BTN has opened IRC interviews once again. This popular TV torrent tracker has so far managed to justify the huge hype it received during launch. In fact, we can boldly declare that BTN is one of the most innovative and feature rich private torrent trackers to be launched during the 2009 – 2010 period. This specialized ratio free TV torrent tracker has great content, good download speeds and of course, very fast pre times. Despite being an excellent torrent site, BTN is not out of reach of the average BitTorrent user. Although it remained completely closed (no user invites and closed down invite applications) for several months, this tracker is once again accepting new members through an IRC interview process.

BTN Logo

If you’ve been browsing BitTorrent forums such as TPS or FST recently, you may have stumbled across threads which compare BTN to the likes of BitMeTV, TVTorrents.Com and Freshon.TV, the leading TV trackers in the world. This prompted us to check some statistics from these sites - here’s how BTN compares to other leading trackers of the same niche, in terms of number of users and active torrents:

Tracker No. Of Torrents No. Of Users
BTN 14000 4350
BitMeTV 25600 21700
TVTorrents.Com 16000 56000?
Freshon.TV 10200 21000?

Is this tracker really the king of TV torrent sites? Not quite, but it’s definitely getting there. As you can see from the table above, BTN’s main ‘weakness’ compared to other sites is the lack of users. Existing members of the site would know that this isn’t too much of a problem but the current open interviews should help expand the user base in any case. Also remember that we’re comparing a tracker that’s only a few months old with some of the oldest private trackers in the BitTorrent scene. BitMeTV for instance is over 5 years old. Anyways one thing is clear – BTN has done exceptionally well in the short period of time it’s been online (oh and in terms of site usability features, BTN beats the hell out of all other sites mentioned above).

BTN Index

Since our last mention of the site, BTN has added several great new features. Once of the most attractive of these is the autouploader bot – this means that more scene releases will be added to the tracker at even faster pre times. A number of other usability features including enhanced search, Actors page, TV news page, improvements to series pages and series lists pages, 1 new skin (woodenglass), etc have also been introduced. For a detailed account of BTN’s features and screenshots, we suggest you check out this article.

As mentioned in the title of this post, IRC interviews are now open. The interview itself is not likely to take a lot of time but due to heavy demand, you may have to wait in a pretty long queue. IRC channel details and a few other helpful resources are listed below:

Server: irc.omgwtfhax.net
Channel: #BTN-Invites
Direct Link: irc://irc.omgwtfhax.net/BTN-Invites
BTN Interview Tips: http://passmetheremote.org/?action=rules
Connectivity Check: http://passmetheremote.org/?action=connectable
mIRC Tutorial: [Click Here]

Special thanks to ‘bob sagat’ for sending us the news firsthand.

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After what seems like ages, DOSBox has finally been updated to a newer version. This hugely popular MS DOS emulator lets you run most applications and games that require native MS DOS support on modern operating systems such as Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS and Linux. The latest build (v0.74 dated 12/5/2010) includes a number of bugfixes including some compatibility updates which add improved support for Windows 7. If you are in love with those old school games such as Prince of Persia, Dangerous Dave, Aladdin, Commander Keen but can’t play them on your new operating system, give DOSBox a go. It’s easy to setup and works with most DOS based games that are around.

dosboxemulator_thumb2[1]

A long list of new changes/fixes introduced in v0.74 can be found on DOSBox homepage. An updated version of the DOSBox manual is available from this location.

Once you have downloaded DOSBox and need help setting it up, check out our tutorial. This has step by step instructions on how to configure the app and use it to play your favorite DOS games on the PC. If you run out of DOS games to play, you can download a ton of these from SquakeNet for free.

Download

[Click Here] to download DOSBox 0.74 from the official download page (includes separate installers for multiple platforms including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows)

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Back in the day, they used to make some really great cartoons. Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies, Tom & Jerry, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Woody Woodpecker, Scooby Doo, Space Ghost and a number of other animated series that won the hearts and minds of both kids and adults from world over. Unfortunately, these awesome shows that were hits in the golden age of American animation are not as widely accessible today. They aren’t shown frequently on TV and even when they are aired it’s only on niche channels such as Boomerang. But if you are a fan classic cartoons who also happens to use BitTorrent trackers, none of this should worry you – NepToons is a private torrent tracker that specializes in cartoons made between 1930s to the early 2000s. To put it short, this site is a godsend for fans of both retro and modern cartoons.

NepToons 2

NepToons (formerly known as Fox Kids) launched sometime back in last October. Initially there was an open signup as well as an IRC invite giveaway but since then, the site has been invite only for several long months. Good news here is that NepToons sysops have decided to open the floodgates for a limited time. Quoted below is a news post found on site homepage:

NepTOONS Tracker will open its gates to the whole world on Tuesday, the 11th of May 2010. The free sign-up period will be undetermined. Tell all your friends that we`re waiting for them

Currently NepToons tracks just 225+ active torrents. However, there’s no reason to be turned off by this relatively low amount of torrents – there’s a shitload of content here. Why? Almost all of the torrents indexed here are collections; these are either complete seasons or full series packs usually weighing several GB in file size. Lots of classic cartoons as well as some modern animation are indexed – most of these are exclusives releases you won’t find on other private trackers. Video quality is usually excellent on uploaded releases but there are several different types of rips including DSR (Digital Satellite Rip), VHSRip, DVDRip and even Blu Ray. Screenshot below should give you a better understanding of the type of stuff you can find on NepToons:

NepToons Index

For those who are worried about the looks, Neptoons comes with three different stylesheets that can be used to customize the look and feel of the site. The default layout is pretty good – it’s colorful, eye catching and easily navigable.

As said earlier Neptoons is currently open for signup. This open signup comes almost after 6 months so don’t waste the opportunity – if you love cartoons, you should check this site out.

Site Name: Neptoons (http://www.neptoons.info)

Signup URL: http://www.neptoons.info/signup.php

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To everyone who sent us Emails asking what happened to PassThePopCorn, the site is not down. There’s been quite a lot of drama involving PTP recently and today’s incident is no exception. Short version of the story is that Pass The PopCorn has suffered from an internal dispute resulting in the site moving to a new domain. It appears that one of the site’s founders performed a hit and run with the donations money, grabbing the site’s old domain along with him as he went. Good news is that PTP staff have managed to move the site to a new location - it is now accessible from http://passthepopcorn.me/. Even better news is that the move does not appear to have caused any data loss - All of the user accounts, torrents, forum posts and ratio statistics are seemingly in tact.

PassThePopcorn

If PTP were a new tracker with average content, most people would forget about the site in a debacle like this. However PTP (which originally started out as SceneMovies) remains to be one of the largest movie torrent trackers on the internet – it currently tracks 26000+ torrents which include 16000+ movies and 10000+ movie trailers (to read more about this tracker please refer to this article). It would be too bad to lose a huge movie repository such as this over the immature actions of a few. Speaking of the incident, what really happened at PTP? Quoted below is a long ass explanation posted on the new site by current tracker staff:

BEGIN QUOTE

Effective immediately, the movie tracker known as PassThePopcorn is using the domain passthepopcorn.me. Please ensure bookmarks and tracker urls are switched to the .me top level domain (TLD).
For help changing torrent passkeys, click here.

PASSTHEPOPCORN.ORG IS NOT TO BE USED, PLEASE DO NOT VISIT THIS SITE.

This change is sudden, abrupt and we apologize. The current staff of PTP is operating on full disclosure on this matter and we are taking the time now to explain the events leading up to this moment in time.

Since the site's birth, PTP has been plagued with instability and drama, something not unknown to the tracker community.
This boils down to one person, the founder pham. Since creation, the site's servers have been in Pham's name, down to the IRC. Donations were controlled by him until recently. Because of this, any issue surrounding these areas of the site have been murky and met with ambiguous answers on the part of pham. Actions of all other staff could only be taken so far as pham had the final say. While shirking regular duties of a sysop, pham has used the site as his personal playground and piggy bank. Changes to policy, site structure, and code were made at the whim of pham, and more often than not, the staff figured this out the same time users did. This made managing the site very difficult as we always had someone working against our efforts.

All of this uncertainty was commonplace for the staff at PTP until we thought we saw a light at the end of the tunnel.
A news post made one month, two weeks ago said the following:
pham Wrote:

Due to circumstances beyond my control within my personal life, I will, effective immediately, be stepping down as founder/sysop of Passthepopcorn, hereafter referred to as PTP. This was not discussed with our other staff. I feel I should not burden them with my personal life issues. My "step-down" was not discussed with my staff. I don't feel I have anything to discuss. The outcome is the same no matter what.
The terms of my step down are not very clear. At this time, I consider it semi-permanent. I will still frequent the site and be the liaison for the server/domain ownership. I will not be answering PMs, visiting the forums, or other admin related tasks. Effectively immediately, I release my duties of SysOP into very capable hands.
To the staff, its been a pleasure. Take care!
-pham


This blindsided staff but it was apparent from the start of this “new era”, that nothing had changed. Pham still held all the cards as far as servers,domain,and donations went. We were in the same position as before, only with pham using the site as his playground exaggerated.

From the “official step-down” to now, an important fact became obvious. The other sysops never saw one donation log, and the donation goal on the site changed from week to week, this going on for months. Donation numbers were always vague, with strange events occurring such as the need to secure a panamanian bank account. There was a news post announcing it and a goal to the sum of 1.5 thousand dollars, rounded up to an even 2 thousand. Donations exceeded this number, but even with the goal met, the news was quickly brushed to the side and soon forgotten about. Questions asking where the money went were met with obscure answers and a change of subject.

Staff could not investigate further and something similar happened weeks ago with a donation drive again announced by pham. Finally, a couple days ago, the worst we had feared was confirmed by none other than pham.

Pham had been laundering donation money and using it for personal use. He was effectively stealing from the site, driving donations up just to use for his personal gain.

When this knowledge became public to the staff, Z made actions to move away from PTP.org. A new server was bought, along with a development box, and donations were moved to a new secure account. Passthepopcorn.me was created for a development site, but because of recent events, the site had to be moved to Passthepopcorn.me.

Staff was preparing for the worst, and unfortunately that became reality. It happened sooner than we had hoped and drastic measures were taken by both parties.

Passthepopcorn.me is the new chapter of PTP, and is under new management, away from the instability pham brought. We are operating on full disclosure on this day forth and look forward to making PTP the best, most secure site imaginable.
We apologize to our community about recent actions but we as staff have done everything in our power to prevent such a corrupt system once we could confirm said corruption.

We do not want to be begging for money but as of current time we only have $200 USD available which will not be able to keep the site up for even another month. We need $450 USD to stay alive per month. Any donations are greatly appreciated, and will finally go directly towards running the site. We post these expenses because we want you to know, we don't want anyone to be in the dark anymore. We love our community and want to keep the ball rolling.

Sincerely,
The PassThePopcorn Staff

END QUOTE

Despite the site still being online, reliability of PTP definitely took a hit from today’s incident. Any kind of controversy related to donation money is never a good news for a torrent tracker (public or private). Anyways PTP staff seem to be determined to move the tracker forward (and we wish them best of luck). Earlier on there were plans to upgrade to Gazelle RC2 and we aren’t quite sure if the recent incidents have affected this plan.  Anyways it would be interesting to see what the future holds for PTP.

Site Name: Pass The Popcorn (http://passthepopcorn.me)

Signup URL: Signup Closed

Special thanks to Kate128 (PTP Staff) for the head’s up.

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A quick update for the folks who have not yet made it into PackMe.In (aka PiN or ‘The Donkey’) – PiN have opened signups for a limited time in celebration of the Mother's Day. As the name suggests, this private torrent tracker is all about torrent packs – for example, instead of individual TV episodes which are regularly found on most other torrent sites, PiN only tracks either complete series or full season packs. Same goes for movies and other content – at PiN, everything comes in bundles. It’s also worth mentioning that this site is ratio free. We have announced about ‘The Donkey’ open signups several times before here on FILEnetworks Blog – if you missed out on creating an account on previous occasions, now would be a good time to do so.

PackMe.In

PackMe.In has been online for a little over 10 months and things have looked good for them so far. Currently the site indexes over 1100 torrent packs – not an easy feat to manage as these are all exclusive torrents not found elsewhere. Uploaded content range from movie packs, music packs to even theme and wallpaper packs. The only noticeable feature change since our last mention of PiN seem to be the addition of new themes (apart from new torrents). The site now features 9 fully fledged themes through which you can customize the visual style with the click of a button. For those of you who want detailed information and screenshots of PiN, we strongly recommend reading this article as it pretty much covers pretty much everything there’s to be said about this tracker.

This is usually a closed community and members are required to either provide an invite code or go through the IRC interview process to get in. However, none of this is necessary right now as PiN is currently in open signup mode:

2010-05-09
Happy Mother's Day! Signups have been opened: please give https://packme.in/oya.php to all of your friends.
Signups will remain open until we reach a certain number of users. We'll try to let you know a day before closing them.
//Staff

If you are looking forward to download torrent packs (including some huge ass files spanning over many GBs), you won’t find a better site than PiN – it's currently the only specialized packs tracker out there.

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

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

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There are many BitTorrent trackers up and about that cater for rare and obscure movies. A few examples of such sites would be Cinematik, Secret Cinema, Karagarga and Gormogon. Although not talked about a lot, one of the newcomers into this particular niche is I Love Classics (ILC). Well, it’s not exactly a brand new site as the tracker’s almost an year old. The important fact is that ILC has continued to grow at a steady pace throughout the past twelve or so months and has now evolved into a tracker that indexes over 10000 movies. If you are a fan of classic, rare, obscure, hard to find movies & TV shows, I Love Classics could be what you are looking for. This site is currently open for registrations but this is bound to change with their upcoming first anniversary. The tracker going invite only and becoming a closed community will be preceded by a week long site-wide free leech period.

I love Classics.

It’s not easy for classic movie/TV trackers to add new content – as you may know majority of indexed torrents in most private trackers are scene releases. Although the scene pres a lot of new movies and TV shows, releases of classic content are not-so-common and infrequent. Therefore, torrent trackers (or DDL forums) that specialize in these areas have to index a lot of P2P originated content, home encodes and user submitted stuff in order to grow. So far, ILC has handled this daunting task pretty well. Currently there are over 12000 indexed torrents – and a lot of them unique to ILC.

Type of content you can find on I Love Classics include both movies and TV shows. Don’t expect to find latest films such as Kick Ass or Iron Man 2 here :p . However you will be able to download a lot of retro flicks from the 1910s, 1920s, 1970s and so on. A lot of full season torrents of classic TV series are also available. Movies and TV shows are available in different video qualities – these range from TVRips, DVDRips to even Blu Ray rips. A screenshot capturing part of ILC’s torrent index may be found here:

I Love Classics Index

Ever since it’s launch ILC has been open to the public so getting into the site was not a problem. However according to administrators this will soon change with the tracker’s upcoming 1st anniversary. Apart from going invite only, several new rules to crack down on inactive users and collectors will also be introduced:

Notice to all Members
After the coming free leech, ILC will stop being open sign-up and go invitation only.
The staff will then start deleting accounts of all members that:

  • Stop their torrents upon completion (hit and run).
  • Continually ignore re-seed requests.
  • Don't seed any torrents, except 3 temporarily to allow a new download.
  • Accounts where the person has never downloaded a torrent, and not visited the site for 3 months or more. Both have to be true (downloaded AND visited) for these accounts to be deleted. If you've visited the site within the last 3 months, but never downloaded anything, your account is safe.

If you fall into one of those categories above, consider this your first and only warning. If you value your account here, this is your last chance to change your ways. If you don't, your account will be deleted and you'll never get back into this site again.
After this time, all remaining members (the sharers) will get a few invites given to them.

12,000 Torrents Birthday Celebration
To celebrate ILC's 1 year birthday and the uploading of our 12,000th torrent, everything on site will be free-leech. This will start on the 21st of May 11.59PM GMT and end on the 28th of May 11.59PM GMT.

If you still aren’t a member of this tracker (we have featured this site in the past), now would be a great sign up for an account. The site’s max user limit is set to 5000 and currently there are 3800+ registered members (roughly 1200 slots left). The upcoming free leech should help you get a head start by helping boost your ratio.

Site Name: I Love Classics (http://www.iloveclassics.com)

Signup URL: http://www.iloveclassics.com/signup.php

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Lately, there’s been a lot of talk surrounding release blogs that automatically post scene releases online. NewSceneFiles (NSF), SceneDDL, SceneFlux, AfterPre are some of the names that come into mind but the worrying factor is that most of these sites are no longer operational. Both SceneDDL and NSF have closed down for good, AfterPre & SceneFlux are still hanging in there but overall, automatic scene release blogs seem to go the way of the dodo all too often. But that’s not to say this niche is dead – there are new sites popping up daily and today we are going to talk about yet another promising scene release auto poster; DownloadThe.Net. DDLThe.Net automatically uploads untouched scene releases to multiple one click hosting services and exposes their direct download links to be consumed by the masses.

Download The Net

DDLThe.Net has not been online for long. The site actively started it’s operations on the 26th of April and it’s first few days of being online has been pretty impressive. Nearly 1500 releases have been covered during this short period of time and hundreds of new posts are being added daily. For those who care about them, pre times seem to be decent enough around here.

As stated above, DownloadThe.Net uploads scene releases to multiple one click hosting sites. Lately, it seems to make use of the Link Spreader service http://www.jheberg.com to upload to several different hosts simultaneously. Whenever you click on a download link from DDLThe.Net, you will be taken to a page on jheberg.com where you will be shown all the available download links from Megaupload, HotFile, RapidShare, etc (usually, each releases is upped to about 10 different services). If you are using JDownloader [Download JDownloader - Recommended], you’d be glad to know that jheberg links are now fully supported by this software. If you get any errors or prompts for Deep Decryption when dealing with jheberg links, just update all your plugins and restart JD.

DDLThe.Net

DDLThe.Net being a release blog, each scene release gets a separate blog post of its own. The structure of a post is pretty simple. There are two buttons at the top of every post, one linking to the release NFO and the other linking to a screenshot of the SFV file (Simple file verification – displays list of file names and checksum values). Buttons are followed by a list of download links from which you may download that particular scene release.

Searching for a particular item is possible on DDLThe.Net. You can do so using the search bar on the top right or you can browse for releases by category. The site supports RSS feeds and you can even subscribe to different feeds based on category (check the right sidebar). For added social media integration, updates can also be followed on Twitter (http://twitter.com/ddlthenet/).

One other thing about Download The Net is that they claim to upload un-modified scene releases. Their tagline is ‘Your unbastardized Scene releases source’ and their FAQ page states:

DDLthe.Net its a site created to please Scene-fans, here we won´t manipulate ANY release, you will download exactly the same as us.

We know that some of you don’t like modified (for example UnRAR’d) scene releases and if you are one of them, DDLThe.Net should cater to your needs.

Anyways this site is currently online and is open to the public - you do not need to register in order to enjoy DDLThe.Net’s benefits. If you are looking to download latest movies, music, games and other scene releases online, check this site out.

Site Homepage: http://ddlthe.net/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ddlthenet/
RSS: http://ddlthe.net/feed/

Special thanks to Dulalala for letting us know about DDLThe.Net.

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We used to post these offline standalone installer builds for various IM clients quite frequently but with us focusing more on the BitTorrent front this has died down a bit. To keep things moving and up to date, here’s the standalone, redistributable installer for the latest available build of Yahoo! Messenger. An advantage of downloading the full installer as opposed to the default over the web download provided by Yahoo! is that you can save the full setup to your hard disk and install it on as many machines, whenever, wherever you like. Note that this setup is not a hacked version nor a custom build. It’s provided by Yahoo! themselves – they just don’t show it on the default download page.

Yahoo%20Messenger%2010%20Final_thumb%5B2%5D[1]

When you run the installer, make sure to install only what you need. By default the this setup comes bundled with a lot of unwanted crap (IMHO) such as Yahoo! browser toolbars and so on – the average user just needs the core IM program so we recommend you install just that without cluttering your system with other junk (unless you really need them of course).

Download

[Click Here] to download Yahoo! Messenger 10.0.0.1264 standalone installer from official server

If you crave for the over the air web installer, you may download it from here.

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As I’m writing this post, I’m wondering why we didn’t feature this site earlier. AfterPre is an excellent direct download link indexer that’s somehow managed to evade our radar up untill now. When compared to other DDL indexers, AfterPre is unique. Their uniqueness mostly comes from the looks – although a DDL index, the site looks and behaves and exactly like a private BitTorrent tracker running on a script such as TBDEV. A layout that resembles a torrent index, categories, category icons, separate download pages for each indexed release – they are all here. Only difference between AfterPre and a private tracker is that instead of .torrent files. AP gives you a list of download links through which you can download a particular release directly.

AfterPre

AfterPre is not a new site and it’s been online for more than a year. Its process of posting scene releases online seems to be automated – something similar to what sites like NewSceneFiles, SceneFulx and SceneDDL are doing/used to do. Pre times are pretty good and you can find most of the stuff indexed on AfterPre not long after scene groups originally release them. As of now the site’s index consists of over 25000 releases – this is a huge amount of releases for any type of site, private tracker or a DDL forum.

Speaking of the content, you can find pretty much anything here. Movies, Music, TV Shows, Games – if it’s a release from the warez scene chances are that AfterPre has got it. Just like on a torrent tracker, releases are searchable by name or category. One of the drawbacks of this site is that it does not have any packs and it does not index any releases that originate from P2P groups. Anyways the content is still great – a screenshot of part of the main index and site layout may be found below:

AfterPre Releases

As said above AfterPre offers direct download links to indexed files. These usually point to external one click hosting services such as HotFile and RapidShare. You can easily download files hosted on these services with a simple tool like JDownloader.

Signups for AfterPre are currently open. You need to create an account and log into the site in order to view download links (registration is almost instantaneous). If you download scene releases over the web, this site is definitely worth checking out.

Site Name: AfterPre (http://afterpre.com)

Signup URL: http://afterpre.com/signup.php

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Here’s a quick update on another private torrent tracker open signup. HD-Bits.ro, an excellent online resource for all things high definition, has opened public signups after several months. Although it’s name might suggest the site is a rip off of HDBits.org, HD-Bits.ro is an independent tracker that has risen on its own. With thousands of members and torrents the site has two things essential for the success of a private tracker; content and activity. Apart from the scene and P2P releases that are found on almost any other HD specific BitTorrent site, HDBits has some exclusive torrents uploaded by their internal encoder groups i.e. HDBRise. Although it’s currently open for registration there’s no telling when the doors will close to the public – if you are interested in high definition content, go ahead and signup for an account without wasting any more time.

HDBits.ro

With over 19000 active members and over 4200 active HD torrents, HD-Bits.ro is easily one of the largest HD trackers currently online. Download speeds on this tracker are superb – you are likely to max out your high bandwidth internet connection when downloading torrents. Pre times are also pretty decent around here.

As for the content on this tracker, HD-Bits.Ro indexes HD movies, HDTV series, HD Documentaries, adult content and even some lossless music and HD music videos. Scene releases as well as a lot of p2p and home user encodes are available for download. Content on Hd-Bits.Ro includes lots of torrent packs (collections) – obviously, some of these packs are f’ing huge and in some cases span over 400GB in size. Screenshot below captures part of the torrent index on HDBits:

HDBits Torrents

Just like on any private tracker, you’ll need to adhere by the site’s rules if you are signing up for an account on HDBits.ro. Apart from the usual rules, make sure to pay attention to the following which relates to site activity requirements:

Accounts with 0 activity, no download (free torrents not included) and no upload, are automatically deleted after being a member for 10 days.
Accounts that have total traffic (download + upload) smaller than 10GB/month will be disabled after a 1-week warning. This is an average value, actually you are not forced to upload/download every month. Freelech download isn't taken into account.

More information on the activity requirements may be found here.

As said above HD-Bits.ro is currently open for signup. Don’t expect the signups to remain open for much longer so go ahead and grab an account ASAP.

Site Name: HD-Bits.Ro (http://www.hd-bits.ro)

Signup URL: http://www.hd-bits.ro/signup.php

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