ScT Tracker (SceneTorrents) To Shut Down, Rumors Galore, Alternatives

Update: TorrentLeech (TL) and other trackers are giving away free invites to ex-ScT members to help them out. Read this post for more info.
As per information posted on SceneTorrents (ScT)’s forum & IRC channel ( and sent via mass PM) , both the site and the tracker will shut down for good in a few hours. If ScT indeed shuts down, it will be a huge blow to the private tracker community as the site was truly a veteran in the BitTorrent scene. It was nearly 5 years old tracker that had amazing pre times, awesome packs and of course blazing fast download speeds. Exact reason/reasons why such a decision was taken has not been clearly mentioned, either on-site or on IRC. This has probably given birth to a lot of rumors some attributing ScT’s (impending) death with ‘Loop’ topsite raid which we reported about earlier.

Rumors

To be honest, we really don’t know if BREIN taking down ‘Loop’ has anything to do with ScT’s shutdown. Affiliated servers getting raided isn’t new to ScT. Back in 2008, TV Land (TVL), a P2L site that was used by a lot of ScT uploaders was shut down. However the torrent tracker continued to live on despite suffering from delayed pre times for a few days. Either way current topic on SCT IRC channel looks something like this:

* Now talking in #SceneTorrents
* Topic is News : Site Closing - Sunday 29th Nov 2009 10PM GMT. RIP SCT - 25/08/05 - 29/11/09 : CHECK PROFILE FOR BLACK DESIGN LAYOUT'

ScT’s IRC channel which was invite only has now been made public. Currently there are over 1000 users online but the place has turned into a spamfest with invite requests and trade offers. If you want to access the IRC, details are as below:

Server: irc.scenetorrents.org
Channel: #SceneTorrents
Direct Link: irc://irc.scenetorrents.org/scenetorrents

Some long time ScT members are not taking the news too well (understandably) and have come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories. Some claim the news about shut down is just a distraction to launch ScT v2.0, the next major site overhaul which was planned earlier. They quote images embedded in site (such as this https://www.eu.scenetorrents.org/themes/blue/pic/about_banner.png and this https://www.eu.scenetorrents.org/about.php) to support their theory. Then there’s been other rumors related to finances and tax which would be wrong to post here without any proof.

Alternatives

As of 29/11/2009 there are nearly 20000 registered, active members on SceneTorrents. It’s safe to assume majority of this userbase has access to seedboxes and/or high bandwidth internet connection. It can also be assumed that these members are aware of P2P best practices, having survived on a difficult-to-seed tracker like ScT.  In other words, these are the type of users any private tracker would love to have.
UPDATE: See this article for details about TorrentLeech and PolishTracker invite giveaways for ex-ScT users.

More Rumors

There are rumors flying about that speak of shutdown of other trackers such as SCC, GFT and so on. We’d like to clarify that as of this moment these are all false. One of the reasons why a lot of private trackers are down/unstable today is that CaratNetworks (which hosts a number of private trackers) is suffering from a DDOS attack (credit to ‘Red’ for the info). And the following prespam (which came from a P2P channel if I remember correctly) didn’t help things much.

CaratNetworks.RAIDED.BY.FBI.DOZENS.OF.SITES.OFFLINE.LARGEST.
CANADIAN.P2P.RAID.EVER.HAS.JUST.HAPPENED

Anyways if ScT indeed is shutting down for good, R.I.P. It was without a doubt a great tracker and one of the best scene only sites that ever existed.

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