22 ms·

Shutting down my legal torrent site after 17 years

749 points by en3r0 3y ago

I ran Legit Torrents for ~17 years and shut it down recently. The homepage is now a nostalgic look back at that time.

ye-olde-sysrq 3y ago
I love stories like these. Just a hacker doing some hacking. "The early days was where a lot of time was spent trying to tell people about the website. Some of my fondest memories are of being at school on Digg.com (back before the v4 fiasco of course) and posting comments to the Upcoming / Hot section where stories were at right before they hit the front page. Almost always the first comments in the thread would become the top comments, with no way to sort, and I would always sign my comment with legittorrents.info. Then later I would come back and check the Google Analytics stats to see those sweet sweet traffic spikes." This is GENIUS. It's a shame signatures are dead now, I kind of liked them when they weren't annoying. "I cannot state enough how much I learned from running this site and others. Way better than a degree in my opinion." It's funny how often this works out like this. I think you can "make it" in software with either hobby experience or a formal degree, and of the two I think the hobby experience is a lot more likely to make you good at "shipping". But the context you get out of a CS degree is super helpful because it compliments your actual work in a thousand tiny (or big, depending on the topic) ways. (Writing CRUD apps is probably not going to flex your CS degree but if someone asks you to optimize a database query, suddenly that second databases class you took about query planners and db internals is suddenly really helpful context.) But I agree with the sentiment here where having hobby experience on top of your CS degree is rocket fuel for your career. "I was super cheap back then, not even wanting to shell out for a domain name, so the original URL was virtenu.dyndns.org/lt. Eventually I bought the .info for $0.99 after the site picked up some speed a few months later." Compared to how easy it is to be wasteful nowadays, there's still really something to be said for intentionally running things on a shoestring budget. (And sometimes we convince ourselves you practically have to be wasteful... isn't running a $20/mo managed k8s + load balancer setup table stakes nowadays?? and you've got to have a hip new $40/yr TLD and don't forget to factor in that surprise big egress bandwidth bill you're gonna accidentally incur at some point). Crazy how much you can do with a $5 VPS and an app server, distributed as a package for your OS's package manager, running as a systemd service. Even just adding a container runtime can be a surprising additional amount of complexity.
- en3r0 3y ago
  It is hard to balance money with time these days, especially if you are doing it on the side, or even doing it for an employer. Back then I was in high school and it was literally spend nothing you don't have to and avoid having to get a job for as long as possible. Good times!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cnity 3y ago
This was a fun read, nice one.
hbn 3y ago
Funny, my work's firewall blocked me accessing the site: > Not allowed to browse Copyright Infringement category
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  Does your corp firewall block archive.is? [1] If so I am curious which vendor if you are permitted to share. [1] - https://archive.is/20220521124546/http://www.legittorrents.info/ https://archive.is/20220521124546/http://www.legittorrents.i...
  - hbn 3y ago
    You know, I thought it did but now it seems to work? Unless it's a different archive site, but in the past I couldn't view the unpaywalled links people posted because the firewall said the site is in the Russian Federation. In fact I just found out about 12ft.io like a week or 2 ago and bookmarked it for that reason.
    - LinuxBender 3y ago
      Archive.is does embed links to mail.ru but that requires javascript. The site itself does not require javascript which is why I suppose I never really notice it. I could see firewall vendors flagging it for that reason.
      - hbn 3y ago
        Interesting. Oh also forgot the question about the vendor but I'm pretty sure it's zscaler? Unless there's something else behind the scenes that's catching sites, there's no branding on the error page other than my org's, it's completely whitelabeled.
- hellweaver666 3y ago
  Same! Probably just the world torrent in the domain was enough to get it on a blacklist.
- 3y ago
overthemoon 3y ago
This is really interesting. You said your brother helped out by posting comments to make it seem more active, do you think that was an important part of its success? I always wonder how sites like this get over the initial evil cycle of no users => no one wants to use it => no users etc.
- markx2 3y ago
  Fake them. "In the early days, reddit's community was built up thanks to hundreds of fake profiles created by the site's co-founders, according to Steve Huffman (coincidentally, a reddit co-founder). To make the site look populated and diverse, Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the other founder, would submit links of their own choosing, each time under a new username." https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
  - egeozcan 3y ago
    Is this legal or do you have to state somewhere that the content is fake? If it is, it'll be interesting to see how the law will develop (across the globe) regarding fake/generated content in the time of GPTs and such.
    - cryptoz 3y ago
      I mean, the content isn't fake though...? Using multiple usernames on your own website is definitely legal.
      - pessimizer 3y ago
        > Using multiple usernames on your own website is definitely legal. I'm sure you can't say this. If I open an ecommerce site and fill it with fake reviews, I'm pretty sure I could end up in legal trouble.
        3y ago
egeozcan 3y ago
Closing a chapter is always hard but exciting as it opens up time to try something new. Good luck! ps. if you could make the images link to source and it's going to take less than a minute of your time, it may be worth it :)
- en3r0 3y ago
  It is harder than I would have imagined, it is a weird thing. Do you mean use the full URL in image references? If so, why exactly?
  - egeozcan 3y ago
    Oh no I just meant wrapping them in an anchor pointing to the source, to be able to click and see full size, instead of right click and open image in new tab. A very, very minor thing.
realce 3y ago
Thanks for your efforts over all these years
- en3r0 3y ago
  Thank you, I appreciate it.
rolph 3y ago
The Web Sherrif https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/07/web-sheriff-accuses-us-breaking-basically-every-possible-law-pointing-out-that-abusing-dmca-takedowns/ https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/07/web-sheriff-accuses-us-b...
tommica 3y ago
You should write some war stories! There gotta be some fun and interesting ones to share after 17 years!
- en3r0 3y ago
  I had spammers uploading torrents in mass for a good while. With auto approval of torrents I spent a lot of time logging in to fight them. Eventually I found an addon to help bulk remove torrents, but even that was a hassle. Eventually in the later years I turned on email verification, which didn't actually work (I never bothered to figure out why) and if someone really wanted to upload, they would post on the forum to which I would then manually verify them.
  - tommica 3y ago
    Spam is the bane of any site that has a public access, it gotta be a slog to deal with :/
conradfr 3y ago
Fun story and experience. > That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. What does that "website purchases" mean?
- en3r0 3y ago
  Bought some small websites that were "guaranteed" to be making a certain amount of money. They were, but with fraudulent ad clicks.
wpietri 3y ago
Awww. I love this. Thanks so much for telling your story. And I love that this was part of what got you into the field. In case others are curious to see what it looked like while in operation, here's the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.legittorrents.info/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.legittorrents.info...
- en3r0 3y ago
  Thank you! I love the Wayback Machine for this!
  - pabs3 3y ago
    Would have been nice to get one last copy of the site on archive.org before it was shut down. If you still have the content and can bring it online temporarily, it could be grabbed by ArchiveBot: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
    - entropicdrifter 3y ago
      Better yet, upload all of the torrents that still have seeders to archive.org so they aren't lost
atentaten 3y ago
Why was the server null routed at the host to begin with?
- en3r0 3y ago
  Sending spam or malware stuff coming from the IP range.
ravenstine 3y ago
Is there a particular reason why you chose not to pass the torch? Too few users at this point? Most of the torrents having no seeders? In any case, your story reminds me of the good ol' days of the web. Back in high school, being able to just put up a cool site and have people magically find it through Google felt like god mode. I never ran anything big like your torrent site (which I'm pretty sure I've visited), but I imagine you got a lot of satisfaction out of having thousands of users. I miss the days when the web was this simple. Now I constantly question the time investment of creating a website because the (im)material condition has changed so much; the search algorithm is completely different and so many people use a small handful of platforms. Unless you generate eye candy and it goes viral, or it competes with major internet companies, I'm under the impression that you can just forget it.
- scarface74 3y ago
  > I miss the days when the web was this simple You mean before AdSense and SEO or exactly what the site’s author does for living?
  - en3r0 3y ago
    Ya, I am a part of the "problem" so to speak, though I do my best to create content that not only ranks well in a search engine, but is genuinely helpful for the reader. I suppose it was inevitable in the drive of the commercialization of everything in life?
    - freedomben 3y ago
      Just my two cents, but IMHO SEO for useful information is itself a great good. The evil are the people who have low-value content and eclipse the higher value content through gaming.
      - scarface74 3y ago
        There isn’t a such thing as “SEO for great content”. The search algorithms don’t reward “great content”. The only way you win is by not playing the game. You have to find other ways to market and have an “unfair advantage”. How many times have you seen “useful content” buried by paragraphs of word salad to juice SEO?
urbandw311er 3y ago
Hey, congrats on this project which, as you say, has been a big part of your life. I can really emphasise with that, having run (and shut down) a couple of larger projects previously that were used by a great many people. It's tough to let go sometimes! Kudos to you for bringing something into the world that did something meaningful. Not to mention all the tangential benefits you mention like learning SEO, hosting, and so on. As good as a degree but without all the drinking.
- en3r0 3y ago
  Thanks for your comment, I really appreciate it.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    If you do need someone to pick up the torch let me know. It'd be nice to keep cool stuff from disappearing.
- jiggywiggy 3y ago
  Isn't the drinking the best part?
  - pastacacioepepe 3y ago
    Arguably the sex is, the drinking mostly helps with that
    - metadaemon 3y ago
      I'd say it's the boating, because of the implication
    - sva_ 3y ago
      Living in a college dorm was wild.
  - urbandw311er 3y ago
    Forgive me, my comment was ambiguous. Just to be clear: yes, it is.
_23sd 3y ago
Hey, I remember this site! Definitely a cool place, when I was in high school and interested in technology and P2P it gave me a place to find torrents to experiment with, without the risk of getting in trouble with my parents over illegal downloads. Also found some cool open source software and CC-licensed music (mostly nerdcore rap lol) in the process.
- en3r0 3y ago
  That is awesome, I am glad to hear you enjoyed the site! There was some odd rap uploaded for sure. There was also some really cool video game music remakes I remember finding.
gspencley 3y ago
Man my heart goes out to you. I owned and operated an adult website for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was primary source of income. It was completely lawful and above board, no user-generated-content so I never once had any issues with controversial content etc. One day last year we get a notice from our bank telling us that we were deemed "high risk" and they were closing our commercial accounts. For months we tried to find any bank or credit union that would take us but they all turned us down. Someone actually posted our story to HN but it's not really tech related so didn't get many upvotes or engagement. So I know how devastating it is for ignorance and stupidity on the part of the others to shut down something that a) you worked hard to create yourself and b) was such a huge part of your life for so long. Extreme empathy.
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  Do you have the link to original story and HN post? The engagement on HN tends to be due to interest in story but also time of day and other stories and specific wording of title and other fickle factors. I find that HN has a lot of interest in freedom of expression and how it interacts with banking sector, but sometimes topics slip nonetheless.
  - gspencley 3y ago
    Yep https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33425319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33425319 The story was posted before we closed, and we had put up a notice to our visitors explaining that we were trying to find alternate banking arrangements and would have to shut down if we couldn't. If you visit the site today, there is still some NFSW content, so beware. But it also has all of the details of the history of the site as well as what led to us having to shut it down if anyone is interested.
    - dageshi 3y ago
      So I use 4g net connection here in the UK and just tried to load what I assume is the site? coedcherry.com? I got a vodaphone (uk mobile phone co whose network I'm apparently connected via) nag page asking me to confirm me age, we protect young mobile users blah blah blah. Which... I have never seen before in the six months I've been using this connection. Any other porn site even massive ones like xvideos works fine, but coedcherry does not? Which is very odd. I'm really rather perplexed as to why your site would be blocked but the biggest porn site on the net is not if the purpose here is to block childrens access to porn.
pessimizer 3y ago
Why not end the story with a list of 5,500 torrent names and hashes? No need for the collection to die off if it was entirely legal.
- en3r0 3y ago
  That is something to consider, thought I am not sure off hand how many were actually still active.
  - kjs3 3y ago
    Does it matter? Make the list available with the caveat "these were the links when I shut down, current status unknown" and you'd still have done a great service.
  - prettyStandard 3y ago
    I support posting the list.
  - indrora 3y ago
    An archive of the content put on archive.org would be amazing. You should have enough detail to at least provide magnet links, but an SQL dump of the content would be very, very interesting for future folks.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Contact https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
AmazingTurtle 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
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vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago
[dead]
hn_throawlles 3y ago
I'll keep saying this as long as I observe it: there's a strong intention against free digital assets. the logic of the market is imposing itself over the digital realm (the inside of the internet?) this logic wants us to pay to copy. why should only some get to keep the enormous advantage unlocked by digital information while the rest are forced to pay? to be fair this is also in reaction to https://torrentfreak.com/brazils-ministry-of-justice-asks-go https://torrentfreak.com/brazils-ministry-of-justice-asks-go...
freedomben 3y ago
This is wonderful sage advice: > Google Adsense was profitable on the site for many years, earning me some really nice pay checks here and there. That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. Since there there has been next to no profit, and that was years ago. Be very cautious about services in that field as there are lots of shady things going on, and the ban hammer falls hard, and there's often no remaining options if you lose adsense.
- nadermx 3y ago
  There are other ways to monetize, some significantly more profitable than adsense, but yes media buys of shady traffic will most likely cause shady results
  - freedomben 3y ago
    What are some of the other ways? (honestly asking). Premium features and such are a possibility, but I don't really see the value for people to pay for this beyond maybe a tiny community, and they would surely need some premium features in return (like maybe private torrents or something).
    - nadermx 3y ago
      Perahps an API, for stats maybe, or something else not sure. Affiliate of VPN or Hosting, or if you know how to code, roll your own VPN service and use that as a traffic source. The hardest thing, at least in my opinion to get on the internet is traffic. That generally only comes with great products, or great branding.
      - en3r0 3y ago
        API would be interesting. Tried the affiliate route for Amazon (Hard Drives ect) and VPN ofers. Never had any luck with those. My conclusion: if you are on a torrent site, you probably are not looking to buy something.
tinglymintyfrsh 3y ago
internet archive runs webseeded torrents. It's effectively a large-scale legal torrent site for anyone to use.
sejo 3y ago
Just a comment to thank you! You did well to the earlier internet. Appreciate the effort and enjoyed reading the fast track through 17 years.
- en3r0 3y ago
  Thank you for the kind words.
copper-float 3y ago
The second I clicked in here, I immediately remembered your website. (That green theme is very iconic and memorable). When I was a young teenager, I remember visiting your site plenty of times and downloading things off of it. Probably something like Linux ISOs, or music. I was a nerdy kid who really liked the idea of peer to peer stuff, I guess. I probably tried to contribute some RuneScape-related content, but it likely didn't stay seeded for long haha. Thanks for maintaining such a great website.
- en3r0 3y ago
  Thanks so much for chiming in, glad you liked the lime green! I definitely remember some RuneScape stuff on there, I played it a lot in the early 2000's myself.
nextmove 3y ago
What I don't get is how this big company called Google can get so big by scraping everyone's data and then indexing it without paying people. And then they have the balls to lock people out from adsense profits if the user makes the tiniest mistake. I made a few thousand on YouTube in 2011 I believe and then got heavily into web development. In 2015ish I placed some ugly adsense ads on a site I had and was only a couple dollars away from $100 payout. So... I manually clicked an ad like less then 10 times. Sure enough my account got banned from adsense. It got me completely demotivated from programming and only last year did I pick back up programming. I was using Node.js and Go back then but I'm now into Rust and Erlang. Not sure how I can profit as I lack work history (giving up on self teaching myself programming also meant I took up dead end jobs), but I'm motivated nonetheless. Google, pick on someone your own size.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  You sugarcoat it by calling it a tiniest mistake. Just call it fraud.
  - nextmove 3y ago
    Seeing as how Google Ads are being used to spread malware https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse-google-ads-to-spread-malware-in-legit-software/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse... https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-ads-push-virtualized-malware-made-for-antivirus-evasion/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-ads-pu... I think I'll sleep tight knowing I'm not the bad one here, buddy.
    - breakingcups 3y ago
      There can be multiple "bad" parties. Small-scale fraud is still fraud and Google was well within their right to ban you.
    - kccqzy 3y ago
      This is not a matter of good or bad, or the absence or presence of ethics. It's a matter of defrauding Google at exactly where their profit is, their cash cow. To phrase it in another way, if Google wasn't very good at detecting fraud, it would not have been making so much money or becoming such a big company. Billionaires are more likely than not to be absolute misers; the same applies to corporations.
butz 3y ago
Could magnet links live on archive.org forever?
vecinu 3y ago
Super cool trip down memory lane. I remember finding your site eons ago when I was in high school too. It's cool seeing some of the most popular shows there like Revision3, it reminds me of Digg, Kevin Rose and my favorite online show, thebroken. Really cool period in internet history. Thanks for hosting for so long!
- en3r0 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing! I had high hopes for Revision3, it was really an exciting time with Web 2.0 and the like.
skee8383 3y ago
Nice to see the internet continuing it's decline.
Synaesthesia 3y ago
Why you shutting it down? Cost too high?
nhumrich 3y ago
What does "null routed at root" mean here? Is this a form of DoS attack?
deweywsu 3y ago
Thanks for keeping it up for so long. Sites like yours are what makes (made) the internet a fun place to learn.
z3t4 3y ago
Advice for people wanting to earn money on ads: Don't use adsense. Make a list of companies that might be interested in advertising on your website, then start making calls. Advertisers have the same problem. Adwords sucks. Facebook ads sucks and are very expensive. There are few alternatives so it's an easy sell.
- aembleton 3y ago
  Has this worked for you?
- potamic 3y ago
  Will companies want to deal with individual websites?
dustingetz 3y ago
Null routed: https://forums.nfoservers.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=11456 https://forums.nfoservers.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=11456
rmbyrro 3y ago
With the GPT's taking over Google, I wonder when web devs will feel nostalgia about the SEO-days... > my first exposures to implementing SEO (what I now do for a living), which funny enough was mostly copied tags from The Pirate Bay and modified to be about legal torrents instead It's already starting to feel nostalgic.
xur17 3y ago
> I was super cheap back then, not even wanting to shell out for a domain name, so the original URL was virtenu.dyndns.org/lt. Eventually I bought the .info for $0.99 after the site picked up some speed a few months later. > I ran it out of my bedroom at my parents house for a long time, eventually switching over to a VPS sometime when I moved out. This brings back many memories from my high school and early college days. I used to run a file and image hosting site (legal content only), and it's amusing to think about the lengths I went to save money. My domain purchase (.com for $8/year or so) felt like a significant investment. I managed to host the site with a considerable number of users out of my parent's basement on a 768kbps upload DSL connection for several years. Eventually, I migrated to a VPS that cost me around $20/month. I ended up selling the site to another hosting service for approximately $700 because it became too much work. In retrospect, I'm guessing it was a no-brainer move for them since they acquired something like 10k users for $700, but from my perspective, I was happy to receive $700.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Money is a weird thing when you are young. I somehow made things work even without it, but now that I have more of it I use it at every opportunity to not have to deal with things I don’t want to.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    There's an old saying that goes: Time is money. It means you buy other peoples' time with your money so you don't have to spend your own time. Conversely, you spend your own time so you don't have to buy other peoples' time with your money.
majestic5762 3y ago
I've been helping law enforcement to harvest torrent seeders for the last 10 years. LT is on my list. If there is someone in the world who owns one of the biggest torrent databases, probably it's me
- phone8675309 3y ago
  > I've been helping law enforcement to harvest torrent seeders for the last 10 years. But why?
- en3r0 3y ago
  That is super interesting, care to share why it was on your list? I mean it was legit after all lol.
alexvoda 3y ago
Can you release an archive of the ~5000 torrents and their descriptions?
mito88 3y ago
how was the server null routed at the host?
weedfroglozenge 3y ago
I really like your writing style. The end of an era for you - Wishing you all the best
- en3r0 3y ago
  Thank you, really appreciate you saying something. Not sure I have ever had anyone comment on my writing style. Probably means I should write more!

749 points by en3r0 3y ago

I ran Legit Torrents for ~17 years and shut it down recently. The homepage is now a nostalgic look back at that time.

I love stories like these. Just a hacker doing some hacking. "The early days was where a lot of time was spent trying to tell people about the website. Some of my fondest memories are of being at school on Digg.com (back before the v4 fiasco of course) and posting comments to the Upcoming / Hot section where stories were at right before they hit the front page. Almost always the first comments in the thread would become the top comments, with no way to sort, and I would always sign my comment with legittorrents.info. Then later I would come back and check the Google Analytics stats to see those sweet sweet traffic spikes." This is GENIUS. It's a shame signatures are dead now, I kind of liked them when they weren't annoying. "I cannot state enough how much I learned from running this site and others. Way better than a degree in my opinion." It's funny how often this works out like this. I think you can "make it" in software with either hobby experience or a formal degree, and of the two I think the hobby experience is a lot more likely to make you good at "shipping". But the context you get out of a CS degree is super helpful because it compliments your actual work in a thousand tiny (or big, depending on the topic) ways. (Writing CRUD apps is probably not going to flex your CS degree but if someone asks you to optimize a database query, suddenly that second databases class you took about query planners and db internals is suddenly really helpful context.) But I agree with the sentiment here where having hobby experience on top of your CS degree is rocket fuel for your career. "I was super cheap back then, not even wanting to shell out for a domain name, so the original URL was virtenu.dyndns.org/lt. Eventually I bought the .info for $0.99 after the site picked up some speed a few months later." Compared to how easy it is to be wasteful nowadays, there's still really something to be said for intentionally running things on a shoestring budget. (And sometimes we convince ourselves you practically have to be wasteful... isn't running a $20/mo managed k8s + load balancer setup table stakes nowadays?? and you've got to have a hip new $40/yr TLD and don't forget to factor in that surprise big egress bandwidth bill you're gonna accidentally incur at some point). Crazy how much you can do with a $5 VPS and an app server, distributed as a package for your OS's package manager, running as a systemd service. Even just adding a container runtime can be a surprising additional amount of complexity.

en3r0 3y ago
It is hard to balance money with time these days, especially if you are doing it on the side, or even doing it for an employer. Back then I was in high school and it was literally spend nothing you don't have to and avoid having to get a job for as long as possible. Good times!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cnity 3y ago

This was a fun read, nice one.

hbn 3y ago

Funny, my work's firewall blocked me accessing the site: > Not allowed to browse Copyright Infringement category

LinuxBender 3y ago
Does your corp firewall block archive.is? [1] If so I am curious which vendor if you are permitted to share. [1] - https://archive.is/20220521124546/http://www.legittorrents.info/ https://archive.is/20220521124546/http://www.legittorrents.i...
- hbn 3y ago
  You know, I thought it did but now it seems to work? Unless it's a different archive site, but in the past I couldn't view the unpaywalled links people posted because the firewall said the site is in the Russian Federation. In fact I just found out about 12ft.io like a week or 2 ago and bookmarked it for that reason.
  - LinuxBender 3y ago
    Archive.is does embed links to mail.ru but that requires javascript. The site itself does not require javascript which is why I suppose I never really notice it. I could see firewall vendors flagging it for that reason.
    - hbn 3y ago
      Interesting. Oh also forgot the question about the vendor but I'm pretty sure it's zscaler? Unless there's something else behind the scenes that's catching sites, there's no branding on the error page other than my org's, it's completely whitelabeled.
hellweaver666 3y ago
Same! Probably just the world torrent in the domain was enough to get it on a blacklist.
3y ago

overthemoon 3y ago

This is really interesting. You said your brother helped out by posting comments to make it seem more active, do you think that was an important part of its success? I always wonder how sites like this get over the initial evil cycle of no users => no one wants to use it => no users etc.

markx2 3y ago
Fake them. "In the early days, reddit's community was built up thanks to hundreds of fake profiles created by the site's co-founders, according to Steve Huffman (coincidentally, a reddit co-founder). To make the site look populated and diverse, Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the other founder, would submit links of their own choosing, each time under a new username." https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
- egeozcan 3y ago
  Is this legal or do you have to state somewhere that the content is fake? If it is, it'll be interesting to see how the law will develop (across the globe) regarding fake/generated content in the time of GPTs and such.
  - cryptoz 3y ago
    I mean, the content isn't fake though...? Using multiple usernames on your own website is definitely legal.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      > Using multiple usernames on your own website is definitely legal. I'm sure you can't say this. If I open an ecommerce site and fill it with fake reviews, I'm pretty sure I could end up in legal trouble.
      - 3y ago

egeozcan 3y ago

Closing a chapter is always hard but exciting as it opens up time to try something new. Good luck! ps. if you could make the images link to source and it's going to take less than a minute of your time, it may be worth it :)

en3r0 3y ago
It is harder than I would have imagined, it is a weird thing. Do you mean use the full URL in image references? If so, why exactly?
- egeozcan 3y ago
  Oh no I just meant wrapping them in an anchor pointing to the source, to be able to click and see full size, instead of right click and open image in new tab. A very, very minor thing.

realce 3y ago

Thanks for your efforts over all these years

en3r0 3y ago
Thank you, I appreciate it.

rolph 3y ago

The Web Sherrif https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/07/web-sheriff-accuses-us-breaking-basically-every-possible-law-pointing-out-that-abusing-dmca-takedowns/ https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/07/web-sheriff-accuses-us-b...

tommica 3y ago

You should write some war stories! There gotta be some fun and interesting ones to share after 17 years!

en3r0 3y ago
I had spammers uploading torrents in mass for a good while. With auto approval of torrents I spent a lot of time logging in to fight them. Eventually I found an addon to help bulk remove torrents, but even that was a hassle. Eventually in the later years I turned on email verification, which didn't actually work (I never bothered to figure out why) and if someone really wanted to upload, they would post on the forum to which I would then manually verify them.
- tommica 3y ago
  Spam is the bane of any site that has a public access, it gotta be a slog to deal with :/

conradfr 3y ago

Fun story and experience. > That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. What does that "website purchases" mean?

en3r0 3y ago
Bought some small websites that were "guaranteed" to be making a certain amount of money. They were, but with fraudulent ad clicks.

wpietri 3y ago

Awww. I love this. Thanks so much for telling your story. And I love that this was part of what got you into the field. In case others are curious to see what it looked like while in operation, here's the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.legittorrents.info/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.legittorrents.info...

en3r0 3y ago
Thank you! I love the Wayback Machine for this!
- pabs3 3y ago
  Would have been nice to get one last copy of the site on archive.org before it was shut down. If you still have the content and can bring it online temporarily, it could be grabbed by ArchiveBot: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
  - entropicdrifter 3y ago
    Better yet, upload all of the torrents that still have seeders to archive.org so they aren't lost

atentaten 3y ago

Why was the server null routed at the host to begin with?

en3r0 3y ago
Sending spam or malware stuff coming from the IP range.

ravenstine 3y ago

Is there a particular reason why you chose not to pass the torch? Too few users at this point? Most of the torrents having no seeders? In any case, your story reminds me of the good ol' days of the web. Back in high school, being able to just put up a cool site and have people magically find it through Google felt like god mode. I never ran anything big like your torrent site (which I'm pretty sure I've visited), but I imagine you got a lot of satisfaction out of having thousands of users. I miss the days when the web was this simple. Now I constantly question the time investment of creating a website because the (im)material condition has changed so much; the search algorithm is completely different and so many people use a small handful of platforms. Unless you generate eye candy and it goes viral, or it competes with major internet companies, I'm under the impression that you can just forget it.

scarface74 3y ago
> I miss the days when the web was this simple You mean before AdSense and SEO or exactly what the site’s author does for living?
- en3r0 3y ago
  Ya, I am a part of the "problem" so to speak, though I do my best to create content that not only ranks well in a search engine, but is genuinely helpful for the reader. I suppose it was inevitable in the drive of the commercialization of everything in life?
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Just my two cents, but IMHO SEO for useful information is itself a great good. The evil are the people who have low-value content and eclipse the higher value content through gaming.
    - scarface74 3y ago
      There isn’t a such thing as “SEO for great content”. The search algorithms don’t reward “great content”. The only way you win is by not playing the game. You have to find other ways to market and have an “unfair advantage”. How many times have you seen “useful content” buried by paragraphs of word salad to juice SEO?

urbandw311er 3y ago

Hey, congrats on this project which, as you say, has been a big part of your life. I can really emphasise with that, having run (and shut down) a couple of larger projects previously that were used by a great many people. It's tough to let go sometimes! Kudos to you for bringing something into the world that did something meaningful. Not to mention all the tangential benefits you mention like learning SEO, hosting, and so on. As good as a degree but without all the drinking.

en3r0 3y ago
Thanks for your comment, I really appreciate it.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  If you do need someone to pick up the torch let me know. It'd be nice to keep cool stuff from disappearing.
jiggywiggy 3y ago
Isn't the drinking the best part?
- pastacacioepepe 3y ago
  Arguably the sex is, the drinking mostly helps with that
  - metadaemon 3y ago
    I'd say it's the boating, because of the implication
  - sva_ 3y ago
    Living in a college dorm was wild.
- urbandw311er 3y ago
  Forgive me, my comment was ambiguous. Just to be clear: yes, it is.

_23sd 3y ago

Hey, I remember this site! Definitely a cool place, when I was in high school and interested in technology and P2P it gave me a place to find torrents to experiment with, without the risk of getting in trouble with my parents over illegal downloads. Also found some cool open source software and CC-licensed music (mostly nerdcore rap lol) in the process.

en3r0 3y ago
That is awesome, I am glad to hear you enjoyed the site! There was some odd rap uploaded for sure. There was also some really cool video game music remakes I remember finding.

gspencley 3y ago

Man my heart goes out to you. I owned and operated an adult website for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was primary source of income. It was completely lawful and above board, no user-generated-content so I never once had any issues with controversial content etc. One day last year we get a notice from our bank telling us that we were deemed "high risk" and they were closing our commercial accounts. For months we tried to find any bank or credit union that would take us but they all turned us down. Someone actually posted our story to HN but it's not really tech related so didn't get many upvotes or engagement. So I know how devastating it is for ignorance and stupidity on the part of the others to shut down something that a) you worked hard to create yourself and b) was such a huge part of your life for so long. Extreme empathy.

NikolaNovak 3y ago
Do you have the link to original story and HN post? The engagement on HN tends to be due to interest in story but also time of day and other stories and specific wording of title and other fickle factors. I find that HN has a lot of interest in freedom of expression and how it interacts with banking sector, but sometimes topics slip nonetheless.
- gspencley 3y ago
  Yep https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33425319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33425319 The story was posted before we closed, and we had put up a notice to our visitors explaining that we were trying to find alternate banking arrangements and would have to shut down if we couldn't. If you visit the site today, there is still some NFSW content, so beware. But it also has all of the details of the history of the site as well as what led to us having to shut it down if anyone is interested.
  - dageshi 3y ago
    So I use 4g net connection here in the UK and just tried to load what I assume is the site? coedcherry.com? I got a vodaphone (uk mobile phone co whose network I'm apparently connected via) nag page asking me to confirm me age, we protect young mobile users blah blah blah. Which... I have never seen before in the six months I've been using this connection. Any other porn site even massive ones like xvideos works fine, but coedcherry does not? Which is very odd. I'm really rather perplexed as to why your site would be blocked but the biggest porn site on the net is not if the purpose here is to block childrens access to porn.

pessimizer 3y ago

Why not end the story with a list of 5,500 torrent names and hashes? No need for the collection to die off if it was entirely legal.

en3r0 3y ago
That is something to consider, thought I am not sure off hand how many were actually still active.
- kjs3 3y ago
  Does it matter? Make the list available with the caveat "these were the links when I shut down, current status unknown" and you'd still have done a great service.
- prettyStandard 3y ago
  I support posting the list.
- indrora 3y ago
  An archive of the content put on archive.org would be amazing. You should have enough detail to at least provide magnet links, but an SQL dump of the content would be very, very interesting for future folks.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Contact https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/

AmazingTurtle 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago

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hn_throawlles 3y ago

I'll keep saying this as long as I observe it: there's a strong intention against free digital assets. the logic of the market is imposing itself over the digital realm (the inside of the internet?) this logic wants us to pay to copy. why should only some get to keep the enormous advantage unlocked by digital information while the rest are forced to pay? to be fair this is also in reaction to https://torrentfreak.com/brazils-ministry-of-justice-asks-go https://torrentfreak.com/brazils-ministry-of-justice-asks-go...

freedomben 3y ago

This is wonderful sage advice: > Google Adsense was profitable on the site for many years, earning me some really nice pay checks here and there. That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. Since there there has been next to no profit, and that was years ago. Be very cautious about services in that field as there are lots of shady things going on, and the ban hammer falls hard, and there's often no remaining options if you lose adsense.

nadermx 3y ago
There are other ways to monetize, some significantly more profitable than adsense, but yes media buys of shady traffic will most likely cause shady results
- freedomben 3y ago
  What are some of the other ways? (honestly asking). Premium features and such are a possibility, but I don't really see the value for people to pay for this beyond maybe a tiny community, and they would surely need some premium features in return (like maybe private torrents or something).
  - nadermx 3y ago
    Perahps an API, for stats maybe, or something else not sure. Affiliate of VPN or Hosting, or if you know how to code, roll your own VPN service and use that as a traffic source. The hardest thing, at least in my opinion to get on the internet is traffic. That generally only comes with great products, or great branding.
    - en3r0 3y ago
      API would be interesting. Tried the affiliate route for Amazon (Hard Drives ect) and VPN ofers. Never had any luck with those. My conclusion: if you are on a torrent site, you probably are not looking to buy something.

tinglymintyfrsh 3y ago

internet archive runs webseeded torrents. It's effectively a large-scale legal torrent site for anyone to use.

sejo 3y ago

Just a comment to thank you! You did well to the earlier internet. Appreciate the effort and enjoyed reading the fast track through 17 years.

en3r0 3y ago
Thank you for the kind words.

copper-float 3y ago

The second I clicked in here, I immediately remembered your website. (That green theme is very iconic and memorable). When I was a young teenager, I remember visiting your site plenty of times and downloading things off of it. Probably something like Linux ISOs, or music. I was a nerdy kid who really liked the idea of peer to peer stuff, I guess. I probably tried to contribute some RuneScape-related content, but it likely didn't stay seeded for long haha. Thanks for maintaining such a great website.

en3r0 3y ago
Thanks so much for chiming in, glad you liked the lime green! I definitely remember some RuneScape stuff on there, I played it a lot in the early 2000's myself.

nextmove 3y ago

What I don't get is how this big company called Google can get so big by scraping everyone's data and then indexing it without paying people. And then they have the balls to lock people out from adsense profits if the user makes the tiniest mistake. I made a few thousand on YouTube in 2011 I believe and then got heavily into web development. In 2015ish I placed some ugly adsense ads on a site I had and was only a couple dollars away from $100 payout. So... I manually clicked an ad like less then 10 times. Sure enough my account got banned from adsense. It got me completely demotivated from programming and only last year did I pick back up programming. I was using Node.js and Go back then but I'm now into Rust and Erlang. Not sure how I can profit as I lack work history (giving up on self teaching myself programming also meant I took up dead end jobs), but I'm motivated nonetheless. Google, pick on someone your own size.

kccqzy 3y ago
You sugarcoat it by calling it a tiniest mistake. Just call it fraud.
- nextmove 3y ago
  Seeing as how Google Ads are being used to spread malware https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse-google-ads-to-spread-malware-in-legit-software/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse... https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-ads-push-virtualized-malware-made-for-antivirus-evasion/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-ads-pu... I think I'll sleep tight knowing I'm not the bad one here, buddy.
  - breakingcups 3y ago
    There can be multiple "bad" parties. Small-scale fraud is still fraud and Google was well within their right to ban you.
  - kccqzy 3y ago
    This is not a matter of good or bad, or the absence or presence of ethics. It's a matter of defrauding Google at exactly where their profit is, their cash cow. To phrase it in another way, if Google wasn't very good at detecting fraud, it would not have been making so much money or becoming such a big company. Billionaires are more likely than not to be absolute misers; the same applies to corporations.

butz 3y ago

Could magnet links live on archive.org forever?

vecinu 3y ago

Super cool trip down memory lane. I remember finding your site eons ago when I was in high school too. It's cool seeing some of the most popular shows there like Revision3, it reminds me of Digg, Kevin Rose and my favorite online show, thebroken. Really cool period in internet history. Thanks for hosting for so long!

en3r0 3y ago
Thanks for sharing! I had high hopes for Revision3, it was really an exciting time with Web 2.0 and the like.

skee8383 3y ago

Nice to see the internet continuing it's decline.

Synaesthesia 3y ago

Why you shutting it down? Cost too high?

nhumrich 3y ago

What does "null routed at root" mean here? Is this a form of DoS attack?

deweywsu 3y ago

Thanks for keeping it up for so long. Sites like yours are what makes (made) the internet a fun place to learn.

z3t4 3y ago

Advice for people wanting to earn money on ads: Don't use adsense. Make a list of companies that might be interested in advertising on your website, then start making calls. Advertisers have the same problem. Adwords sucks. Facebook ads sucks and are very expensive. There are few alternatives so it's an easy sell.

aembleton 3y ago
Has this worked for you?
potamic 3y ago
Will companies want to deal with individual websites?

dustingetz 3y ago

Null routed: https://forums.nfoservers.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=11456 https://forums.nfoservers.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=11456

rmbyrro 3y ago

With the GPT's taking over Google, I wonder when web devs will feel nostalgia about the SEO-days... > my first exposures to implementing SEO (what I now do for a living), which funny enough was mostly copied tags from The Pirate Bay and modified to be about legal torrents instead It's already starting to feel nostalgic.

xur17 3y ago

> I was super cheap back then, not even wanting to shell out for a domain name, so the original URL was virtenu.dyndns.org/lt. Eventually I bought the .info for $0.99 after the site picked up some speed a few months later. > I ran it out of my bedroom at my parents house for a long time, eventually switching over to a VPS sometime when I moved out. This brings back many memories from my high school and early college days. I used to run a file and image hosting site (legal content only), and it's amusing to think about the lengths I went to save money. My domain purchase (.com for $8/year or so) felt like a significant investment. I managed to host the site with a considerable number of users out of my parent's basement on a 768kbps upload DSL connection for several years. Eventually, I migrated to a VPS that cost me around $20/month. I ended up selling the site to another hosting service for approximately $700 because it became too much work. In retrospect, I'm guessing it was a no-brainer move for them since they acquired something like 10k users for $700, but from my perspective, I was happy to receive $700.

Aeolun 3y ago
Money is a weird thing when you are young. I somehow made things work even without it, but now that I have more of it I use it at every opportunity to not have to deal with things I don’t want to.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  There's an old saying that goes: Time is money. It means you buy other peoples' time with your money so you don't have to spend your own time. Conversely, you spend your own time so you don't have to buy other peoples' time with your money.

majestic5762 3y ago

I've been helping law enforcement to harvest torrent seeders for the last 10 years. LT is on my list. If there is someone in the world who owns one of the biggest torrent databases, probably it's me

phone8675309 3y ago
> I've been helping law enforcement to harvest torrent seeders for the last 10 years. But why?
en3r0 3y ago
That is super interesting, care to share why it was on your list? I mean it was legit after all lol.

alexvoda 3y ago

Can you release an archive of the ~5000 torrents and their descriptions?

mito88 3y ago

how was the server null routed at the host?

weedfroglozenge 3y ago

I really like your writing style. The end of an era for you - Wishing you all the best

en3r0 3y ago
Thank you, really appreciate you saying something. Not sure I have ever had anyone comment on my writing style. Probably means I should write more!