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I'm not sure what problem this is solving, and the info on the website is sparse to say the least. Anyone care to explain?
by black_puppydog 7y ago
I'm not sure what problem this is solving, and the info on the website is sparse to say the least. Anyone care to explain?
- rhizome 7y agoFar as I can tell it's just a regular tracker.
- johnpowell 7y agoAnd it has been around for over a decade.
- daneel_w 7y agoThe irregular (open) bit is that it does not require uploading torrents for them to be accepted by the tracker. You can freely announce a hash, no pre-requisites, and the torrent will exist in the swarm.
- jchook 7y agoMost of the sites that index torrents no longer host their own trackers. They stay “once removed” that way I presume. This tracker started in 2009 and has gone offline twice since, returning from the ashes most recently in 2018. It runs on opentracker software that anyone can download and run, but it would seem popularity and widespread use make a tracker more useful to the public. It also bears the brunt of legal issues since it remains high-profile and subject to numerous court cases.
- calcifer 7y ago> This tracker started in 2009 and has gone offline twice since It has gone down a few orders of magnitude more times than that.
- brokenmachine 7y agoWell it's a free tracker for torrents. A tracker is a server that manages the swarm of people sharing a torrent file. I'm not sure why this is really necessary given the existence of trackerless DHT torrents though. Maybe using a tracker makes it faster somehow?
- nodja 7y agoHaving a tracker is faster and also helps you bootstrap your DHT if you're having problems connecting to the bootstrap peers hardcoded in your client.