Lots of good private torrent trackers have been opening up recently. Although we have covered most of these in separate posts, we thought it best to integrate all of them into one article to avoid the confusion. This post features summarized information about four private torrent trackers that are currently open for signup; GameGui (Games), ScL (General/0Day), STN (General/0Day) and TorrentVault (General/0Day). Note that these sites won’t say open forever – some of them will close down after a few hours and you’ll have to be quick if you are to get in.

GameGui
 
Site Name: GameGui (http://gamegui.org)
Stats: 11400+ users and 2800+ active torrents
Signup URL: http://gamegui.org/signup.php
Description: GameGui is a specialized games tracker that has never been featured on FILEnetworks Blog before. This site has Chinese origins but almost all indexed releases are international scene/p2p releases. Site language is also Chinese however all major functions come with English labels. Both PC and Console games can be found here.

ScL (The Clover)
 
Site Name: ScL
Stats: 9800+ users and 3800+ torrents
Signup URL: Site rules prohibit public display of URL
Description: Everyone should know about this one by now. ScL went down a couple of days back due to a billing issue. When it came back, fans were treated to a nice surprise – 24 hour open signups. ScL is celebrating their second birthday and currently double upload is enabled for all torrents on site. To read more about the downtime and open signups, refer to this article. 
Note: Some users were having trouble with confirmation E-mail earlier. When we checked just now, E-mail confirmation was not required.

STN (StoreThe.Net)
 
Site Name: StoreThe.Net (http://storethe.net)
Stats: 5700+ torrents and 2100+ members
Signup URL: http://storethe.net/signup.php
Description: STN is a general tracker that’s been making quite a buzz these days. Great pre times, amazing torrent uploads, one of the best request systems – it has almost everything you look for in a 0Day tracker. If you couldn’t get in via the initial open signup or the subsequent IRC invite giveaway, signups are now open again for 96 hours. Full review can be found here.

TorrentVault (TV)
 
Site Name: TorrentVault (http://www.torrentvault.org)
Stats: 5400+ torrents
Signup URL: http://www.torrentvault.org/signup.php
Description: TorrentVault is a decent General/0Day tracker with lots and lots of TV torrents. Pre times are pretty good for TV releases. Interface is very similar to that of TorrentLeech. Our full review of this site may be found here.

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Some of you might remember that we posted an article about SceneX (sX) a few weeks ago. Back then, SceneX was a private torrent tracker dealing with general content. Two months have passed and a lot has changed at sX – it is now a HD torrent tracker. Well it’s not just any HD tracker – it’s probably the first ratio free private HD torrent site around. Site’s visual layout has also been overhauled and it now sports a brand new look. SceneX is currently closed for signup and the only way in is via an invite. Don’t worry - interested members can easily obtain a free invite through sX’s official invites IRC channel.

Although sX now brands itself as a HD tracker, it might be a little different from other similar sites you know of. While majority of the site’s content comprises of HD torrents, other extremely popular releases would continue to be available on the tracker. And all indexed HD torrents will be on permanent free leech. This is better explained in a forum post:

sX is now a high definition tracker. But not just any ordinary HD tracker. First off we will have all of our HD content freeleech. So, in a way this is a ratio free HD tracker. However, we feel it would be neglectful to the sX community not to offer the major release that come out whether it be a game, or application, or a big hit movie in XviD before it hits HD. Those torrents will NOT be freeleech.

Above should explain why a ratio is still calculated on sX. Your download stats will be unmoved by any HD torrent you download – however download data will still be counted for any other type of torrent (and thus affect your global ratio). Basically, the ‘ratio-freeness’ on sX is made possible by permanent free leech on HD torrents – a concept similar to the one used by Scene Inspired (S-I). As usual hit and run is prohibited, even on torrents that are on free leech:

You must seed for at least 48 hours within a 5 day period or you will get a warning. It does not have to be consecutive but if seed break is longer then 24 hours then you may be warned.

As of 29/09/2009, sX tracks over 400 active torrents. Majority of these (as highlighted earlier) are HD content (Blu Ray, HDTV, etc).

Currently there are around 2200 registered members on sX. Signups are currently closed (they might open up for 1-2 days in the future but not sure when) but interested members can get in via IRC interview. All users get 2 free invites and 2GB upload credit upon signup.

Site Name: SceneX (http://scenex.me)

Invites Channel URL: http://scenex.me/ircinvite.php (requires Java)

Invites Channel Direct Link: irc://irc.p2p-network.net/sx.invite (for use with mIRC and similar clients)

Note: If you are trying to access sX using any other browser than FireFox, you might run into glitches: “Please Note : This website is made to work with Firefox and Firefox only.”

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UPDATE: ScL is now back and the site has open signups for 24 hours. Since tracker rules still apply, please do not post or ask for the URL – it’s not that hard to find anyway. For the official notice on open signups (posted on tracker homepage), see end of this article. 

Original Article: Fans of the ScL tracker (aka ‘The Clover’) were left stranded when they were greeted with the following message on site homepage yesterday “Domain ********* has been temporary suspended. Please contact Billing as soon as possible”. It’s been some time and ScL remains to be offline. Naturally, rumors have started flying about in the BitTorrent community, some even claiming the site is gone for good. Good news is that most of these stories are false – it’s highly likely that ScL will return, probably in just 1-2 days.

Although both the site and tracker are down, ScL’s IRC server is still functioning. And the topic in their support channel says:

News: ‘The site is down due to a billing issue... it will be up some time around Monday/Tuesday’

For the close to 6000 users of the site, this should be really great news. ScL is one of the better general/0day trackers launched in recent times - it has a great community as well as a torrent index with plenty of free leech packs (in ‘Depot’ section). And many would agree with me when i say that ScL is one the best private trackers ever, in terms of visual layout.

Open signup

As most of you now know, ScL is back and the site has opened registrations for 24 hours. This is a good opportunity for those who were waiting to get in. Quoted below is the official notice posted on homepage:

For the next 24 hours we will be having open sign-ups! Tell your friends! Tell you mom! Just don't tell Dan Glickman!
Lets welcome our new users to ********!
I would like to take this time to remind all users that dupe accounts will lead to both accounts being disabled.
Oh.. and account trading is a good way to end up in the level of hell reserved for child molesters and people who talk at the theaters.

Note: ScL’s rules prohibit mentioning full site name or URL in public. We respect trackers wishes so please do not ask for these details, invites, etc on this thread. We are posting this because we (having posted news of several ScL open signups here) have a lot of readers who are already members of this site. Thank you for understanding.

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Veteran BiTtorrent users among our readership should be familiar with the name ‘Araditracker’. Back in its time, Aradi was a hugely popular private torrent tracker with an excellent community. Unfortunately the site was shut down in late 2008 due to legal pressure and as far as the administration was concerned, there were no plans to resurrect it. So, has Araditracker been re-born? Not really. But TDS (commonly known as T*S due to site rules) is an entirely new private torrent tracker that’s run by old staff of Aradi. It’s a Gazelle based General/0Day tracker with movies and TV shows (among other things) and of course, there’s a lot of focus on community as well.

It’s only been three weeks since TDS launched and not many in the BitTorrent community know of its existence (not yet anyways).  this is probably because TDS is another private tracker that prefers less publicity. Site rules prohibit posting full tracker name or URL in public and users are encouraged to refer to it only as T*S wherever possible. (this article is posted with permission from staff –  it wouldn’t have made much sense without the the URL). Considering what happened to Aradi, TDS’s wishes to become ‘not so popular’ are understandable.

Anyways the site has been improving steadily over the past few weeks even without much publicity. Currently there are around 325 registered members and ~275 active torrents. These numbers will no doubt increase as days progress. As mentioned earlier TDS is a general tracker. However I noticed a large number of movie and TV torrents including HD releases being indexed compared to other torrents such as games, music, E-books, etc.

TDS is based on a customized version of Gazelle BitTorrent tracker script. Gazelle’s organization and performance enhancements should make TDS even more user friendly than Aradi’s ever was. Apart from BitTorrent tracker functions, TDS has a decent forum which hosts most of the community oriented activities such as radio (you get upload credit for listening to radio), competitions, chit chat, etc.

Public registrations at TDS are currently open and interested readers are free to join. All new members will get 2 invites upon signup. We do not know till when signups will remain open but they definitely won’t be open forever. Right now the entire site is set to free leech so go download some gigs.

Site Name: TDS (http://www.thedarksyndicate.com)

Signup URL: http://www.thedarksyndicate.com/register.php

Special thanks to Ceigg and rest of TDS staff for the information.

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If you didn’t know already, there is a new General/0Day tracker that’s making huge waves in the BitTorrent scene. StoreThe.Net or STN is a ratio free private torrent tracker that has recorded explosive growth in the first 10 days since launch. When we first posted about this site about three days back, it was open for signup. However the huge influx of new users forced the site to quickly go invite-only and STN’s user limit is currently capped at 1500. If you are one of those users who couldn’t get in during open signup, there is still hope. STN now has an official invites IRC channel in place.

What’s so impressive about STN is that it’s still maintaining the insanely high number of daily torrent uploads we highlighted in the previous post. During the first 10 days it’s autouploaders have spewed out no less than 5000 releases. If there were world records for private trackers, I’m sure STN would be a good contender for the ‘fastest 5000 torrent uploads’.

If you were a member of this tracker, you might have noticed the slower pre-times/download speeds on some of the torrents earlier today. There was an issue with one of STN’s seedboxes but this has now been resolved. This is what STN SysOP told us about the problem:

Apparently utorrent starts to choke around 2500 torrents or so.
We are working on switching to rtorrent for the seedboxes.
Until then, we only only keeping 5K worth of torrents live (or approx 10 days) on the seedboxes.
However the members are doing a fantastic job of seeding, so there are 6K torrents active.

And as we mentioned earlier STN’s user base skyrocketed to 1500 in a matter of 2-3 days. Had the site not gone invite only, this number would have been a lot higher by today. But there is still hope for those who missed out on the open signups. STN has set up an invites IRC channel and potential new members would be able to get invited for free (provided they pass the interview). Good news is that you’ll be in with a chance even if you are a newbie. Bad news – invites will be limited.

Invites are currently closed, however Monday sometime, we will do interviews and give out invites. Probably not many, maybe 100-200.
Will welcome n00bs as well. So for every guy that is a seasoned pro, we'll invite a n00b too.

Invites channel details are as follows:

• Server: irc.storethe.net
• Channel: #StoreThe.NET.Invites
• Direct Link: irc://irc.storethe.net/StoreThe.NET.Invites
• Help: If you are new to IRC, please read this article. You don’t have to be a power user to join an IRC chan – it’s simple.

Note that invites are not being offered right now (consider this post a heads-up). Read the channel topic before you do anything stupid such as spamming the channel or PM’ing sysops. Good Luck!

Special thanks to Yocto (STN admin) for the information provided.

Related Articles

• StoreThe.Net – Ratio Free Scene Tracker With Fast Torrent Uploads

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It’s a well known fact that you can download latest movie and TV shows from private BitTorrent trackers. However, the same cannot be said about matching subtitles for such releases. Most early/leaked versions of movie & TV releases do not come packed with subtitles - users are often left to download subs from external sources such as Opensubtitles.org and Subscene.com when this happens. If you were annoyed by this factor, TorrentLeech’s (TL) brand new automatic subtitle fetching service should be welcome news to you. TL has partnered with YourSubs, a trendy new subtitle index, to provide matching sub downloads for movie and TV shows uploaded to the tracker.   

If you haven’t already seen it, a news post from the front page is quoted below:

As many of you may have noticed, from now on, movie and tv torrents, include in their details page a subtitle list, grabbed from a brand new subtitle site: Yoursubs.org

It is still in beta phase, so small bugs may exist. Of course, we are going to optimize it in the coming week, and add new features like one-click upload of a subtitle, right from the torrent details page. In the mean time, whoever wants to upload subtitles, may do so at yoursubs.org and they will appear in TorrentLeech as soon as they are authorized by YS staff.

YourSubs.org is a relatively new subtitle index and to be honest I only heard about them for the first time in TL’s announcement. Anyways they seem to have a surprisingly good amount of indexed subtitles for a newcomer. Flashy interface and the modern look and feel is also a plus. However, I found the site’s search function to be a little inefficient – it would only return results if search query exactly matched full movie title (as displayed in drop down menu). TL users needn’t worry about this – so far the service on TL seems to work fine:

Image: YourSubs integration – how it looks on TorrentLeech 

With the popularity boost given by partnership with TL, expect YourSubs to grow rapidly in the future. And if you have a TL account (if you are a regular reader of FILEnetworks, you should have one by now), go check out this new feature – it should be visible on new movie and TV series/episode uploads.

Related Articles

• NonScene BRRip-x264 and BRRip-XviD releases now on TorrentLeech tracker
• Free TorrentLeech invites for FileList users – Now on IRC
• TorrentLeech Invite Giveaway July 2009 - 2000 IRC Invites

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Google Chrome has become browser of choice for many since its initial release back in last September. If you are one of them, here is some news that you might find interesting. ChromePlus is a customized, pimped out version of Google Chrome that adds several extra features that are otherwise unavailable in the original version. Currently there are 5 major additions including mouse gestures in ChromePlus and more are promised with upcoming builds. Best news of all – it’s free and there is no spyware inside. In addition, unneeded Chrome background communications are disabled in ChromePlus.

As we mentioned above, currently there are 5 main features offered in ChromePlus:

1. Double click tab to close page
2. Super drag
3. Mouse gesture
4. IE tab
5. Download Tools Support

You can find more information about these features and how they work, on this page. It’s worth mentioning that all regular features of Google Chrome are also available in ChromePlus.

Note that Google Chrome is known for its speed and reduced usage of system resources. Addition of new features would definitely add to the resource consumption of the app. However I don’t think the difference between original Chrome and ChromePlus’s resource usage will even be noticeable for most users. Anyways it’s an interesting app. Check it out.

[Click Here] to download latest version of ChromePlus from official download page (Windows Only)

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Fans of classic movies rejoice – our second Gormogon invitation giveaway is here. Gormogon is a private torrent tracker that specializes in obscure movies, TV shows, old time radio shows and even music. This is actually a reincarnation of the private torrent tracker previously known as Classic Cinema Zone (CCZ) but with a different administration and staff. Although only a few months old, Gormogon has already made a name for itself as a decent retro movie tracker. However, like most private BitTorrent sites, it’s closed for signup. This is where our invitation giveaway comes in – We, with a help of Gormogon staff, are giving away 150 free invite codes for our readrs - no strings attached.

Gormogon’s torrent index has grown at a healthy rate during the last three months. In fact, it has nearly doubled. When we last featured this site it only had around 2600 torrents, but now it tracks a little under 5000 files. Almost all of these torrents point to truly rare, obscure TV series and movies, some even produced before the 1950s. A limited number of torrents found on this site are tracked by external public trackers. However the vast majority are tracked by Gormogon’s own private tracker (ratio rules apply to these).

   

Apart from the content rich torrent index, Gormogon has several interesting site features such as ‘Collections’, Gallery, Bookmarks, Requests, etc. And if you prefer RapidShare or other one click hosting links to get your hands on retro stuff, you should check out Gormogon’s ‘External File Sharing’ threads located in their forums.

Anyways back to the invite giveaway.  To get invited to Gormogon, all you have to do is to send an invite request E-mail with the following format:

1. Set the subject of your E-mail to ‘Gormogon Invite – FILEnetworks Blog’.
2. Send the E-mail to loup[dot]garou[at]wowway[dot]com.

Please allow 1-3 days for the invite to be sent to you. Do not make multiple requests. Note that invites are limited and will be given out on a ‘first come, first served’ basis.

By the way, this is what FedayeenTimmy, a moderator at Gormogon, had to say about those who joined via the first FILEnetworks giveaway:

Your readers have been very courteous, have become good strong members, and gotten very active. As a Moderator, I can't ask for better than that.

So well done folks – this yet again proves we have a good reader base who are well aware of P2P best practices. Let’s keep up the good work during this giveaway as well – please try to be active and respect tracker rules.

Special thanks to FedayeenTimmy for hooking us up with the giveaway.

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This is probably old news (unless you have been watching our Twitter) however since we got several E-mails asking why it’s not posted, here goes. ScienceHD, the hugely successful private tracker for science fiction movies, TV series and documentaries, has increased user limit and opened public registrations. As a regular reader of this blog you may already have a membership on SciHD since it’s been featured multiple times on FILEnetworks before – including when the tracker accidentally opened signups for several hours back in August 2009. Anyways this time around it’s not an accident – ScienceHD is officially open and interested members are free to join.

If you are hearing about this site for the first time, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Well let me put it this way – SciHD is well on its way to become the BitMeTV of documentaries and science fiction content. After being launched back in April/May 2009, site has undergone significant improvements in the past few months, both related to indexed content as well as site features. It now has a strong community of close to 5000 registered members and over 2600 active torrents containing a wealth of infotainment. Download speeds on most of the torrents are pretty good. Site navigation and usability has also improved over time with additional customizations added to the already versatile gazelle codebase that Sci-HD uses.

Speaking of the content on SHD, they can be grouped into two main categories;  science fiction movies/TV shows (entertainment) and documentaries/other educational content (infotainment). From TV shows such as Heroes, Eureka to HD documentaries from premium publishers such as Discovery Channel, National Geographic, The History Channel, etc, SHD should be a paradise if you are into shows like this.

Some of the torrent categories on SHD – there are lots more but we don’t have room here to display the full list 

As mentioned at the start of this article, SHD is open for signup. Site will continue to accept pubic registrations either for 1 week (5 more days from today) or until the membership count reaches 7000 – whichever comes first. Following list of summarized rules (quoted from forum) should help you survive on this tracker:

1. Use your Account: Inactivity rules here ==> kb.php?id=7

2. Use a valid Client: rules.php?p=clients

3. Keep a good ratio: rules.php?p=ratio

4. Follow the upload guide carefully and ask questions if in doubt before uploading: forums.php?action=viewthread&threadid=28

5. Follow our Golden Rules carefully. Especially do not get caught uploading SciHD materials marked "Exclusive" elsewhere, and do NOT trade our invites: rules.php

Keep an eye on their inactivity rules as this is a tracker that only seeks active members.

Site Name: ScienceHD (https://sciencehd.net)

Signup URL: https://sciencehd.net/register.php

Special thanks to AzzA & Ascend for the information provided.

Related Articles

• ScienceHD – Sci-Fi & Documentary Torrent Tracker
• ScienceHD cracks down on collectors - Be active or be gone

This story was first broken on our Twitter feed - @filenetworks.

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Ratio free trackers – they are invading the world of BitTorrent. After PackMe.in and X, this is the third no ratio private torrent site featured on this blog within a week. Like X, StoreThe.Net (STN) is a scene only torrent tracker which aims to index scene released movies, music, games, TV shows and pretty much everything else. Before you close this page (“meh, another 0day tracker'”) there’s something you should know. Within 7 days since launch, STN has added over 3250 torrents – and new ones are being uploaded every few minutes. I don’t know how long it can keep up but for the last few days, STN has pretty much been acting like a scene topsite.

According to STN admin, they have access to 2-3 different topsites (high speed private FTP servers used by groups in the warez scene to dump pirated releases). If that weren’t enough, they have an autouploader bot to ensure scene releases are indexed on the tracker without delay (and without missing out on anything due to human error). To quote the admin of STN:

“We currently have 2 boxes, 1 gigabit and 1 100mb/s, each are being fed directly from 2 very large topsites, and 1 niche topsite. We index and host the torrents, the seeding and actual storage of the releases is done by different entities. The technology we use makes it look transparent to the end user, but none of the releases are hosted by or at STN ;)”

Unsurprisingly, pre times on this site during the last few days have been excellent – consistently under 1 minute for smaller files and usually under 5mins for medium sized files.

Image: Some of the torrent categories tracked by STN 

And yes, this site is ratio free. You might see the tracker recording upload:download stats and calculate a ratio but it wouldn’t matter. Currently all users are encouraged to seed a downloaded torrent for 48 hours.

Even though they have over 3000 torrents indexed, don’t forget that STN is a brand new tracker. The site is only about a week old and there aren’t many registered users. No matter how many torrents a site has, it’s bound to fail without users. Thankfully, STN admins seem to have realized this - the site is not hard to get into and signups are currently open. According to the SysOp StoreThe.Net will become invite only when they hit 300-500 users.

Is this another successful scene tracker such as GFT in the making? So far things have looked great for STN but only time will tell if it could hold out in the long run. If you are interested, check it out.

Site Name: StoreThe.Net (http://storethe.net)

Signup URL: http://storethe.net/signup.php

Special thanks to STN admin for the information provided.

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Some great private torrent trackers are opening their doors to the masses these days. PackMe.in (aka PiN aka 'The Donkey'), a ratio free private torrent tracker that deals exclusively with torrent 'packs', is the latest site to open public registrations. This site has been invite only since their launch (about 2 and a half months ago) and potential new members had to go through an IRC interview if they were to be invited. While invite channels are still active, users can easily sign up using the special signup link provided at the end of this article.  This should be a great opportunity for our readers to join this innovative new tracker.

Talking about innovation, PiN is probably the first private tracker to specialize in packs. As we highlighted in a previous post, every torrent indexed on this site is a pack (a collection of related content). You won't find individual movies or TV episodes here - but if movie packs, games packs, full TV season packs , etc is your thing, you'd love this site.

For the past two-three months, PiN has amassed no less than 500 packs. In any other tracker, content in these 500+ uploads would amount to more than couple thousand torrent files. And what’s even more important is that most of these packs are exclusive to this tracker – note how many torrents have the ‘PiN’ tag at the end, instead of the usual scene group name.

And before we forget to mention it, PiN is a ratio free tracker. You wouldn’t need seedboxes or uber high speed internet connections to survive on this site. However like most ratio free trackers, hit and run is prohibited. Following is quoted from rules section:

Do not hit and run. You must seed or leech a torrent a total of 7 days within 21 days or to a 1:1 ratio. Regular hit and running will result in the disabling of your account.

It’s not just the torrents that are unique on PiN – everything from the login page, seed bonus system (aka pack points) to the user class scheme is cleverly designed, matching ‘The Donkey’ theme (and i think they pushed TBDEV to its limits in terms of customization). We won’t ruin these surprises for you – get in and see for yourself.

It’s unknown till when the open signups will continue. However it looks like they will be on for a while as the tracker is trying to get some new blood in (which should help boost activity on some torrents btw).

Site Name: PackMe.In (https://packme.in)

Signup URL:  https://packme.in/oya.php

If PiN has closed the open registrations by the time you read this, please look here for invite IRC channel details. You will still be able to get in through IRC interview.

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Invite applications are becoming an increasingly popular way to recruit members for private torrent trackers. We’ve seen the likes of Sparvar, PTN, TemplateP2P, etc use them and the latest site to deploy online invite apps is PTFiles (PTF). PTFiles, which is a reincarnation of now defunct Phoenix-Torrent, has made significant improvements as a general/0day tracker since its return back in 2008. It has a good community, a feature rich site and lots of torrents – things most users would look for in a general tracker. In addition, PTF now have their own internal release group named EMBER (who seem to specialize in BRRip/DVDRip/DVDR releases of new and old movies).

At last check, PTFiles tracked over 2500 active torrents and had over 3100 registered members. Bulk of this site’s users seem to be very active both on forums as well as on IRC. As we mentioned in a previous article several months back, PTF’s new site interface (PTF 2.0) is not short of features. Apart from standard BitTorrent tracker features such as arcade, shoutbox, forum, bookmarks, trivia, etc, some really cool additional options such as the ability to create new themes (thanks to this feature PTF now has over 35 themes), ‘genres’ feature, moods addon, all kinds of bonus systems (reputation points, karma bonus points (coins), IRC seed bonus, etc), Requests/Offers sections, Wiki, tabbed torrent browse pages, flash games, TV guide, photoshop, pastebin, etc, are also available.

If you want to get into PTF you can either fill up the invite application or simply sign up during the daily open signup period.  A countdown to the next open signup window will be displayed in the questionnaire page, making things a lot easier for those who want to get in. This should look something like:

Registrations will be Open in X hour and YY minutes for a period of 2 hours. Tomorrows open registration hours will be set tonight after 23:59:59 GMT.

Anyways invite application is not hard and there are only a couple of questions that need answering.

Site Name: PTFiles (http://ptfiles.net/)

Invite Application URL: http://ptfiles.net/questionnaire.php (Use the ‘Signup’ link on this page to directly create an account when registrations are open)

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A pleasant surprise for those who thought FileList.org was dead and gone. It looks like the tracker might live to fight another day. I’m pretty sure majority of FileList’s users thought the site was gone for good when things because quite. Hell, TL even gave away invites to FileList members who were seemingly stranded. Anyways now it’s good news all around - Both FileList homepage and it’s BitTorrent tracker are showing signs of life after an extended period of inactivity. New torrents are being uploaded and there are several new announcements posted on site, some of which briefly explain the reasons for recent downtime.

Quoted below are several news updates quoted from site homepage:

2009-09-22 - We greatly apologize for the downtime. Explanations will come soon, it mainly has to do with the admin being on summer break.

2009-09-22 - If you have lost your password, click here to recover it.

2009-09-22 - Note: If you are trying to recover a forgotten password and you’re using hotmail, you will need to disable junk mail filters to receive the confirmation. Also make sure to look in the junk mail folders.

2009-09-22 - Questions or Comments? Visit us on irc for help. Network: EFnet Channel: #filelist If you think your account was hacked (password stolen) please report it to the channel op (@).

Things are looking positive even on the IRC channel. Channel topic reads:

Topic is ::: Filelist UP We're back! :0 sorta! Bare with us! check announcements soon for updates.

I’m sure a lot more information regarding recent inactivity will be made available in the coming days. More importantly, normal service might resume soon at FileList – over 20 new torrents have been uploaded today itself and more are being uploaded as we speak.

FileList.org is closed for signups and they do not have any IRC recruitment ongoing. This is just a heads up for existing members who thought the tracker was gone forever – it’s alive.

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As we promised via Twitter yesterday,The Horror Charnel (THC) invitation giveaway is here. Unlike our last few giveaways, you don’t have to worry about ‘limited’ number of invite codes. This giveaway is handled by THC staff themselves and yeah, there are unlimited invites available. This should be welcome news to those who love horror, cult and sleaze movies – THC has a great collection of such movies and most of the torrents in its index are very rare and not found elsewhere. Unlimited invites offer should be a great opportunity for those waiting to get in as this tracker does not usually open its door to the public (last time it opened up was back in last February, on Friday the 13th :p )

THC by no means is a new private tracker. It’s a veteran site that has a good reputation in the BitTorrent community. As of 21/09/2009, there are over 3850 registered members and over 1200 torrents indexed on THC. For a tracker that has less than 5k users, seeder/leecher activity is surprisingly good. Note that inactive members are very frequently deleted and don’t expect to last long on THC if you are a collector.

The Horror Charnel is a community oriented tracker with tons of site features that bind the community together. It’s torrent index is incredibly detailed (see screenshot below) and everything from category icons to background images match the ‘cult’ theme of the tracker. They have some additional interesting features such as ‘Free movie of the week’, ‘theme of the month’, etc all of which promote activity and participation of existing users. A karma bonus system also exists.

Over 100 different torrent categories and sub-categories can be found on THC and some truly crazy ass movies are scattered among these genres, just waiting to be found (it has some of the most unusual categories ever found on a torrent tracker; ‘uber-low budget’, ‘women in prison’, ‘clowns’ and….. wait for it…. ‘mothers’, etc). Horror Charnel indexes both movies and TV shows - these range from relatively new flicks to those released back in the 1960’s. Some good movie packs and several complete TV season packs can also be found.

Back to the burning question – how does on get into THC? As we mentioned earlier this is a private tracker and public registrations are closed. However, you can easily request an invite directly from tracker staff via E-mail. You don’t have to do much:

1. Create two ratio proofs from two private trackers you are already a member of. These need to be un-edited.
2. Send your ratio proofs to this E-mail address: thc[dot]invites[at]gmail[dot]com 
   Set the subject of your mail to ‘THC Invite – FILEnetworks Blog’ 
   Clearly mention in message body, the E-Mail address you want the invite sent to.

If approved by staff, you will be sent an invitation. Good Luck!

Special thanks to Azazel and THC staff for the support given.

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Hits4.Us is a brand new music torrent tracker that has recorded some rapid growth in the past few weeks. It tracks a wide range of US/UK English music across a number of different genres, including some music video torrents as well. Behind Hits4.Us is a veteran crew in the BitTorrent scene; it’s brought to you by the same folks behind successful trackers such as XWT (a poplar wrestling tracker), A4N (decent general tracker) and XWT-Classics (another wrestling tracker). With the backing of such an experienced staff, future of Hits4.Us definitely looks bright. And for those of you who want to get in, signups are currently open.

If I remember correctly, this tracker was launched somewhere around the 1st of September. Within only three weeks, Hits4.Us has managed to recruit over 3700 members – an outstanding achievement for a private tracker indeed (the notice announcing tracker launch on XWT homepage should definitely have helped). Over 575 torrent have also been uploaded, at an average of ~30 new torrents per day.

Hits4.Us tracks English music from the likes of US and UK. Following paragraph which describes the type of content available on this tracker, is quoted from a forum post:

This is a Dedicated Music Tracker which means we will ONLY allow Music to be uploaded. The only exception to this Rule is Concerts/Music Videos and Music Applications.

Currently there are 31 different music genres defined as torrent categories. It appears that there are both scene and non scene content available on this tracker. Below is an screenshot of part of Hits4.Us categories and torrent index:

Like most sites from the XWT family, Hits4.us is open for registration. However open signups may not last forever so get in while you can.

Site Name: Hits4.Us (http://hits4.us)

Signup URL: http://hits4.us/signup.php

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Judging by the amount of hits we got for our previous NFS : Shift troubleshooting article, it seems a lot of folks were experiencing the dreaded ‘black screen crash’ problem with the game. If you tried the workarounds mentioned in our previous article (thanks to those who posted more possible solutions as comments btw) and still couldn’t get the game to work or got it to play rather sh1ttly, here is something else that you can try. Given below is a custom configuration file for NFS : Shift with settings that could minimize the occurrences of black screens or random CTDs.

Note that the idea behind this workaround was originally posted in EA’s support forums. Credit to whoever figured this out first.

How to apply updated fix

1. Make a backup of your current GraphicsConfig.xml file located in My Documents –> NFS Shift folder (in case anything goes wrong, replace edited config with backup copy)
2. Download the custom configuration file from this location. UnRAR the archive using WinZip or WinRAR.
3. Replace your existing copy of GraphicsConfig.xml (located in My Documents—> NFS Shift folder) with one in downloaded archive.
4. Run the game.

Note that the above configuration file will launch the game in 1280x720 resolution. If your monitor/VGA does not support it, please change the resolution by editing this line in configuration file (open GraphicsConfig.xml with a text editor such as notepad) :

<prop name="Mode" adapter="0" width="1280" height="720" antialias="0" refresh="60" />

For example, if you want to run the game in 1024 x 768 resolution, edit the above so that it reads:

<prop name="Mode" adapter="0" width="1024 height="768" antialias="0" refresh="60" />

If you still cannot get it to work, you can try manually editing other settings in the configuration file. However, placing incorrect values might cause the game malfunction – proceed at your own risk.

Please do not copy and paste this article elsewhere. You are of course welcome to link to it.
If you liked this article do not forget to subscribe to our RSS feed. You can also follow us on Twitter. We bring you the latest BitTorrent news, private torrent tracker updates, leaks, downloads and more.

Related Articles

• How to fix Need For Speed : Shift black screen error or crashes

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We we have said many times before, ratio free private torrent trackers are becoming increasingly common. Some trackers such as GFT and PTN have had great success with this model while several others such as SceneRace are considering reverting back to a ratio based model. Anyways the growth of ratioless private torrent sites have not stopped and this article is about one such brand new ratio free tracker; X. X is a new scene 0-day releases tracker that is only a couple of weeks old. The site has been invite only from the start but if you are interested in getting in, an invite can easily be obtained via IRC recruitment.

As mentioned above, X is only three weeks old and is largely unknown in the BitTorrent world. However the site has already amassed over 1150 torrents (as of 20/09/2009) – almost all of these 0-day scene releases. Pre times on this tracker seem to be good and majority of the torrents have under 10-minute pre times. Both the high number of daily torrents and good pre times can be associated with X’s autouploader bot. Torrents however need more seeders/leechers – a problem almost all new trackers go through in early days.

Although the title of this article might lead you to believe that X is a scene-only tracker, it’s not. There are two browse pages – one for scene releases and the other for non scene content such as old movies and games. However, non scene section contains less than 10 torrents at the time this article is written.

As the title says, X is a ratio free tracker. Global upload:download ratio doesn’t matter on this site. However, you do need to seed every downloaded torrent to a 1:1 ratio OR for at least 48 hours (whichever is possible). A bonus system is also present on the site.

Like many other private torrent trackers, X is built on TBDEV tracker script. It has a slightly dark theme that’s easy on the eyes. Navigation is easy and the interface is not cluttered.

X seems to be a tracker that prefers less publicity. Following is quoted from site rules section:

Do not reveal our full name, URL, or details of our tracker anywhere else. Those who break this rule will be caught and banned.
Failure to follow this may result in a permanent ban. Refer to us only as X and ONLY to people you trust and intend to use your invite on.

There are some other rules pertaining to downloading, uploading, etc and reading rules.php is the first thing you should do if you get accepted.

Speaking of getting accepted, currently there is only one way to get into X – via IRC interview. You might be asked to submit ratio proof from other trackers during the interview. IRC server and channel details are as follows:

• Server: irc.p2p-network.net
• Port: 6667
• Channel: #X-invites
• Direct Link: irc://irc.p2p-network.net:6667/x-invites
• Help: If you are new to IRC, please read this article. You don’t have to be a power user to figure our IRC.

Anyways good luck everyone with the interviews. And special thanks to X sysops and staff for the heads up.

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About two years back, there was a nice little application called Autopatcher. Autopatcher was similar to an offline version of Windows Update – it was a 3rd party setup package which contained all updates released by Microsoft. Needless to say, this was a huge hit among the Windows community. But then Microsoft spoiled the party by sending Autopatcher a ‘Cease and Desist’ notice which hampered the project. Windows Update Downloader is a similar utility that automatically retrieves updates from Microsoft and allows users to re-use the downloaded files. The next time you reinstall Windows, you won’t have to download and install every update from scratch (which is painful btw).

Windows Updates Downloader gets latest available update information from Update Lists (ULs). Regularly updated ULs can be found on WUD homepage. Once you get an update list, WUD allows you to download all or selected updates in it to your computer. Once the downloads are complete, you are able to integrated downloaded updates to your Windows installation using a tool such as nLite.

This tool should be useful for those who frequently install/reinstall Windows. In addition, it’ll save you a lot of bandwidth if you have multiple computers running Windows (you can use the same disk to update multiple PCs).

Download

A new version of WUD (v2.50) was released a few days ago. It features fixed service pack support and other minor updates. You can download this free piece of software from app homepage.

[Click Here] to download latest build of Windows Update Downloader from official download page.

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It’s always exiting news when new trackers open up. It’s even more exciting when niche trackers go online. Wii-Leech is one such specialized tracker that is brand new to the BitTorrent scene. As the name suggests, this tracker focuses only on games and tools related to the Nintendo Wii video game console. Although Wii is hugely popular, there are only a handful torrent trackers that focus on this niche such as nTorrents and GCTracker (down). There definitely is room for more similar trackers and Wii – Leech seems to be a nice new addition to this list.

It’s only been a few days since this tracker has been launched it it already tracks over 120 torrents. Almost all of these are Wii games (both PAL and NTSC formats are available) apart from a few torrents related to Wii modding, toolkits and guides. Currently there are around 22% registered members but these numbers are expected to go up as the site gains more exposure.

Most of the indexed game releases seemed to be those pre’d by groups from the warez scene (not exactly sure how much p2p oriented content is there).

As you might have noticed, most new trackers launch with free leech, double upload, seed bonus system and other little gizmos.  Well Wii-Leech doesn’t have any of these – it looks like a tracker that is solely focused on content, as opposed to looks and extras. Anyways the site is brand new and nothing much can be said about it at this stage. But if you are looking forward to join a torrent community dedicated to Wii stuff, check this out.

Site Name: Wii Leech (http://www.wii-leech.info)

Signup URL: http://www.wii-leech.info/signup.php

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Many would agree with us when we say Torrent Damage is one of the best General/0Day trackers around. A content rich torrent index, good download speeds, user friendly interface, friendly staff and a good community – it has everything you’d expect from a good private torrent tracker. If you are a member of this site, there’s even more good news – This weekend (starting 18th) is TD’s ratio building weekend. It’s the perfect opportunity to fix your stats as all members will enjoy ratio bonuses of up to 300%. And if you are thinking of joining this tracker, there are invites available on TD’s IRC. With ratio building weekend in progress, now would be a great time to join TD.

So what’s so special about the next two days? The following paragraph (quoted from Torrent Damage forum) should give you a pretty good idea:

From Fridee th' 18th Septembree at 22:00 UTC or thar abouts we be doin' a ratio buildin' until Sundee th' 20th Septembree at 23:59 UTC
GADZOOKS!! 300%!!
Th' way this works be, whatereyou download, only counts 50% towards yer download statistics, an' whatereyou upload counts 150% towards yer upload statistics. This gives ye an effective 300% ratio boost!
Example: Ye really download 100,000,000 bytes an' upload 100,000,000 bytes. Torrent-Damage will record a download o' 50,000,000 bytes an' record an upload o' 150,000,000 bytes, givin' ye an effective 3:1 ratio instead o' a 1:1
Also, this ratio buildin' be nay limited t' stuff which be uploaded durin' this time - 'tis everythin' on th' site!

If you can’t decode the ‘pirate speak’ above, it basically says the tracker will record 1.5 times the actual amount you upload and will only record half the size of your downloads, giving your global ratio a massive boost.

It’s not only the ratio building weekend that’s so special about this tracker. As we mentioned earlier, TD is a great general tracker in its own right. It’s a veteran BitTorrent site that’s been around for ages and more importantly, it has improved over time. For example, Torrent Damage launched TDv2 last January – the site now runs on a fast, heavily modified Gazelle codebase. It is also one of the larger general private trackers out there, with over 40000 members and over 28000 active torrents.

I’ve seen TD invites being requested on various BitTorrent forums but many don’t know that TD has an invites IRC channel. We talked about it several months back and if you still haven’t got in, information below might come in handy:

How to Join the Torrent-Damage invites IRC channel

Note that the invites channel is only accessible via the web based IRC client Mibbit (mIRC does not work unless you are TD staff or uploader).

Easiest way log into this channel is by clicking on this direct link.

If you are having problems with the above, follow the directions below:
Go to http://mibbit.com/chat/ and enter the following details there:
Server: falcon.torrent-damage.net (click on the ‘server’ link to enter server name)
Channel : #td-invite
Nick: A nickname of your choice 

Once you are in the channel, you will be greeted by TD’s IRC bot. Do exactly as it says – don’t say things like ‘please give me an invite’ since it’s only a coded script and won’t understand you anyways (and that would be embarrassing). You will be prompted to provide 1 speedtest and 1 ratio proof (screenshots you provide must be unmodified and un-cropped). Once you submit these (as per instructions by bot), wait patiently for staff to approve them and invite you to TD.

Site Name: Torrent Damage (http://www.torrent-damage.net/)

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I don’t know about you but I’ve always wanted to do this, and I’ve found the perfect utility to do it. Volumouse is a simple but useful utility that lets you control system sound volume with your mouse wheel. The best part about it - your mouse wheel not only be limited to volume control. The application lets you define when exactly the mouse should control the sound volume. For example,  you can tell the application to adjust volume when alt key is pressed - in all other cases mouse wheel will be used for regular functions such as web page scrolling etc. Volumouse is a product of Nirsoft – it’s completely free and is not bundled with any unwanted cr@pware.

As you can see from the above screenshot, you can hand over volume control to mouse even for specific scenarios such as ‘Windows media player is focused’. You can set one to five of such conditions. Further customizations can be made to the way volume is altered. You can fine tune these settings and trust me, you’ll love it once you get used to Volumouse.

Download

Volumouse is totally free and is only 115kb in file size.

[Click Here] to download latest version of Volumouse from official server (link auto updated with latest build)

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We have given out hundreds of Cinematik invites via FILEnetworks Blog before but the demand just keeps increasing. Cinematik is apparently a very popular tracker among our readers.  Here is some good news for those waiting to get their hands on a free invite – We, with the help of Cinematik administrators, are giving away 175 invitations to this tracker for free – no ratio proofs required and no strings attached. Invitations will be handed out on a ‘first come, first served’ basis (our Twitter followers should have got a heads-up). If you don’t know what it is, Cinematik is a private BitTorrent site that specializes in classic, independent, rare and outlandish movies.

We’ve seen people signing up for this tracker ‘just because they can’ and then abandoning their accounts without even using them. Please avoid doing this at all costs. By registering an account without the intention to actually use it, you are not only wasting the site’s resources but also blocking others from getting in (since invites are limited). Below is a brief description of Cinematik tracker (provided by Cinematik crew) - read it and if the content does not appeal to you, please do not waste an invitation.

Our mission is to provide cinephiles of classic, independent, rare and outlandish films a friendly location to discuss and share their own interests with current members of this ever-growing community."

We are a ratio-based tracker. It's a purely DVDR (DVD5/DVD9, PAL+NTSC) community, with a lot of rare releases. There are a lot of quality films as far as as classic, cult, foreign and indie go. Once you join you will soon get a feel for what is and isn't allowed on the site by browsing through it.

We do carry a lot of films that were big hits in their day, but you won't find the latest blockbuster flicks here.

We're part of the Golden bandwagon, thanks to our lovely bastard-sister-site AsianDVDClub, with a freeleech Movie of the Week and usually at least a dozen other torrents, picked by staff or suggested by members rotated semi-weekly. All the largest torrents have Silver status - usually big box sets - which is that only 1/2 the downloaded stats are counted.

Cinematik currently tracks over 16000 torrents and has a strong user base of over 8000 registered members. For those concerned, here is an screenshot which shows part of the torrent index:

Note: This is a FILEnetworks exclusive giveaway. We don’t mind you sharing this news with your friends at other BitTorrent forums/sites but please do not post direct links to the giveaway page or copy paste invitation codes from the list. If you want to share the news, feel free to link to this article. This giveaway should be productive for both the users as well as the tracker itself – we do not want random people signing up without even knowing what Cinematik is all about.

IMPORTANT:

• Do not make multiple accounts. You will be banned.
• Read Cinematik Rules and FAQ

Invitation Codes List: http://cinematik.net/filenetworks.php

Signup URL: http://cinematik.net/register.php?with_invite=1

Use the above mentioned signup URL to insert your invitation and register an account. Invitation codes page will initially contain 175 codes. Once a code is used, it will be removed from the page. If you cannot see any of the codes, it means all were used up. Good luck!

Special thanks to Cinematik administration and staff.

Keep reading FILEnetworks Blog, our Giveaway threads, and our private trackers section for more free invites and open signup updates. Follow us on Twitter for more news that isn’t posted on main page.

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You probably have not heard about XtremeZone but it’s a large Romanian 0Day torrent tracker with scene and p2p releases. Last time we mentioned this tracker was back in April 2008 – obviously it hasn’t had that many open signups. New users however could register on XtremeZone by making a donation, even during the times it was closed. Anyways this is a private tracker that can rival iPlay, TorrentBits and LastTorrents, in terms of download speeds and content. It has relatively good pre times, some great torrent packs and almost every major scene and p2p release indexed. If you are looking to be part of a good general tracker, Xtreme Zone is currently having free signups.

Although the exact number of registered members on this tracker is unknown, it’s clear that Xtreme Zone is a pretty large private tracker (based on Alexa Rankings and judging by number of seeders/leechers on popular torrents). Most popular indexed torrents usually have more than 50-100 seeders each. Xtreme Zone has a pretty large active torrents index as well – as of 16/09/2009 there are over 8000 files. Download speeds are pretty good on most of these torrents.

As mentioned XtremeZone is a general-0day tracker. You can expect to find almost every major scene and p2p release indexed here. In addition, there are close to 150 torrent packs (some of which are huge btw). Something that I noticed with packs is that some of them seem to be taken from other private trackers such as ScL, TL and TTi. Take a look at the screenshot below and notice the torrents that end with ‘ScL’ tag (there are a lot more of these):

Either way XtremeZone is currently open for free signup. We do not exactly know for how long the signups will remain open but it’s safe to assume that it won’t be for long. If you are looking for a good General tracker, check this site out.

Site Name: XtremeZone (http://xtremezone.ro)

Signup URL: http://xtremezone.ro/free-signup.php (signup link mentioned in homepage will take you to the donate page)

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This has been a great month for PC gaming with the release of Resident Evil 5, Batman Arkham Asylum. Red Faction : Guerilla, etc. Today saw the release of yet another highly anticipated title for the PC, Need for Speed : Shift. First of all thank you EA for not fuc*ing up another NFS title – this game seems very promising. Based on my experience with the game so far (that’s 1-2 hours), car handling has been significantly improved. When maxed out, graphics looked pretty amazing  (especially the car models). Anyways purpose of this article is to provide possible fixes to some problems several folks seem to be having with the game.

NFS : Shift screen goes black

You might be able to load the game just fine but sometimes – mostly when you get control of a vehicle (when you load a race) - monitor might suddenly go black. Nothing but a black screen will be visible. This seems to be happening a lot under Windows XP. There are two possible fixes that might solve this issue (provided that your system meets minimum requirements)

Run game under compatibility mode for Windows 98.

Yeah it’s strange, we are used to running games under XP SP2 compatibility when problems arise. Since the black screen might be related to XP environment, try running with Windows 98/Me compatibility.

1. Right click the NFS : Shift executable (or shortcut).

2. Select ‘Properties’ and go to the ‘Compatibility’ tab. Choose Windows 98 from the list, select it and press ok.

3. Run the game.

There is another solution but this might be a little extreme. From the responses I saw on various gaming forums, Windows 7 users have had a lot less problems with NFS : Shift than XP users. If possible, try running the game under Windows 7.

Do you use a game controller?

Lots of people use 3rd party controllers rather than mouse + keyboard to play NFS games. Sometimes, issues or incompatibilities with such hardware might cause random crashes or black screen errors. If you are experiencing any, try removing your game controller and playing the game.

Whatever you do, please update your DX9 to the latest monthly runtime (regardless of using Vista, XP or Windows 7). It can be downloaded from here. This will fix most (if not all) missing dll file errors and other issues related to DirectX. Also, don’t forget to update your display and audio drivers.

This post will be updated as more fixes are discovered.

If you liked this article do not forget to subscribe to our RSS feed. You can also follow us on Twitter. We bring you the latest BitTorrent news, private torrent tracker updates, leaks, downloads and more.

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