you can. Torrent leech in particular should be opening their doors soon for open registration (they usually do in spring, if not it won’t be long as they do so twice a year anyways). TL is a great starter and honestly many people will never need more. Very easy to maintain on with great free leech on anything over a certain size which ends up meaning all remuxes and most TV show seasons.
  
  24 TB NAS (expandable to 432 TB over time)
  Damn, nice! I'll let you know if an invite comes my way, sounds like you would get better use out of it than me

I can find most everything I want/need on public trackers, so I've never felt the need to jump through their hoops; however easy that would be.
- If i wanted to jump through complicated hoops, I'd try paid streaming services!

I love my privates :)
- I love your privates too 😘

I’ve used them and can find a lot of stuff that isn’t available on the more open seas, but maintaining ratio is a big issue, not sure if it’s my setup or the tracker itself, so I can’t download as much as I want to.

What are some good public trackers for movies and shows? With VPN enabled of course.
- Btdig, not a tracker just searches DHT of other trackers

Not for me.
My setup puts all external traffic from my torrent container through the VPN
Getting into a private tracker is a pain
Setting up the VPN exception is a pain
I won't even know if the tracker is worth it until I'm already in and can see their library
- Some are easy like mam
  I am using all my private trackers with VPN. Some even encourage that.

Just use I2P 🤷 It's slow, but it's safe
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- What's that?
  
  https://geti2p.net
  
  An anonymous network that's better for P2P than TOR (qbittorrent supports anonymous torrents this way). Also allows hidden services like an alternative github, so they could host their code and other stuff their. That would make Nintendo's tantrums and threats meaningless.
  As somebody else posted https://geti2p.net
  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I've only been part of one private tracker, and I got kicked from them after not logging in for a month despite meeting ratios. haven't bothered since then
- iptorrents ig lol
  
  nah, it was digitalcore

Only because I was randomly invited to one by a friend, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered with it.

They're the tits. Public trackers are literal trash by comparison. Like comparing Notre Dame to a busted gas station chapel in Missouri.
Edit: Don't PM me and beg for invites... Not a chance.
- Do you have some to recommend?

TL;DR: Great to have if you're looking for less popular content, high quality files, and/or are concerned about copyright notices, but the rules that keep the niche content alive make them less appealing for super popular content.
I randomly made friends IRL about a year ago and got an invite to BTN & PTP. I don't watch/download a lot of movies, so my account at PTP has lapsed, but I've kept my account with BTN.
From my recent searches, BTN tends to have higher quality files and more seeders than public trackers, but since a) I have a seed box, which provides a line of defense against copyright notices, and is only strengthened my my aars (gets me in & out of the swarm before the studios find it), b) I usually can't tell the difference in quality from the devices I'm using (and my friends/family most definitely don't notice/care), c) seed ratio or time doesn't impact access to public trackers, and d) I prefer to keep public torrents alive, I usually lean towards public trackers, and only use the private trackers for things that are harder to find and/or things I want in high quality.
I still try to seed to a minimum ratio of 3.0 on popular files (public or private), and ∞ for more niche files, but sometimes demand is so low, and I need to move files off of my seed box. While a ratio below 1.0 makes me feel "stuck" no matter where I got the file from, private tracker rules definitely amplify that feeling.
- It's been years since I used a private tracker (pre-Netflix), but your experience seems to mirror mine.
  I'll expand on the quality angle for video, I'm going to be watching on my tablet, anything beyond 720p is going to be marginal at best. I also wear glasses, so reality rarely reaches 4K. For music I appreciate FLACC, but I'll be hard pressed to notice the difference between that and a 128kbps MP3 I encoded 25 years ago most of the time.
  Still, a well seeded deep collection is something I miss. Public trackers are fine for popular stuff, but trying to load my wife's MP3 player with musicals is proving the limits of public trackers.
  On the other hand, running a seedbox is a bit more involved than a VPN. In order to maintain ratios, keeping a seedbox is highly recommended from what I recall.

I've never liked them outside of the niches the private trackers I had access to were about.
I've had one that sucked for anything other than music (and even the music was annoying because the uploaders had boners for FLAC and this was back when file size still mattered and FLACs are fucking huge and don't sound different enough to warrant the file size), one that only hosted textbooks for college courses, and another that was strictly niche as fuck films that nobody has ever even really heard of.
It's good to filter out bad actors uploading viruses, but it also limits how much stuff is there period.

I switched to only private trackers 5 or 6 years ago and haven't looked back.

I do use private trackers but only if I can't find something on public trackers

I've never really used them as most content I can find readily available on public sites. I do want to get access to the World Boxing Video Archive one day as that is an area that seems to be pretty barren on public sites, unfortunately it seems that the registration is forever locked. Maybe I'm wrong but they all seem pretty pointless unless you have some pretty niche tastes in which case they can make a whole lot of sense.

I don't use private trackers..

ITT: the sourest of grapes.

They’re basically the RC Cola of Usenet. Instead of messing around with torrents and private trackers, just move on to the grownup option.

I've been using private trackers since demonoid. Maybe I'm just a different generation, but I enjoy sharing stuff from my local library on private trackers. Torrents rarely fully die on private trackers. People will generally reseed if they have the ability. I can quality shop, and get things that are generally harder to find/request things that I can't find anywhere.
- This. It’s definitely a very nice experience when you get into a few good ones.

id like to get into one, I have good seed ratios, just hard to know where to start

Better quality releases and more active users with much less leeches as they get thrown out.
Though there are many site admins with some complex here too.. your experience can vary.
And of course you need to contribute to the community, most trackers will grant you buffer for both uploading and keeping the torrent running. You want something, then you have to give back.
If the tracker doesnt give possebilities to build your buffer in multiple ways, other than just uploading, its usually a shit tracker.
And some are just super hard to impossible to get into. Start small, wait for open signups or just go to new trackers, they might get bigger over time.
Dont publicly beg for invites, you can humiliate yourself in private chats if you are into that.