PTN down, SceneRace moves, GFT broken

This post is not really an update on private torrent tracker open signups. It’s rather a relatively short news update on three well known torrent sites; PTN, GFT and SceneRace. We’ve been getting a lot of mails asking what’s up with these trackers as of late and hopefully this post should answer at least a few of your questions. Well the info we have is not entirely ‘good news’ but it could have been a lot worse ; PTN has been experiencing hosting problems, SceneRace is locating their servers in another country and GFT has lost the entire torrent index.

PTN
 
The popular ratio free movie tracker PTN has been down for several days. The site does not display any messages but simply times out when trying to establish a connection. The reason for this is that they are having hosting problems. Here is what ‘Rodin’ (PTN community rep)  posted on TPS forums:  “we have some host problems and we are trying to resolve them asap”. So it’s not just you that’s having trouble accessing the tracker. However, knowing that this is just a temporary downtime should be comforting for most PTN members.

SceneRace
 
SceneRace (ScR), a ratioless General/0Day tracker based on Gazelle codebase, seems to have just completed a server move. Guess which country they moved to? Sweden. With all the recent Swedish private tracker shutdowns after TPB trial, one would think Sweden’s role as a safe heaven for BitTorrent trackers was over. However this does not seem to be the case – not according to SCR admins anyways. 

You are getting this message because you are a member at SceneRace.net
Over the next hour or so we will be moving the site over to our new server in Sweden, so you may experience up to 48 hours of down time (maybe longer if your ISP sucks)
ScR isn't gone or anything, we're just moving
FYI we chose sweden because the laws are still safe for trackers, even if certain court cases say otherwise...
-The SceneRace.net Team

Let’s hope SCR has a long stay in their new home.

GFT
 
Out of the three trackers mentioned in the article, GFT probably suffered the worst – they seem to have lost their entire torrent index. When I logged into the site about a day ago, there were only two torrents being tracked. This was pretty odd because the lat time I checked GFT tracked over 5000 torrents. The following site notices explain what happened:

16.06.2009 - Someone broke the Site

All torrents except for today have been deleted, u are safe to remove them from your client without getting a HnR warning

16.06.2009 - Restoring Old Torrents

If any users still have the old .torrent files for stuff they previously were seeding...
Feel free to upload these .torrent files to the site.
Any users who still may have these old torrents seeding in their client will still be marked as seeding these files once they are again uploaded to the site.
These files being re-uploaded to the site will allow us to rebuild our archives of older content so long as people still have them in their clients.

This probably won’t matter because GFT is not a good tracker to download relatively old releases anyways – it’s best known for kick ass pre times. Their pre times do not seem to have suffered and new releases are being indexed as usual. Good enough for me.

In other news, MP3 music tracker SceneSound has seemingly re-enabled country bans after lifting them only two days ago.

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