How Not To Send Your Tracker Invite Requests

In addition to bringing you news from the BitTorrent scene, we also give away invitations for various private trackers. In fact, we have now conducted over 50 giveaways in conjunction with staff from various torrent sites. During some of these giveaways, we simply direct users to a tracker’s invite IRC channel, recruitment thread, special signup URL, online invite application, etc and staff then take it over from there. In other cases we ask readers to send an E-mail to our invite request address – we process the request and send an invite back over E-mail. Whenever this is done we clearly specify the format of the mail you need to compose (with specific subject text and contents that should be included in msg body) on the the giveaway article itself. While majority of the responses we get are well formed, we do receive quite a few dodgy mails as well. Quoted below are some of the requests that made it to our hall of shame.

Included screenshots are from requests we received for our most recent giveaway, which was for BlackCats Games. Although we clearly specified how to send in the invite request E-mail in the giveaway post itself, take a look at some of the interesting responses we received. We have edited out the names and E-mail addresses of the senders to protect their privacy.

1. What we asked for was a profile link on a private tracker the reader was already a member of. Instead, we received a 4MB Bitmap image that made the E-mail server cry (the image was an screenshot of a tracker profile page – which was not needed).

2. This response has fail written all over it. It has none of the information we requested and even the subject line is wrong. We sort invite E-mails by the subject text and if you set this incorrectly (to something other than the one mentioned in the giveaway article), your response will not get processed.

3. Again, another example of a dumb request. This one does not even have the name of a tracker. I’m pretty sure this is one of those folks who litter BitTorrent invite forums and blogs with generic posts like “please send me invite for XYZ tracker. my email is dumbass@provider.com. thx in advance”. There were a lot of similar requests sent in by different users and this is just one example. Kinda sad, really.

4. When we respond to an invite request E-mail, we usually use the ‘reply’ button in our mail client. This particular user had support@google.com set as his reply E-mail and needless to say the invite code got sent to that address. This is not really an error with the invite request itself but just be careful what you set as the default reply-to address in your outgoing mails.

5. There are some folks who try to improve their chances by sending in multiple requests. Some do it from different E-mail address and some (like the guy below) do it with the same address. If we detect someone sending multiple requests for the same giveaway (and we usually do), all of those mails will go straight to the trash bin (and the addresses will also be added to the junk mail filter).

6. There was nothing wrong with this guy’s invite request. However, the automatic response he had set up had us surprised. “I’ll Feed You Back as Soon as Possible…”. You might want to change this text buddy.

By posting the above, we did not want to trash anybody. We just wanted to say that the key to obtaining an invite from giveaway threads conducted by FILEnetworks (and other blogs) is to follow instructions in the giveaway article itself. This usually has detailed information on how and what you should include in an invite request. Either way, good luck with your next invite reqeust – we have some more giveaways coming up :)

Tweet