34 ms·

Rarbg Is No More

1352 points by 0___0 3y ago

pantulis 3y ago
From the released note: > Some are also fighting the war in Europe - ON BOTH SIDES What an absurd tragedy this is. I think it bears mention between all this conversation about sharing torrents.
- bazmattaz 3y ago
  Yes my heart broke reading this. Likely two young people who worked together around a common goal. All be it illegal. Now they’re hiding in bunkers and told to shoot each other if needed. Such a tragedy. Fuck Putin
biatch 3y ago
[flagged]
biatch 3y ago
[flagged]
aigoochamna 3y ago
I wonder how much it costs to run? I can't imagine it's too crazy.. data can be stored/cached easily and access is random and has some hot spots (recent torrents). Seems like it would be fairly cheap to run?
sktrdie 3y ago
Why don't torrent site owners just release their sites as a torrent file itself? Like a sqlite dump with search indexes? They could either self-update the torrent [1] or just release the new torrent via forums/groups/chats etc. Would bring the costs down to zero. 1. http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html
- traverseda 3y ago
  Because they make money off of ads and people who have the skills and resources to do that without profit motive also probably are afraid of getting entangled in legal battles.
  - sktrdie 3y ago
    From the announcement doesn't seem like they were making money?
    - traverseda 3y ago
      Pretty sure I remember there being ads.
      - diath 3y ago
        Even so, if they earn less money off ads than it costs to keep the site running, they're not making money, they're losing money.
        megablast 3y ago
        What is this comment? So they were losing money you suggest they should lose more money?
- krzyk 3y ago
  Pirate bay does that.
- Lammy 3y ago
  It's not just the site. RARBG themselves were responsible for many of the video encodes, hence the "RARBG_DO_NOT_MIRROR.exe" included in many of them: https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-adds-exe-files-to-torrents-but-no-need-to-panic-190126/ https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-adds-exe-files-to-torrents-bu...
  - 3y ago
zit10 3y ago
[flagged]
k5hp 3y ago
Let's hope the same doesn't happen to Rutracker.
- chromoblob 3y ago
  Rutracker seems to have big ad revenue (just look at the ads and how popular it is). Also, Rutracker administrators seem quite serious to me (I compare the feeling I get from observing elaborate upload post format requirements, massive forum structure, important size of dedicated wiki on Rutracker and the feeling I get after reading the linked announcement).
expertentipp 3y ago
Thank you RARBG team, you were the awesome part of the internet. Hope the crises will end favorably in the months to come.
tejohnso 3y ago
They just abandoned it and closed? Why no handoff? Why no appeal for funding? Or even a warning?
mxmilkiib 3y ago
A reminder that if you're using qBittorrent there is an in-client torrent search tab you can enable.
- oliwarner 3y ago
  This seems to use EliteTorrent (by default) which has a strong bias towards Spanish language content. There might be other reasons to use qBittorrent, but if you don't want to switch, you could just use that. https://github.com/iordic/qbittorrent-search-plugins/blob/master/engines/elitetorrent.py https://github.com/iordic/qbittorrent-search-plugins/blob/ma...
  - mxmilkiib 3y ago
    You want https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/Unofficial-search-plugins https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/Unofficia...
crazygringo 3y ago
Wow. Between Mullvad removing port forwarding 2 days ago ago [1] and now this, easy safe fast torrenting just got a bit harder. Talk about a one-two punch. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36113215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36113215
no_time 3y ago
2007 - 2023 RIP Is there a successful tracker founded after 2010? With all these old sites and their experienced crew quitting, things are not looking good for the long term of warez. The only one that comes to mind is the .si reboot of nyaa.se.
appleaday1 3y ago
It's always sad news when something that is widely used by people goes down.
unicornmama 3y ago
Someone should setup a torrent website on one of these decentralized blockchain technologies.
qersist3nce 3y ago
Sorry to see it go. While we are at it, an honest question: Why should _anyone_ undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and development time burden for maintaining a public tracker? What would release teams gain from setting up encoding pipelines and upholding their networking infrastructure?
- Shish2k 3y ago
  Gotta have a hobby ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I wonder if The Scene is still remotely accurate by modern standards — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIs_5nfJKu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIs_5nfJKu4
- a1369209993 3y ago
  > Why should _anyone_ undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and development time burden for maintaining a public tracker? Try a more extreme example: why should anyone undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and logistical hassle of hiding Jews from the SS? It's not some psychopathic business decision; it's because some people stubbornly insist on doing the right thing despite it being unpopular, illegal, and clearly a bad idea. If someone does manage to turn a profit doing it that's (all else being equal) great, but it's not the point.
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  Because some people grew up poor and without much access to content. Then they learned about this thing in the 90’s called the internet where you can share information with anyone for free. So said poor person learned programming and other skills to get a tracker working so that they could give back to others who are in the same boat. This way the poor kid (who’s family can’t afford lunch, let alone a 10€ /month Disney + subscription) can chat with their rich friends at the lunch table about the latest marvel film the week it releases and god forbid, fit in for once.
robertoandred 3y ago
"Content releases" aka stolen goods
DoItToMe81 3y ago
Their host charges 250 euro a month for 100 megabits and a one terabyte data cap. At the prices they're paying, I'm surprised this did not happen sooner.
- LordShredda 3y ago
  Do you have a source for that? Curious how you found out. But yeah, that's basically a scam for hosting a static website.
  - DoItToMe81 3y ago
    Site IP is owned by Netsaap.
smashah 3y ago
Thank you for your service
ZoomerCretin 3y ago
Ctrl+F "covid" Phrase not found Seriously, a huge part of the internet is down because the team was taken out by Covid (both death and complications), and no one even mentions this? All the evidence points to the covid complication rate compounding with each infection. Rarbg is only the start of where we can all expect to be in 5-10 years without more serious long-term mitigations (universal indoor air filtration). https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/opinion/last-pandemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/opinion/last-pandemic.htm...
gjsman-1000 3y ago
The Motion Picture Association is probably throwing free champagne around the offices and rejoicing about how that was the easiest pirate website takedown ever. Also, if I was the MPA, I would almost look into attrition tactics now, if that were legal. Create dozens and dozens and dozens of junk piracy websites with borked videos. Maybe the first half the movie in 720p, then the audio switches to Spanish and 240p black and white with flickering. Flood the market on every pirate website with the world's worst remuxes. Overwhelm them with junk so that nobody knows what tracker to trust for anything. Maybe even (with permission from rights holders) run some pirate websites with high-quality rips, then burn them to the ground after a year or two just to demoralize.
Willish42 3y ago
Seeing lots of mentions here in the comments about increased serving costs but the nature of the message sounds more like the community itself has fallen apart / lost people due to covid and war. I can't imagine the effort it must've taken to keep this site running for so long given the amount of traffic, especially during the hellish last few years. I'm sad to see them go but I support their desire to spend time and energy/resources on something else after all they've done
rejectfinite 3y ago
Related documentary TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard https://youtu.be/eTOKXCEwo_8 https://youtu.be/eTOKXCEwo_8
MagicMoonlight 3y ago
Ugh that was the only good public site
monkaiju 3y ago
Tragic
omegaworks 3y ago
>some of the people in our team died due to covid complications, others still suffer the side effects of it - not being able to work at all. Long COVID is having a real impact on technical people. There's a reason Google buys COVID rapid testing kits in bulk for any of their onsite events. One of my friends working behind the scenes was gifted a grocery bag full of leftover tests. Governments around the world have largely abandoned us to a disabling virus.
firstSpeaker 3y ago
Is there is any replacement with similar clean design and availability?
atmosx 3y ago
Aren't torrents legal in Spain and Switzerland?
puskuruk 3y ago
R.I.P rarbg... I'll miss you.
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Is this the real reason or just something like Truecrypt did?
adastra22 3y ago
What is the best alternative? I know usually people use a seedbox + private torrent server. But which private server? RARBG was amazing because it had everything, but still curated the releases for minimum standards of quality. Is there an alternative out there?
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  For educational reasons I'm going to suggest Usenet. Sure you have to pay $ for a few providers to obtain most 100% but it has everything that torrent has if not more. Not as convenient but you do get decent download speeds and if parts are broken you can normally repair with PAR2 which itself is alien tech. Provider backbone/list: https://svgshare.com/i/oti.svg https://svgshare.com/i/oti.svg
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
double2helix 3y ago
For those questioning how websites can still illegally operate torrenting movies, the answer is very simple. It costs a lot of money and resources for the FBI and/or other federal agency to prosecute someone, let alone post adjudication costs ie: probation officers. The feds just don't care to waste time with search warrants over a menial crime. They tried a few years back just simply mailing fines to people. But quickly realized they couldn't prove guilt without spending more money than it's worth. Also movie makers don't care to push the issue with law enforcement anymore. They (unfortunately for law abiding folks) just inflate the price to make up for lost, just like stores do to combat shoplifting.
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  Movie makers aren't losing that much, if at all. It is ridiculous to assume that had piracy not been available, the pirates would pay them the full price for the content. Imagine I operate this web app free of charge that gets 1 million monthly active users, and I think to myself, if I start charging $2 per month, I'd be making $2m a month. This doesn't work because if I charge money, people would try to find less expensive options, so I would be getting way less than $2m. Piracy also contributes significantly to the general promulgation of the content into the culture, which may offset some of the profit that is lost. And no, screwing over legit customers by charging more, DRM, or whatever bullshit like that isn't going to win over more people.
paulmd 3y ago
Is there an archive of the tracked torrents available?
nipperkinfeet 3y ago
This is a sad news! What is going on? Really, this week has been a disaster.
smeagull 3y ago
Huh. I wonder what it was.
koreanguy 3y ago
[dead]
defrost 3y ago
Of Interest: RARBG magnet link archive: https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-magnet-links-appear-online-230601/ https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-mag... https://github.com/2004content/rarbg https://github.com/2004content/rarbg ( released 5 hours ago )
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lukematt 3y ago
[flagged]
chakintosh 3y ago
For what it's worth, there is a concerted effort at r/DataHoarder to bring the site back from the dead.
- clsec 3y ago
  There is now also a repository that is holding 100's of thousands of RARBG magnet links in text files [1]. The link is in the article. I'm not sure whether posting the direct link is proper here. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-magnet-links-appear-online-230601/ https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-mag...
SergeAx 3y ago
One of the problems of RarBG was that they were dealing with real data. Today to get a popular file from bit-torrent network all one needs is a hash (AKA magnet) - DHT and other distributed announcement protocols will take care of everything else. But the moment you gotta deal with real content - you are in a big trouble both legaly and technically: todays 4K media can take up to ten gigabyte per hour of screen time. No wonder RarBG suffered that much.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
So much media is going to be lost once torrenting dies out.
nubinetwork 3y ago
I could have sworn that rarbg got shut down like 5 years ago... I didn't know they were still operating. Not that I use bittorrent very much personally, I gave that up many years ago. RIP, I suppose.
bishop77 3y ago
I'm interested in the art-house, non-mainstream genres, mainly produced by independent studios (e.g. one of my all-time favourites is When father was away for business, by Emir Kusturica). Do you have any suggestions for trackers specialised in these types of movies?
noonething 3y ago
where are all these torrent sites that have been up for years and I've never heard of geez
Avlin67 3y ago
its still there ? https://rargb.to/ https://rargb.to/
sankalp22 3y ago
Sad to hear, last time they took down that book website
0___0 3y ago
Hello guys, We would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site. The past 2 years have been very difficult for us - some of the people in our team died due to covid complications, others still suffer the side effects of it - not being able to work at all. Some are also fighting the war in Europe - ON BOTH SIDES. Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard. Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare. Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket. After an unanimous vote we've decided that we can no longer do it. We are sorry :( Bye Edit: This isn't me BTW. I just copy-pasted the text from the site. Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230531105653/https://rarbg.to/index80.php https://web.archive.org/web/20230531105653/https://rarbg.to/...
- PiranhaTO 3y ago
  Thank you for everything you've done. Your efforts did not go unnoticed and you will be greatly missed. I hope the circumstances of your lives improve and that you can find normality in these difficult times.
- Nick-Adventure 3y ago
  First, a sincere thank you for all the efforts you have done. My collection of TV shows is nothing but ION10 webrips. You will be missed. While I can respect your decision, I have to ask: Why the hell did you not choose to ask for donations or monetize the website? While there are many that cannot afford to purchase, there are plenty of hackers that could have / would have supported you.
- tokai 3y ago
  Why would anyone fight on both sides? Seems ridiculous.
  - netfortius 3y ago
    Considering the recent events in the area previously known as Yugoslavia, and the fact that part of hosting is there, in addition to Russia - Ukraine conflict being over a year old, I'd think of other sources. ...that if we were to trust what's been publicized, of course.
vachina 3y ago
Devastating to see them go, they’re like the Apple of pirated content, oracle of only quality releases presented in a consistent manner.
abdusco 3y ago
I guess this is a reminder to support your pirated material source.
- SSLy 3y ago
  Thank God PTP is back on a good track.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Klaster_1 3y ago
Any advice on where to download daily MP3 scene release from now?
- GOATS- 3y ago
  You could always try Soulseek?
- SSLy 3y ago
  usenet
KennyNON 3y ago
Ouh, do you know any alternative with UHD BD remuxes?
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  There are private trackers like PTP, but good luck getting in.
petecooper 3y ago
Two DHT search engines that might be useful: https://btdig.com https://btdig.com https://bt4g.org https://bt4g.org
- qersist3nce 3y ago
  So these crawl torrent indexers and provide search functionality? Do they also search private indexers?
  - arsome 3y ago
    They crawl the peer to peer DHT, private torrents have a flag so they do not get announced via DHT.
  - SSLy 3y ago
    You can't search private indexers without having account on them.
    - dark-star 3y ago
      they are not searching the indexers, they are searching the DHT directly. Some private trackers do not set the "disallow DHT" flag, so those will be indexed as well. Most do, however, and it's impossible to scrape those without an account, yes
jumm 3y ago
[dead]
jumm 3y ago
[dead]
OGITH 3y ago
[dead]
- imgabe 3y ago
  Be careful: you want https://1337x.to/ https://1337x.to/ note 1337 not 1377
  - snickerbockers 3y ago
    what happens if you go to 1377?
    - imgabe 3y ago
      instant death
- sonofaragorn 3y ago
  are these safe? being clones doesn't really inspire much confidence rarbg was my go to for years :S
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    They're not clones. Just proxies so they are down too. This is usually done to make it harder for the courts to force providers to block these sites. Whack-a-mole.. PS: Why am I getting downvoted? Try clicking on the links, you will see the same goodbye message. Edit: Oh the first 2 do seem to be clones, now I understand. The rest are proxies though. I do think even the clones basically skived off the original's database though so I doubt they will have much going forward.
    - fastball 3y ago
      Did you actually try any of these yourself? Some are clearly clones, and are not down.
      - 3y ago
mrtksn 3y ago
RARBG was originally Bulgarian, like many other trackers and warez stuff. Eastern Europe - inside EU or outside of the EU - has always been major player in this scene. RIP. I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations without being exposed or caught. How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?
- phkahler 3y ago
  >> How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised? Because at the core, identity on the internet is not well defined. Authentication is a hard problem. You might wonder why it's hard, why better more secure protocols haven't emerged. Answer: that makes end to end encryption easy, among other things that give individuals too much power.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - samstave 3y ago
    AI produced Obits, and death certs and detailed descriptions of the death, and then new documents produced via GPT6+ access to APIs to DMV, Embassies, etc to produce new documents sent to your new PO box in [place] etc... - deep-fake assassinations are going to be a thing... PHKahler
- themagician 3y ago
  The answer to this is easier (and harder) than you might think: just don't say anything. You can get away with quite a bit just by being silent, and for longer than you'd think. A big way that people get away with things for so long is just by not answering questions. Someone says, "Is this [illegal thing] yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them. You'll find domains, web hosts, countries, and employees who are all onboard with the same philosophy. When everything requires a subpoena at the highest level to move something forward, it can easily take years for anything to happen at all. Some countries are known for having slow legal systems. Stack jurisdictions with slow court systems and you can start with an 18 month window before anything can happen. You've got a domain in Tonga registered to a company in another country, owned by a large company in another country owned by a trust in a third country. Often small countries with limited resources and archaic or corrupt bureaucracies. And where is it hosted? That's probably another connect the dots. And the site can change hands and then you have to start all over again. Are you going to refocus on the new owner or are you going to spend even more resources trying to track down the former owner? And any of these entities may lead to nothing more than a mule, fake person, or dead person. Sure, it's someone's fault for having inaccurate records—but who? How long has this been going on? Did they know? Was it intentional? It shouldn't be like this, but it is… what do you do now? Are you going to go after the recordkeeper too? You can do illegal shit for years or even decades if you just say nothing and respond to no one.
xorkatoss 3y ago
noooooooo, this was my go-to torrenting website, so sad :(
doqq 3y ago
oh wow, sad news
sph 3y ago
o7 thank you for your service, keeping the Internet awesome and anti-corporate. Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse. Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time. "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell (If you need a semi-private tracker that's easy to get into, try TorrentLeech. Also /r/opensignups)
- oxygen_crisis 3y ago
  [dead]
- robertoandred 3y ago
  I love when thieves act like they're such noble saints.
  - izacus 3y ago
    Yeah, we all love Robin Hood books. What does your comment have to do with this thread though?
    - youreincorrect 3y ago
      Uh, because it responded to a comment that wrote a bunch of 2009-era Guy Fawkes mask-wearing redditor bullshit that attempts to make piracy noble. > o7 thank you for your service (o7 would be a salute) > Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse. False and nonsense, especially in 2023. > Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel... Okay, I'll stop here. I'm fine with piracy, personally. I'd prefer we just admit that you're mostly using it to download movies, music, and television shows for free. This isn't some noble fight for freedom. We're talking about watching mindless bullshit content like Star Wars, without paying for it. Piracy proponents, and comments like the one starting this thread, make it seem like we're entitled to this content. We're not. But I'll admit, I don't watch much in the way of tv or movies any more anyway, so the whole debate is lost on me. I just rolled my eyes at the ridiculous tone of that comment, like they're freedom fighters. It's self-important bullshit.
revskill 3y ago
What's this site for ? First time i know it.
- tokai 3y ago
  Media piracy
  - revskill 3y ago
    Thanks. WHat's special about this, in comparison with other similar sites ?
    - dist-epoch 3y ago
      Possibly the biggest one after ThePirateBay.
    - SSLy 3y ago
      Compared to other public spaces, relatively high quality of the content curation.
    - emptyfile 3y ago
      [dead]
feyes 3y ago
That's pretty devastating. This was old reliable for a long time. I could never keep up with the demands from private trackers as streaming made it so I didn't need to utilize them as much.
- dmix 3y ago
  Are there any private torrent sites for movies/tv that you can buy your way in without needing a seedbox?
  - holoduke 3y ago
    Checkout sonarr and radarr together with jackett. Plenty of ways to find zillions of sites. Most dark streaming sites use these tools to fully automate everything
    - paintballboi07 3y ago
      Yep. Although, I'd recommend prowlarr instead of jackett. Integrates with the other arr apps much better.
  - drexlspivey 3y ago
    Last I checked you can get in IPTorrents and HDTorrents with a donation. Still need to maintain your ratio but you can also boost your upload with donations.
bsaul 3y ago
i was always skeptical on people saying that torrentz are a symptom of bad legal streaming services.. Well, i recently got myself a videoprojector with an android tv included, and since i happen to have an amazon prime account, i installed the app, which is quite good. And yes, it's true, since i've done that, my torrentz usage has dramatically dropped..
- George83728 3y ago
  Streaming is a content ghetto. 9 times out of 10, none of the streaming websites have the media I'm looking for. When I visit friends and family and am made to sit down with their streaming services and find something to watch, it always turns into a disaster of everybody sitting on the couch browsing the various catalogue on their phones, discovering that no service has whatever movie somebody just thought of and suggested. If you treat streaming like old cable television; you turn it on then decide what you want to watch from what is available, I guess it might seem fine to you. But if you try to decide what you want to watch first, treating streaming as a means to an end rather than the end itself, then streaming is unmitigated trash.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Deciding a movie and then look for it on streaming sites is hopeless. Just rent it on a pay to view site if they don't want to download via torrents.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I got myself Amazon prime, logged in on my computer, and found out I can only watch 480p video because of DRM shenanigans. The app on my TV is no longer supported (TV doesn't run Android), my phone is rooted (Xiaomi stopped making updates after two years) so I sometimes can't even find the app in Google Play let alone play decent quality video and the Chromecast app is a buggy mess. So yeah, I went back to torrents after that. All of my problems disappeared when I just had an MP4 file I could play anywhere. I'm still paying my subscription but they can take my 1080p video from my cold dead hands.
Sharply2703 3y ago
Any other places that do find by imdb code or similar? That was the best feature here, with the TV show seasons grouped together.
- dlxfoo 3y ago
  [dead]
- SSLy 3y ago
  https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/407284-imdb-scout-mod https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/407284-imdb-scout-mod
KoftaBob 3y ago
This is the torrent search engine I've been using lately, works reliably and has a clean UI: https://bitsearch.to/ https://bitsearch.to/
sampa 3y ago
pity seems like rutracker.org (ex torrents.ru) is gonna outlive everybody
- jamesy0ung 3y ago
  rutracker is amazing. I've had no problems with the stuff I download from there (games, movies, books and software) and they also have some super niche stuff as well. Rip RARGB
jackspratts 3y ago
phenomenal site. while the content is upped by users the fact that multiple rips were found on the same page; SDR, HDR, HDR10, 264, 265, 720, 1080, 2160, dubbed, original, theatrical cuts, director's, producer's etc. was all on the brilliant, dedicated folks of rarbgtor and is what made the site the best in the world. nothing else even approaches it. like OiNk wiithout the drama. i'll remember the time spent there with gratitude and fondness. and I just installed two more 20TB drives, less than 18 hours ago... - js.
ArfathKhalid 3y ago
First heart break was when Kickass was taken down.. Now this. I am literally too sad over a website than my other life choices lol.. Love you RARBG team, will miss you till death. Good luck in your life's.
OGITH 3y ago
[flagged]
defrost 3y ago
Elsewhere: Iconic Torrent Site RARBG Shuts Down, All Content Releases Stop https://torrentfreak.com/iconic-torrent-site-rarbg-shuts-down-all-content-releases-stop-230531/ https://torrentfreak.com/iconic-torrent-site-rarbg-shuts-dow... RARBG, one of the world's largest torrent sites, has said "farewell" to millions of users. The site, which was a prominent and stable source of new movie and TV show releases, cited a variety of reasons behind its decision to cease operations. The surprise shutdown marks the end of an era. Founded in 2008, RARBG evolved to become a key player in the torrent ecosystem. The site didn’t only attract millions of monthly visitors from all over the globe, it was also a major release hub, bridging the gap between the Scene and the broader pirate public. ... etc.
mdrzn 3y ago
Damn RARBG was the GOAT lately, it had more stuff than TPB. Guess I'll have to subscribe to a USENET after all.
pengster 3y ago
so sad to read this - I know it's probably too late but if its a money question as they stated on the site, I would pay for it to remain!
- robertoandred 3y ago
  You'd pay for the ability to steal?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - getcrunk 3y ago
    Torrenting is not stealing. Stealing implies preventing the original owner use of the item
    - robertoandred 3y ago
      Sure, whatever you have to tell yourself.
taopai 3y ago
I am not technical so maybe this questions sound stupid. But this topic really interests me. I read that Rarbg was like thepiratebay but safer. I guess that's due to moderation to check which torrents are safe, right? This people had a website that offered a nice UI to find torrents. Did they had ads to make money? So they offered their services to maintain healthy piracy in exchange of money and also to pay servers. (I am not criticize or judging I just want to understand how it worked) Would It be possible to share the same website using a torrent file? Like shipping and actualizing the website and sending to users trough torrent so they can search it locally? Or send a sql database and then create a UI for users to search trough it? Or would be complications because torrenting exposes our ip?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Sites can't be offered as torrents, because generally torrents are immutable once they have been created. You can't say "oops, that version of the file is wrong" and start offering the new version within that same torrent swarm. However, there was an update to the protocol, BEP44, that did allow you to update the already-in-progress torrent. Furthermore, there is a protocol called WebTorrent that swaps out some of the other base protocols for WebRTC, allowing a web browser to participate in the torrents. You could just include a link to the library via CDN. The trouble of course is that bittorrent now relies on DHT more and more (you wouldn't want to have to run a tracker, if you did it'd just be a target of legal attacks)... and WebTorrent can't do DHT (of any variety) well. There was a proposal to allow browsers to be able to do native network sockets, but I think that got turned down by Mozilla (maybe they were more concerned with doing VPN ads or something). But if you had that, then yes, it might be possible to have something like a "swarmsite" that didn't need to be hosted.
  - sktrdie 3y ago
    Torrents are immutable but they could just give us new torrents (with updated indexes) via chats/forums/etc. Then thanks to https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html we can just download the diff.
BLKNSLVR 3y ago
I mean, it did take a pandemic, war, and rampant global inflation to finally kill it. Testament to the resilience it showed throughout its lifetime. I think it's somewhat poetic that it was unrelated to law enforcement pressure.
hiofio 3y ago
[flagged]
pdimitar 3y ago
What a shame. They could have asked for donations but me as an Eastern European, I get it -- usually if we get to the point of needing donations we feel ashamed and humiliated and just close shop. I hope somebody picks up the flag. Illegal and copyright-protected piracy aside, there were tons of royalty-free and non-copyright-enforced works of art there and it would be a big hit on humanity's culture at large for all that to be lost.
- dmos62 3y ago
  They did use aggressive popup ads via click-hijacking. So they were monetizing at least to some extent. Unfortunately for them, most people torrenting probably use ad protection.
  - anticrymactic 3y ago
    To my knowledge, they didn't. There were a lot of imposter sites, which were indistinguishable, where you'd be told to download a VPN or similar. But the main .to site never opened any ads for me
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      It always did for me. The first time a torrent results page opens, the clicks open a new tab with ads. You had to refresh the results page to actually click through to the torrent.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - poisonarena 3y ago
      they sure did! every half a dozen clicks! immediately blocked by my adblockers but i would still dig into the dev tools to try and figure it out occasionally
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- 3y ago
computerfriend 3y ago
The have been a lot of terrible casualties of the war, but this one was very unexpected. Deeply sad about this. Nothing lasts forever.
hiofio 3y ago
I found a replacement is the same as Rarbg https://torrentgalaxy.to/ https://torrentgalaxy.to/
- clsec 3y ago
  Thanks! This seems like a great replacement. Much better than l337x or TPB, especially with dark mode turned on!
- majkinetor 3y ago
  looks even better. thx
kypro 3y ago
I've been using Jackett for torrents recently. It seems to work really well if anyone is looking for alternatives. https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett
- roesel 3y ago
  Doesn't Jackett still need trackers such as Rarbg to function?
  - egKYzyXeIL 3y ago
    Yes - Jackett is just a search aggregator for multiple selected torrent indexers
  - kypro 3y ago
    Yes, but Rarbg was both a tracker and a popular torrent search site. Out of the box Jackett supports many popular public trackers like 1337x and you can configure private trackers too.
- MayeulC 3y ago
  Prowlarr is another alternative https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr
  - reyqn 3y ago
    Interestingly (or not), I avoided prowlarr because it didn't cache results, which triggered rarbg's rate limiter. Well it took rarbg going down for me to see that they actually started caching results for rarbg in the latest release... Too bad.
CoBE10 3y ago
I guess mirrors would stay unaffected, because they seem to be up right now. Someone will probably clone their torrents. They might not have been the best quality, but they were always better than YIFI (YTS). I always liked that you could search Rarbg using IMDB numbers. Also, their UI was really pleasing to me, plus, there were many userscripts that extended the functionality of the site. I wounder who will fill up their place, because TPB was always the last resort for me. In the meantime Btdig could be a nice transitory place to find all of their torrents.
- tawayasdf 3y ago
  what is the de-facto alternative these days?
  - medlazik 3y ago
    1377x
    - inversetelecine 3y ago
      I think this is a typo? should be 1337x.
    - melvyn2 3y ago
      1377x is an ad-hijacking "clone" of the real 1337x
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - poisonarena 3y ago
    rutracker
    - grishka 3y ago
      I second this but I'm not sure how much use it is outside of the former USSR. Most movies and TV shows there do come with original English soundtracks tho.
m4r1k 3y ago
Probably the largest blow to the torrent sharing community since The Pirate Bay got shut down. The impact of content availability will be noticeable for years to come
- rabuse 3y ago
  RARBG was my favorite for finding HDR/4k content. Anybody got an alternative?
  - GaggiX 3y ago
    I usually just try to find stuff on DHT using BTDigg.
- jasonfarnon 3y ago
  I'm very out of the loop at this stage of life, but one thing I have wondered--has software as a service, and all the online gaming, killed off all those kinds of warez? Are most of these pirate sites nowadays just for movies/tv? (One of the reasons I have been wondering about this is that I so f'ing hate windows etc updating and phoning home all the time I would prefer a version cracked a la 2007 to prevent that, over the legit copy I own.)
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Online-only, heavily DRMed games are still a tiny minority of games. And even if you look at popularity instead, Minecraft (so far as the more open Java version is still popular at least) single-handedly skews the results enough for them not being a clear win for the locked down games.
    - chickenimprint 3y ago
      Where are you getting that from? On Steam, the offline title with the highest concurrent player count is Civ 6 on place 18, with 1/30 the amount of players of CS:GO. On Twitch, Minecraft, which almost all streamers seem to be playing on multiplayer servers, is in 20th place, behind 19 exclusively online games. I would estimate more than 99% of all playtime is spent on online games.
MeltdownSpectre 3y ago
Really sad to hear this. I basically built my entire Plex server with RARBG. Anyone have any solid private tracker recommendations for movies and TV shows? After taking advantage of public trackers like RARBG, I feel like it's my time to give back.
- inversetelecine 3y ago
  check out /r/trackers also watch entry level trackers for open invites. speed, iptorrents, torrentleech, etc
- robertoandred 3y ago
  [flagged]
- mktk1001 3y ago
  Torrent leech is great for movies and tv.
- Thaxll 3y ago
  https://1337x.to/ https://1337x.to/
- SSLy 3y ago
  I recommend registering on some usenet indexer instead.
  - blitzar 3y ago
    I download all my linux ISO's through usenet these days.
    - xu3u32 3y ago
      Games? Or other software?
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    That almost costs more than actually paying for the content.
skjoldr 3y ago
I wonder if they could host the database of magnet links somewhere, since it shouldn't be too big.
slazaro 3y ago
I keep wondering all the time why torrent search is based on websites (centralized), which can be taken down, etc., while once you have a torrent file or a magnet/hash everything is distributed. Is there a main reason why there isn't (AFAIK, even though I haven't really researched) a distributed search that wouldn't have these problems? Is it a tech problem that literally can't be solved? Or it just hasn't been done? It seems like search is the obvious weak link, since the websites keep disappearing or taken down or blocked by governments and ISPs, etc.
- dmos62 3y ago
  That's a good question, but the answers are somewhat sad. I see the other commenters saying it's not about the search, but about the curation. Curation or identification (as in, "who's the author?") is essential, but decentralized search is non-existent too. Yes, there is unmaintained, resource-hungry, locally-run, unscalable software out there that you can use, but there really isn't a public search engine for this. Which is a shame. I really hope someone will tell me I missed something, but I'm not holding my breath :( Edit: found mentions of https://btdig.com https://btdig.com and https://bt4g.org https://bt4g.org. I wasn't aware of the latter. A problem with the former is that it doesn't track number of peers.
- drexlspivey 3y ago
  How is it distributed? Don’t you need a torrent tracker? How do you know which peer has which files to share?
  - zolland 3y ago
    Here is a good resource https://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification https://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification
- grishka 3y ago
  Decentralized search is a complex problem and there exist different approaches to it with different degree of centralization and resource requirements. DC++ is a bit more decentralized than BitTorrent. There still are central servers ("hubs"), but they don't even host any metadata. Search works by the hub broadcasting all search queries to all online peers and them replying with results if they have any. The file transfers themselves are p2p. I have an idea that's kind of more decentralized. Initially envisioned as a missing global search feature for the fediverse, but can be adapter for anything that has a similar network structure. A server has a number of peers already established because of the ActivityPub federation. Each server would send to its peers some kind of bloom filter that determines the tags or keywords that this server has results for. Then, when searching, your server would find the peers who are likely to have what you want, and only send your search query to them. If there aren't any, then it would send your query to the peers that have most users (with some random bias for load balancing purposes) because they're likely to have more connectivity, and they would point you where to look based on their own peers and their bloom filters. There would also need to be some kind of reputation system (centralized server lists? p2p exchange of scores/reports?) so that servers that return spam or intentionally wrong results would get punished. This could probably be made to work in a fully-decentralized p2p network, but I imagine it would be too easy to abuse. Getting a new domain costs money, yet getting a new IP or public key is free and easy.
EwanG 3y ago
I have seen several folks on here mention Usenet subscriptions as another option. What I haven't found is any good Usenet tutorial on how to actually get from "I know the name of something I want" to "I have downloaded it". The irony that I used to run a UUCP node on the original version of Usenet does not escape me :-)
- simse 3y ago
  It's not too complicated. I heard from a friend, that all you need is a downloader like Sabnzbd, a usenet provider like Eweka or Frugal Usenet, and an index like Drunkenslug to find stuff.
- clsec 3y ago
  I haven't used Usenet since probably around 2002. It seems like everything is still the same except for the indexer. I assume that is so you don't have to sign onto a bunch of binary groups into your newsreader and then search through them for what you want (part of the fun in the old days for me)? Is that correct, does anyone know? I also wonder if Forte' Agent still works? Does Newsguy still exist? /s edit: found the answer to my question
- maronato 3y ago
  r/usenet has a great FAQ about it[1]. In a nutshell, there are 3 things you need to use usenet. You need providers, indexers, and a software to download stuff. Providers are companies and servers where the data is actually stored, as opposed to peers in torrenting. Since they are for-profit, you need to purchase a subscription to have access to these servers. r/usenet has some nice deals on those[2]. Frugal is usually the most recommended for beginners since it’s pretty cheap and has most files you’ll want. Indexers are similar to what rarbg was. They make it easy to search for files stored in the providers. They usually require a subscription as well, and some require invites, but are really cheap and easy to get [3]. nzbgeek doesn’t require an invite and is pretty complete. nzbplanet and drunkenslug have more content, but require invites. You can get invites for those on r/UsenetInvites Finally, you need something to download the files. There are many options available for that, but I find that the best one is sabnzb [4]. It is pretty complete and has a lot of moving parts, so I recommend following the trash-guides article on it to get started[5] [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/faq/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/faq/ [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/ https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/ [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/indexers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/indexers/ [4]: https://sabnzbd.org/ https://sabnzbd.org/ [5]: https://trash-guides.info/Downloaders/SABnzbd/Basic-Setup/ https://trash-guides.info/Downloaders/SABnzbd/Basic-Setup/
yieldcrv 3y ago
note: this has no more information about the shut down than the blurb posted on rarbg's website
- cronix 3y ago
  That's because it's an archive of that blurb from the rarbg site.
saiya-jin 3y ago
Not only they had clean, easy-to-navigate UI, they also produced tons of their own releases. As big fan of saving space, x265 1080p releases from them were taking minimal space with good quality, practically always bundled with subtitles. That's how quality service looks like. Glad I pulled (here legally) all the movies I wanted in my private collection. RIP.
haunter 3y ago
Pray for https://nyaa.si/ https://nyaa.si/ that's the goat tracker for anything Japan
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  nyaa has already died once, and this replacement is nowhere near the old one wrt peer counts and content availability (the old one already wasn't great). I wish torrent trackers had kept their databases open, maybe by regularly publishing encrypted dumps with a dead man's switch on decryption keys. At least the new nyaa is FOSS, although the code isn't very useful without data.
dmix 3y ago
Kinda makes sense the team was (partially) operating out of Eastern Europe and then had some issues with rising costs given the war and inflation. Maybe it will come back in the future when things settle down or a new backer comes in.
- johnvanommen 3y ago
  The first time I went on vacation in Eastern Europe, almost two decades ago, I noticed that basically everyone pirated content.
  - m00dy 3y ago
    Ive had best parties of my life in Eastern Europe :)
Giorgi 3y ago
Damn. I used to use their "popular movies" feature the most. RIP
rwmj 3y ago
I notice that "anti-piracy efforts", DMCA notices, etc don't figure at all.
- BossHogg 3y ago
  Given the Bulgarian heritage, I'd assume looming laws[0] were in fact a factor even if not mentioned. [0] https://torrentfreak.com/bulgaria-approves-draft-law-that-turns-pirate-site-operators-into-criminals-230425/ https://torrentfreak.com/bulgaria-approves-draft-law-that-tu...
- userbinator 3y ago
  DMCA would be completely irrelevant as they are not in the US.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    Is “completely irrelevant” accurate? In reality, the influence of the US extends far beyond where the jurisdiction of US laws ends.
    - omniglottal 3y ago
      In the case of DMCA notices, yes. 100.00% of those which are relevany are served within US jurisdiction.
      - moffkalast 3y ago
        Wait, so EU businesses don't have to comply with DMCA? Neat.
      - pixxel 3y ago
        KimDotcom?
cheapliquor 3y ago
RIP RARBG It was a good site.
fsociety999 3y ago
Previous hn thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36136819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36136819
zfxfr 3y ago
Wow that came as a shock. I used to check every couple of days if they had interesting movie I could watch with my wife. I wonder what is the cost of running such a site and I guess they must also earn some money in crypto with all the donation and also the advertisements. Well, that's the end of something
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  its probably not the money cost, its the effort involved with more manual hosting if you can't risk being cancelled in the convenient data centers or platforms
- makach 3y ago
  One Man's Death Is Another Man's Bread
  - tawayasdf 3y ago
    >> One Man's Death Is Another Man's Bread Who's bread is it? Most of the classic bt sites seem to have gone away from what I could see. Sad to see rarbg go.
    - abwizz 3y ago
      the "younger generation" (>2k) aren't used to the open net, they grew into moderated groups (fb), hence i suspect there is a massive number of hidden/private trackers
      - thatguy0900 3y ago
        I think the younger generation just uses streaming sites. FMovies and 9anime work fine. I don't know anyone who torrents shows or movies now.
        lax4ever 3y ago
        Those who don't want to be dependent on the whims of a conglomerate and would like to actually possess the data files.
Simulacra 3y ago
Until another site takes its place
- dopa42365 3y ago
  >until it has always been just one of many such sites, no need to wait
  - vachina 3y ago
    Nothing rivals the curation of rarbg though. It’s so well maintained it actually felt like browsing a library. Unfortunately none of the proxies copied that feature.
villgax 3y ago
The only way I was able to archive certain show after the studios pulled it from any reasonable avenue of purchase....
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
I really liked their rss feature, it made it easy to filter stuff and auto-download stuff... They will be missed!
sbdaman 3y ago
It's absolutely insane how many of these incredibly important torrent sites are just managed and hosted by a rag-tag group of people with the site barely clinging to life.
- best_one_there 3y ago
  Basically all of an actual software company is bullshit jobs unrelated to the core product like legal, marketing, investor relations, HR, maybe even developers for R&D etc. Running a website doesn't require that many people. I've worked at companies with 4 developers and 30+ "other stuff". The company would not be profitable and we would not get paid without them, but the actual product would work just fine if we wanted it to.
  - jahewson 3y ago
    Anecdotally, I’ve never met anyone who thought this way who’s product didn’t suck.
    - best_one_there 3y ago
      It's not an opinion. Legal is very useful in the general case, but if you're an anonymous torrent site operator who fully intends to ignore the law anyway it's a waste of time.
    - George83728 3y ago
      Stack Overflow seems to still be running well.
    - ebiester 3y ago
      I don't understand this. If you build a system for resilience, it should not take significant effort to maintain. You should be able to keep the lights on with 10-20% of the engineering team. The rest is growth. Growth may be making the product better, creating new product lines, or improving the scalability - for example, allowing larger numbers of users or entries. However, you can make the choice to make a well constrained product that serves a valuable use but doesn't need growth. Consider Bingo Card Creator, for example.
westmeal 3y ago
Damn there goes another titan RIP to real ones
pallas_athena 3y ago
Does anyone know how to find where a certain team uploads stuff? I loved VXT stuff on rarbg, and would love to find them again.
misterbishop 3y ago
That site has been Comcast's honeypot for like 10 years.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  If Comcast is your ISP in this context, it's not their honeypot. They're the ones receiving the requests that downloads cease from the copyright holders and Comcast acts on those requests as they see fit.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  Running a torrent site as a honeypot seems like a stupid move for an ISP given how cheap it would be to run a bot that automatically downloads every release and tracks the IP addresses. And Comcast would only bother with that as they own NBC, so probably have been running such a bot for about 14 years now.
- crumpled 3y ago
  Someone already mentioned the Comcast angle, and they are correct. The ISP isn't involved until they get the notification from an agent of the owner of the content. The honeypot isn't the torrent site. You can use any site in the world or no site at all and still get busted. It's a peer to peer network, and the people busting you are seeding the torrents themselves. They catch you when you peer with them. Use a VPN, and read more.
  - crumpled 3y ago
    Just to be clear, the rights holders probably aren't publishing torrents, they just also download them and monitor anybody that happens to connect with their seed. In a way, they are helping us with better download speeds.
    - 8organicbits 3y ago
      I'd be interested in the legal argument that by sharing their media in this way, the rights holders are authorizing the download.

1352 points by 0___0 3y ago

From the released note: > Some are also fighting the war in Europe - ON BOTH SIDES What an absurd tragedy this is. I think it bears mention between all this conversation about sharing torrents.

bazmattaz 3y ago
Yes my heart broke reading this. Likely two young people who worked together around a common goal. All be it illegal. Now they’re hiding in bunkers and told to shoot each other if needed. Such a tragedy. Fuck Putin

biatch 3y ago

[flagged]

biatch 3y ago

[flagged]

aigoochamna 3y ago

I wonder how much it costs to run? I can't imagine it's too crazy.. data can be stored/cached easily and access is random and has some hot spots (recent torrents). Seems like it would be fairly cheap to run?

sktrdie 3y ago

Why don't torrent site owners just release their sites as a torrent file itself? Like a sqlite dump with search indexes? They could either self-update the torrent [1] or just release the new torrent via forums/groups/chats etc. Would bring the costs down to zero. 1. http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

traverseda 3y ago
Because they make money off of ads and people who have the skills and resources to do that without profit motive also probably are afraid of getting entangled in legal battles.
- sktrdie 3y ago
  From the announcement doesn't seem like they were making money?
  - traverseda 3y ago
    Pretty sure I remember there being ads.
    - diath 3y ago
      Even so, if they earn less money off ads than it costs to keep the site running, they're not making money, they're losing money.
      - megablast 3y ago
        What is this comment? So they were losing money you suggest they should lose more money?
krzyk 3y ago
Pirate bay does that.
Lammy 3y ago
It's not just the site. RARBG themselves were responsible for many of the video encodes, hence the "RARBG_DO_NOT_MIRROR.exe" included in many of them: https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-adds-exe-files-to-torrents-but-no-need-to-panic-190126/ https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-adds-exe-files-to-torrents-bu...
- 3y ago

zit10 3y ago

[flagged]

k5hp 3y ago

Let's hope the same doesn't happen to Rutracker.

chromoblob 3y ago
Rutracker seems to have big ad revenue (just look at the ads and how popular it is). Also, Rutracker administrators seem quite serious to me (I compare the feeling I get from observing elaborate upload post format requirements, massive forum structure, important size of dedicated wiki on Rutracker and the feeling I get after reading the linked announcement).

expertentipp 3y ago

Thank you RARBG team, you were the awesome part of the internet. Hope the crises will end favorably in the months to come.

tejohnso 3y ago

They just abandoned it and closed? Why no handoff? Why no appeal for funding? Or even a warning?

mxmilkiib 3y ago

A reminder that if you're using qBittorrent there is an in-client torrent search tab you can enable.

oliwarner 3y ago
This seems to use EliteTorrent (by default) which has a strong bias towards Spanish language content. There might be other reasons to use qBittorrent, but if you don't want to switch, you could just use that. https://github.com/iordic/qbittorrent-search-plugins/blob/master/engines/elitetorrent.py https://github.com/iordic/qbittorrent-search-plugins/blob/ma...
- mxmilkiib 3y ago
  You want https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/Unofficial-search-plugins https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/Unofficia...

crazygringo 3y ago

Wow. Between Mullvad removing port forwarding 2 days ago ago [1] and now this, easy safe fast torrenting just got a bit harder. Talk about a one-two punch. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36113215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36113215

no_time 3y ago

2007 - 2023 RIP Is there a successful tracker founded after 2010? With all these old sites and their experienced crew quitting, things are not looking good for the long term of warez. The only one that comes to mind is the .si reboot of nyaa.se.

appleaday1 3y ago

It's always sad news when something that is widely used by people goes down.

unicornmama 3y ago

Someone should setup a torrent website on one of these decentralized blockchain technologies.

qersist3nce 3y ago

Sorry to see it go. While we are at it, an honest question: Why should _anyone_ undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and development time burden for maintaining a public tracker? What would release teams gain from setting up encoding pipelines and upholding their networking infrastructure?

Shish2k 3y ago
Gotta have a hobby ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I wonder if The Scene is still remotely accurate by modern standards — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIs_5nfJKu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIs_5nfJKu4
a1369209993 3y ago
> Why should _anyone_ undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and development time burden for maintaining a public tracker? Try a more extreme example: why should anyone undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and logistical hassle of hiding Jews from the SS? It's not some psychopathic business decision; it's because some people stubbornly insist on doing the right thing despite it being unpopular, illegal, and clearly a bad idea. If someone does manage to turn a profit doing it that's (all else being equal) great, but it's not the point.
SamuelAdams 3y ago
Because some people grew up poor and without much access to content. Then they learned about this thing in the 90’s called the internet where you can share information with anyone for free. So said poor person learned programming and other skills to get a tracker working so that they could give back to others who are in the same boat. This way the poor kid (who’s family can’t afford lunch, let alone a 10€ /month Disney + subscription) can chat with their rich friends at the lunch table about the latest marvel film the week it releases and god forbid, fit in for once.

robertoandred 3y ago

"Content releases" aka stolen goods

DoItToMe81 3y ago

Their host charges 250 euro a month for 100 megabits and a one terabyte data cap. At the prices they're paying, I'm surprised this did not happen sooner.

LordShredda 3y ago
Do you have a source for that? Curious how you found out. But yeah, that's basically a scam for hosting a static website.
- DoItToMe81 3y ago
  Site IP is owned by Netsaap.

smashah 3y ago

Thank you for your service

ZoomerCretin 3y ago

Ctrl+F "covid" Phrase not found Seriously, a huge part of the internet is down because the team was taken out by Covid (both death and complications), and no one even mentions this? All the evidence points to the covid complication rate compounding with each infection. Rarbg is only the start of where we can all expect to be in 5-10 years without more serious long-term mitigations (universal indoor air filtration). https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/opinion/last-pandemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/opinion/last-pandemic.htm...

gjsman-1000 3y ago

The Motion Picture Association is probably throwing free champagne around the offices and rejoicing about how that was the easiest pirate website takedown ever. Also, if I was the MPA, I would almost look into attrition tactics now, if that were legal. Create dozens and dozens and dozens of junk piracy websites with borked videos. Maybe the first half the movie in 720p, then the audio switches to Spanish and 240p black and white with flickering. Flood the market on every pirate website with the world's worst remuxes. Overwhelm them with junk so that nobody knows what tracker to trust for anything. Maybe even (with permission from rights holders) run some pirate websites with high-quality rips, then burn them to the ground after a year or two just to demoralize.

Willish42 3y ago

Seeing lots of mentions here in the comments about increased serving costs but the nature of the message sounds more like the community itself has fallen apart / lost people due to covid and war. I can't imagine the effort it must've taken to keep this site running for so long given the amount of traffic, especially during the hellish last few years. I'm sad to see them go but I support their desire to spend time and energy/resources on something else after all they've done

rejectfinite 3y ago

Related documentary TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard https://youtu.be/eTOKXCEwo_8 https://youtu.be/eTOKXCEwo_8

MagicMoonlight 3y ago

Ugh that was the only good public site

monkaiju 3y ago

Tragic

omegaworks 3y ago

>some of the people in our team died due to covid complications, others still suffer the side effects of it - not being able to work at all. Long COVID is having a real impact on technical people. There's a reason Google buys COVID rapid testing kits in bulk for any of their onsite events. One of my friends working behind the scenes was gifted a grocery bag full of leftover tests. Governments around the world have largely abandoned us to a disabling virus.

firstSpeaker 3y ago

Is there is any replacement with similar clean design and availability?

atmosx 3y ago

Aren't torrents legal in Spain and Switzerland?

puskuruk 3y ago

R.I.P rarbg... I'll miss you.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

Is this the real reason or just something like Truecrypt did?

adastra22 3y ago

What is the best alternative? I know usually people use a seedbox + private torrent server. But which private server? RARBG was amazing because it had everything, but still curated the releases for minimum standards of quality. Is there an alternative out there?

doublerabbit 3y ago
For educational reasons I'm going to suggest Usenet. Sure you have to pay $ for a few providers to obtain most 100% but it has everything that torrent has if not more. Not as convenient but you do get decent download speeds and if parts are broken you can normally repair with PAR2 which itself is alien tech. Provider backbone/list: https://svgshare.com/i/oti.svg https://svgshare.com/i/oti.svg

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

double2helix 3y ago

For those questioning how websites can still illegally operate torrenting movies, the answer is very simple. It costs a lot of money and resources for the FBI and/or other federal agency to prosecute someone, let alone post adjudication costs ie: probation officers. The feds just don't care to waste time with search warrants over a menial crime. They tried a few years back just simply mailing fines to people. But quickly realized they couldn't prove guilt without spending more money than it's worth. Also movie makers don't care to push the issue with law enforcement anymore. They (unfortunately for law abiding folks) just inflate the price to make up for lost, just like stores do to combat shoplifting.

alwayslikethis 3y ago
Movie makers aren't losing that much, if at all. It is ridiculous to assume that had piracy not been available, the pirates would pay them the full price for the content. Imagine I operate this web app free of charge that gets 1 million monthly active users, and I think to myself, if I start charging $2 per month, I'd be making $2m a month. This doesn't work because if I charge money, people would try to find less expensive options, so I would be getting way less than $2m. Piracy also contributes significantly to the general promulgation of the content into the culture, which may offset some of the profit that is lost. And no, screwing over legit customers by charging more, DRM, or whatever bullshit like that isn't going to win over more people.

paulmd 3y ago

Is there an archive of the tracked torrents available?

nipperkinfeet 3y ago

This is a sad news! What is going on? Really, this week has been a disaster.

smeagull 3y ago

Huh. I wonder what it was.

koreanguy 3y ago

[dead]

defrost 3y ago

Of Interest: RARBG magnet link archive: https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-magnet-links-appear-online-230601/ https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-mag... https://github.com/2004content/rarbg https://github.com/2004content/rarbg ( released 5 hours ago )

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lukematt 3y ago

[flagged]

chakintosh 3y ago

For what it's worth, there is a concerted effort at r/DataHoarder to bring the site back from the dead.

clsec 3y ago
There is now also a repository that is holding 100's of thousands of RARBG magnet links in text files [1]. The link is in the article. I'm not sure whether posting the direct link is proper here. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-magnet-links-appear-online-230601/ https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-mag...

SergeAx 3y ago

One of the problems of RarBG was that they were dealing with real data. Today to get a popular file from bit-torrent network all one needs is a hash (AKA magnet) - DHT and other distributed announcement protocols will take care of everything else. But the moment you gotta deal with real content - you are in a big trouble both legaly and technically: todays 4K media can take up to ten gigabyte per hour of screen time. No wonder RarBG suffered that much.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

So much media is going to be lost once torrenting dies out.

nubinetwork 3y ago

I could have sworn that rarbg got shut down like 5 years ago... I didn't know they were still operating. Not that I use bittorrent very much personally, I gave that up many years ago. RIP, I suppose.

bishop77 3y ago

I'm interested in the art-house, non-mainstream genres, mainly produced by independent studios (e.g. one of my all-time favourites is When father was away for business, by Emir Kusturica). Do you have any suggestions for trackers specialised in these types of movies?

noonething 3y ago

where are all these torrent sites that have been up for years and I've never heard of geez

Avlin67 3y ago

its still there ? https://rargb.to/ https://rargb.to/

sankalp22 3y ago

Sad to hear, last time they took down that book website

0___0 3y ago

Hello guys, We would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site. The past 2 years have been very difficult for us - some of the people in our team died due to covid complications, others still suffer the side effects of it - not being able to work at all. Some are also fighting the war in Europe - ON BOTH SIDES. Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard. Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare. Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket. After an unanimous vote we've decided that we can no longer do it. We are sorry :( Bye Edit: This isn't me BTW. I just copy-pasted the text from the site. Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230531105653/https://rarbg.to/index80.php https://web.archive.org/web/20230531105653/https://rarbg.to/...

PiranhaTO 3y ago
Thank you for everything you've done. Your efforts did not go unnoticed and you will be greatly missed. I hope the circumstances of your lives improve and that you can find normality in these difficult times.
Nick-Adventure 3y ago
First, a sincere thank you for all the efforts you have done. My collection of TV shows is nothing but ION10 webrips. You will be missed. While I can respect your decision, I have to ask: Why the hell did you not choose to ask for donations or monetize the website? While there are many that cannot afford to purchase, there are plenty of hackers that could have / would have supported you.
tokai 3y ago
Why would anyone fight on both sides? Seems ridiculous.
- netfortius 3y ago
  Considering the recent events in the area previously known as Yugoslavia, and the fact that part of hosting is there, in addition to Russia - Ukraine conflict being over a year old, I'd think of other sources. ...that if we were to trust what's been publicized, of course.

vachina 3y ago

Devastating to see them go, they’re like the Apple of pirated content, oracle of only quality releases presented in a consistent manner.

abdusco 3y ago

I guess this is a reminder to support your pirated material source.

SSLy 3y ago
Thank God PTP is back on a good track.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Klaster_1 3y ago

Any advice on where to download daily MP3 scene release from now?

GOATS- 3y ago
You could always try Soulseek?
SSLy 3y ago
usenet

KennyNON 3y ago

Ouh, do you know any alternative with UHD BD remuxes?

SamuelAdams 3y ago
There are private trackers like PTP, but good luck getting in.

petecooper 3y ago

Two DHT search engines that might be useful: https://btdig.com https://btdig.com https://bt4g.org https://bt4g.org

qersist3nce 3y ago
So these crawl torrent indexers and provide search functionality? Do they also search private indexers?
- arsome 3y ago
  They crawl the peer to peer DHT, private torrents have a flag so they do not get announced via DHT.
- SSLy 3y ago
  You can't search private indexers without having account on them.
  - dark-star 3y ago
    they are not searching the indexers, they are searching the DHT directly. Some private trackers do not set the "disallow DHT" flag, so those will be indexed as well. Most do, however, and it's impossible to scrape those without an account, yes

jumm 3y ago

[dead]

jumm 3y ago

[dead]

OGITH 3y ago

[dead]

imgabe 3y ago
Be careful: you want https://1337x.to/ https://1337x.to/ note 1337 not 1377
- snickerbockers 3y ago
  what happens if you go to 1377?
  - imgabe 3y ago
    instant death
sonofaragorn 3y ago
are these safe? being clones doesn't really inspire much confidence rarbg was my go to for years :S
- wkat4242 3y ago
  They're not clones. Just proxies so they are down too. This is usually done to make it harder for the courts to force providers to block these sites. Whack-a-mole.. PS: Why am I getting downvoted? Try clicking on the links, you will see the same goodbye message. Edit: Oh the first 2 do seem to be clones, now I understand. The rest are proxies though. I do think even the clones basically skived off the original's database though so I doubt they will have much going forward.
  - fastball 3y ago
    Did you actually try any of these yourself? Some are clearly clones, and are not down.
    - 3y ago

mrtksn 3y ago

RARBG was originally Bulgarian, like many other trackers and warez stuff. Eastern Europe - inside EU or outside of the EU - has always been major player in this scene. RIP. I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations without being exposed or caught. How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?

phkahler 3y ago
>> How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised? Because at the core, identity on the internet is not well defined. Authentication is a hard problem. You might wonder why it's hard, why better more secure protocols haven't emerged. Answer: that makes end to end encryption easy, among other things that give individuals too much power.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- samstave 3y ago
  AI produced Obits, and death certs and detailed descriptions of the death, and then new documents produced via GPT6+ access to APIs to DMV, Embassies, etc to produce new documents sent to your new PO box in [place] etc... - deep-fake assassinations are going to be a thing... PHKahler
themagician 3y ago
The answer to this is easier (and harder) than you might think: just don't say anything. You can get away with quite a bit just by being silent, and for longer than you'd think. A big way that people get away with things for so long is just by not answering questions. Someone says, "Is this [illegal thing] yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them. You'll find domains, web hosts, countries, and employees who are all onboard with the same philosophy. When everything requires a subpoena at the highest level to move something forward, it can easily take years for anything to happen at all. Some countries are known for having slow legal systems. Stack jurisdictions with slow court systems and you can start with an 18 month window before anything can happen. You've got a domain in Tonga registered to a company in another country, owned by a large company in another country owned by a trust in a third country. Often small countries with limited resources and archaic or corrupt bureaucracies. And where is it hosted? That's probably another connect the dots. And the site can change hands and then you have to start all over again. Are you going to refocus on the new owner or are you going to spend even more resources trying to track down the former owner? And any of these entities may lead to nothing more than a mule, fake person, or dead person. Sure, it's someone's fault for having inaccurate records—but who? How long has this been going on? Did they know? Was it intentional? It shouldn't be like this, but it is… what do you do now? Are you going to go after the recordkeeper too? You can do illegal shit for years or even decades if you just say nothing and respond to no one.

xorkatoss 3y ago

noooooooo, this was my go-to torrenting website, so sad :(

doqq 3y ago

oh wow, sad news

sph 3y ago

o7 thank you for your service, keeping the Internet awesome and anti-corporate. Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse. Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time. "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell (If you need a semi-private tracker that's easy to get into, try TorrentLeech. Also /r/opensignups)

oxygen_crisis 3y ago
[dead]
robertoandred 3y ago
I love when thieves act like they're such noble saints.
- izacus 3y ago
  Yeah, we all love Robin Hood books. What does your comment have to do with this thread though?
  - youreincorrect 3y ago
    Uh, because it responded to a comment that wrote a bunch of 2009-era Guy Fawkes mask-wearing redditor bullshit that attempts to make piracy noble. > o7 thank you for your service (o7 would be a salute) > Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse. False and nonsense, especially in 2023. > Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel... Okay, I'll stop here. I'm fine with piracy, personally. I'd prefer we just admit that you're mostly using it to download movies, music, and television shows for free. This isn't some noble fight for freedom. We're talking about watching mindless bullshit content like Star Wars, without paying for it. Piracy proponents, and comments like the one starting this thread, make it seem like we're entitled to this content. We're not. But I'll admit, I don't watch much in the way of tv or movies any more anyway, so the whole debate is lost on me. I just rolled my eyes at the ridiculous tone of that comment, like they're freedom fighters. It's self-important bullshit.

revskill 3y ago

What's this site for ? First time i know it.

tokai 3y ago
Media piracy
- revskill 3y ago
  Thanks. WHat's special about this, in comparison with other similar sites ?
  - dist-epoch 3y ago
    Possibly the biggest one after ThePirateBay.
  - SSLy 3y ago
    Compared to other public spaces, relatively high quality of the content curation.
  - emptyfile 3y ago
    [dead]

feyes 3y ago

That's pretty devastating. This was old reliable for a long time. I could never keep up with the demands from private trackers as streaming made it so I didn't need to utilize them as much.

dmix 3y ago
Are there any private torrent sites for movies/tv that you can buy your way in without needing a seedbox?
- holoduke 3y ago
  Checkout sonarr and radarr together with jackett. Plenty of ways to find zillions of sites. Most dark streaming sites use these tools to fully automate everything
  - paintballboi07 3y ago
    Yep. Although, I'd recommend prowlarr instead of jackett. Integrates with the other arr apps much better.
- drexlspivey 3y ago
  Last I checked you can get in IPTorrents and HDTorrents with a donation. Still need to maintain your ratio but you can also boost your upload with donations.

bsaul 3y ago

i was always skeptical on people saying that torrentz are a symptom of bad legal streaming services.. Well, i recently got myself a videoprojector with an android tv included, and since i happen to have an amazon prime account, i installed the app, which is quite good. And yes, it's true, since i've done that, my torrentz usage has dramatically dropped..

George83728 3y ago
Streaming is a content ghetto. 9 times out of 10, none of the streaming websites have the media I'm looking for. When I visit friends and family and am made to sit down with their streaming services and find something to watch, it always turns into a disaster of everybody sitting on the couch browsing the various catalogue on their phones, discovering that no service has whatever movie somebody just thought of and suggested. If you treat streaming like old cable television; you turn it on then decide what you want to watch from what is available, I guess it might seem fine to you. But if you try to decide what you want to watch first, treating streaming as a means to an end rather than the end itself, then streaming is unmitigated trash.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Deciding a movie and then look for it on streaming sites is hopeless. Just rent it on a pay to view site if they don't want to download via torrents.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I got myself Amazon prime, logged in on my computer, and found out I can only watch 480p video because of DRM shenanigans. The app on my TV is no longer supported (TV doesn't run Android), my phone is rooted (Xiaomi stopped making updates after two years) so I sometimes can't even find the app in Google Play let alone play decent quality video and the Chromecast app is a buggy mess. So yeah, I went back to torrents after that. All of my problems disappeared when I just had an MP4 file I could play anywhere. I'm still paying my subscription but they can take my 1080p video from my cold dead hands.

Sharply2703 3y ago

Any other places that do find by imdb code or similar? That was the best feature here, with the TV show seasons grouped together.

dlxfoo 3y ago
[dead]
SSLy 3y ago
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/407284-imdb-scout-mod https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/407284-imdb-scout-mod

KoftaBob 3y ago

This is the torrent search engine I've been using lately, works reliably and has a clean UI: https://bitsearch.to/ https://bitsearch.to/

sampa 3y ago

pity seems like rutracker.org (ex torrents.ru) is gonna outlive everybody

jamesy0ung 3y ago
rutracker is amazing. I've had no problems with the stuff I download from there (games, movies, books and software) and they also have some super niche stuff as well. Rip RARGB

jackspratts 3y ago

phenomenal site. while the content is upped by users the fact that multiple rips were found on the same page; SDR, HDR, HDR10, 264, 265, 720, 1080, 2160, dubbed, original, theatrical cuts, director's, producer's etc. was all on the brilliant, dedicated folks of rarbgtor and is what made the site the best in the world. nothing else even approaches it. like OiNk wiithout the drama. i'll remember the time spent there with gratitude and fondness. and I just installed two more 20TB drives, less than 18 hours ago... - js.

ArfathKhalid 3y ago

First heart break was when Kickass was taken down.. Now this. I am literally too sad over a website than my other life choices lol.. Love you RARBG team, will miss you till death. Good luck in your life's.

OGITH 3y ago

[flagged]

defrost 3y ago

Elsewhere: Iconic Torrent Site RARBG Shuts Down, All Content Releases Stop https://torrentfreak.com/iconic-torrent-site-rarbg-shuts-down-all-content-releases-stop-230531/ https://torrentfreak.com/iconic-torrent-site-rarbg-shuts-dow... RARBG, one of the world's largest torrent sites, has said "farewell" to millions of users. The site, which was a prominent and stable source of new movie and TV show releases, cited a variety of reasons behind its decision to cease operations. The surprise shutdown marks the end of an era. Founded in 2008, RARBG evolved to become a key player in the torrent ecosystem. The site didn’t only attract millions of monthly visitors from all over the globe, it was also a major release hub, bridging the gap between the Scene and the broader pirate public. ... etc.

mdrzn 3y ago

Damn RARBG was the GOAT lately, it had more stuff than TPB. Guess I'll have to subscribe to a USENET after all.

pengster 3y ago

so sad to read this - I know it's probably too late but if its a money question as they stated on the site, I would pay for it to remain!

robertoandred 3y ago
You'd pay for the ability to steal?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- getcrunk 3y ago
  Torrenting is not stealing. Stealing implies preventing the original owner use of the item
  - robertoandred 3y ago
    Sure, whatever you have to tell yourself.

taopai 3y ago

I am not technical so maybe this questions sound stupid. But this topic really interests me. I read that Rarbg was like thepiratebay but safer. I guess that's due to moderation to check which torrents are safe, right? This people had a website that offered a nice UI to find torrents. Did they had ads to make money? So they offered their services to maintain healthy piracy in exchange of money and also to pay servers. (I am not criticize or judging I just want to understand how it worked) Would It be possible to share the same website using a torrent file? Like shipping and actualizing the website and sending to users trough torrent so they can search it locally? Or send a sql database and then create a UI for users to search trough it? Or would be complications because torrenting exposes our ip?

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Sites can't be offered as torrents, because generally torrents are immutable once they have been created. You can't say "oops, that version of the file is wrong" and start offering the new version within that same torrent swarm. However, there was an update to the protocol, BEP44, that did allow you to update the already-in-progress torrent. Furthermore, there is a protocol called WebTorrent that swaps out some of the other base protocols for WebRTC, allowing a web browser to participate in the torrents. You could just include a link to the library via CDN. The trouble of course is that bittorrent now relies on DHT more and more (you wouldn't want to have to run a tracker, if you did it'd just be a target of legal attacks)... and WebTorrent can't do DHT (of any variety) well. There was a proposal to allow browsers to be able to do native network sockets, but I think that got turned down by Mozilla (maybe they were more concerned with doing VPN ads or something). But if you had that, then yes, it might be possible to have something like a "swarmsite" that didn't need to be hosted.
- sktrdie 3y ago
  Torrents are immutable but they could just give us new torrents (with updated indexes) via chats/forums/etc. Then thanks to https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html we can just download the diff.

BLKNSLVR 3y ago

I mean, it did take a pandemic, war, and rampant global inflation to finally kill it. Testament to the resilience it showed throughout its lifetime. I think it's somewhat poetic that it was unrelated to law enforcement pressure.

hiofio 3y ago

[flagged]

pdimitar 3y ago

What a shame. They could have asked for donations but me as an Eastern European, I get it -- usually if we get to the point of needing donations we feel ashamed and humiliated and just close shop. I hope somebody picks up the flag. Illegal and copyright-protected piracy aside, there were tons of royalty-free and non-copyright-enforced works of art there and it would be a big hit on humanity's culture at large for all that to be lost.

dmos62 3y ago
They did use aggressive popup ads via click-hijacking. So they were monetizing at least to some extent. Unfortunately for them, most people torrenting probably use ad protection.
- anticrymactic 3y ago
  To my knowledge, they didn't. There were a lot of imposter sites, which were indistinguishable, where you'd be told to download a VPN or similar. But the main .to site never opened any ads for me
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    It always did for me. The first time a torrent results page opens, the clicks open a new tab with ads. You had to refresh the results page to actually click through to the torrent.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - poisonarena 3y ago
    they sure did! every half a dozen clicks! immediately blocked by my adblockers but i would still dig into the dev tools to try and figure it out occasionally
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
3y ago

computerfriend 3y ago

The have been a lot of terrible casualties of the war, but this one was very unexpected. Deeply sad about this. Nothing lasts forever.

hiofio 3y ago

I found a replacement is the same as Rarbg https://torrentgalaxy.to/ https://torrentgalaxy.to/

clsec 3y ago
Thanks! This seems like a great replacement. Much better than l337x or TPB, especially with dark mode turned on!
majkinetor 3y ago
looks even better. thx

kypro 3y ago

I've been using Jackett for torrents recently. It seems to work really well if anyone is looking for alternatives. https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett

roesel 3y ago
Doesn't Jackett still need trackers such as Rarbg to function?
- egKYzyXeIL 3y ago
  Yes - Jackett is just a search aggregator for multiple selected torrent indexers
- kypro 3y ago
  Yes, but Rarbg was both a tracker and a popular torrent search site. Out of the box Jackett supports many popular public trackers like 1337x and you can configure private trackers too.
MayeulC 3y ago
Prowlarr is another alternative https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr
- reyqn 3y ago
  Interestingly (or not), I avoided prowlarr because it didn't cache results, which triggered rarbg's rate limiter. Well it took rarbg going down for me to see that they actually started caching results for rarbg in the latest release... Too bad.

CoBE10 3y ago

I guess mirrors would stay unaffected, because they seem to be up right now. Someone will probably clone their torrents. They might not have been the best quality, but they were always better than YIFI (YTS). I always liked that you could search Rarbg using IMDB numbers. Also, their UI was really pleasing to me, plus, there were many userscripts that extended the functionality of the site. I wounder who will fill up their place, because TPB was always the last resort for me. In the meantime Btdig could be a nice transitory place to find all of their torrents.

tawayasdf 3y ago
what is the de-facto alternative these days?
- medlazik 3y ago
  1377x
  - inversetelecine 3y ago
    I think this is a typo? should be 1337x.
  - melvyn2 3y ago
    1377x is an ad-hijacking "clone" of the real 1337x
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- poisonarena 3y ago
  rutracker
  - grishka 3y ago
    I second this but I'm not sure how much use it is outside of the former USSR. Most movies and TV shows there do come with original English soundtracks tho.

m4r1k 3y ago

Probably the largest blow to the torrent sharing community since The Pirate Bay got shut down. The impact of content availability will be noticeable for years to come

rabuse 3y ago
RARBG was my favorite for finding HDR/4k content. Anybody got an alternative?
- GaggiX 3y ago
  I usually just try to find stuff on DHT using BTDigg.
jasonfarnon 3y ago
I'm very out of the loop at this stage of life, but one thing I have wondered--has software as a service, and all the online gaming, killed off all those kinds of warez? Are most of these pirate sites nowadays just for movies/tv? (One of the reasons I have been wondering about this is that I so f'ing hate windows etc updating and phoning home all the time I would prefer a version cracked a la 2007 to prevent that, over the legit copy I own.)
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Online-only, heavily DRMed games are still a tiny minority of games. And even if you look at popularity instead, Minecraft (so far as the more open Java version is still popular at least) single-handedly skews the results enough for them not being a clear win for the locked down games.
  - chickenimprint 3y ago
    Where are you getting that from? On Steam, the offline title with the highest concurrent player count is Civ 6 on place 18, with 1/30 the amount of players of CS:GO. On Twitch, Minecraft, which almost all streamers seem to be playing on multiplayer servers, is in 20th place, behind 19 exclusively online games. I would estimate more than 99% of all playtime is spent on online games.

MeltdownSpectre 3y ago

Really sad to hear this. I basically built my entire Plex server with RARBG. Anyone have any solid private tracker recommendations for movies and TV shows? After taking advantage of public trackers like RARBG, I feel like it's my time to give back.

inversetelecine 3y ago
check out /r/trackers also watch entry level trackers for open invites. speed, iptorrents, torrentleech, etc
robertoandred 3y ago
[flagged]
mktk1001 3y ago
Torrent leech is great for movies and tv.
Thaxll 3y ago
https://1337x.to/ https://1337x.to/
SSLy 3y ago
I recommend registering on some usenet indexer instead.
- blitzar 3y ago
  I download all my linux ISO's through usenet these days.
  - xu3u32 3y ago
    Games? Or other software?
- moffkalast 3y ago
  That almost costs more than actually paying for the content.

skjoldr 3y ago

I wonder if they could host the database of magnet links somewhere, since it shouldn't be too big.

slazaro 3y ago

I keep wondering all the time why torrent search is based on websites (centralized), which can be taken down, etc., while once you have a torrent file or a magnet/hash everything is distributed. Is there a main reason why there isn't (AFAIK, even though I haven't really researched) a distributed search that wouldn't have these problems? Is it a tech problem that literally can't be solved? Or it just hasn't been done? It seems like search is the obvious weak link, since the websites keep disappearing or taken down or blocked by governments and ISPs, etc.

dmos62 3y ago
That's a good question, but the answers are somewhat sad. I see the other commenters saying it's not about the search, but about the curation. Curation or identification (as in, "who's the author?") is essential, but decentralized search is non-existent too. Yes, there is unmaintained, resource-hungry, locally-run, unscalable software out there that you can use, but there really isn't a public search engine for this. Which is a shame. I really hope someone will tell me I missed something, but I'm not holding my breath :( Edit: found mentions of https://btdig.com https://btdig.com and https://bt4g.org https://bt4g.org. I wasn't aware of the latter. A problem with the former is that it doesn't track number of peers.
drexlspivey 3y ago
How is it distributed? Don’t you need a torrent tracker? How do you know which peer has which files to share?
- zolland 3y ago
  Here is a good resource https://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification https://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification
grishka 3y ago
Decentralized search is a complex problem and there exist different approaches to it with different degree of centralization and resource requirements. DC++ is a bit more decentralized than BitTorrent. There still are central servers ("hubs"), but they don't even host any metadata. Search works by the hub broadcasting all search queries to all online peers and them replying with results if they have any. The file transfers themselves are p2p. I have an idea that's kind of more decentralized. Initially envisioned as a missing global search feature for the fediverse, but can be adapter for anything that has a similar network structure. A server has a number of peers already established because of the ActivityPub federation. Each server would send to its peers some kind of bloom filter that determines the tags or keywords that this server has results for. Then, when searching, your server would find the peers who are likely to have what you want, and only send your search query to them. If there aren't any, then it would send your query to the peers that have most users (with some random bias for load balancing purposes) because they're likely to have more connectivity, and they would point you where to look based on their own peers and their bloom filters. There would also need to be some kind of reputation system (centralized server lists? p2p exchange of scores/reports?) so that servers that return spam or intentionally wrong results would get punished. This could probably be made to work in a fully-decentralized p2p network, but I imagine it would be too easy to abuse. Getting a new domain costs money, yet getting a new IP or public key is free and easy.

EwanG 3y ago

I have seen several folks on here mention Usenet subscriptions as another option. What I haven't found is any good Usenet tutorial on how to actually get from "I know the name of something I want" to "I have downloaded it". The irony that I used to run a UUCP node on the original version of Usenet does not escape me :-)

simse 3y ago
It's not too complicated. I heard from a friend, that all you need is a downloader like Sabnzbd, a usenet provider like Eweka or Frugal Usenet, and an index like Drunkenslug to find stuff.
clsec 3y ago
I haven't used Usenet since probably around 2002. It seems like everything is still the same except for the indexer. I assume that is so you don't have to sign onto a bunch of binary groups into your newsreader and then search through them for what you want (part of the fun in the old days for me)? Is that correct, does anyone know? I also wonder if Forte' Agent still works? Does Newsguy still exist? /s edit: found the answer to my question
maronato 3y ago
r/usenet has a great FAQ about it[1]. In a nutshell, there are 3 things you need to use usenet. You need providers, indexers, and a software to download stuff. Providers are companies and servers where the data is actually stored, as opposed to peers in torrenting. Since they are for-profit, you need to purchase a subscription to have access to these servers. r/usenet has some nice deals on those[2]. Frugal is usually the most recommended for beginners since it’s pretty cheap and has most files you’ll want. Indexers are similar to what rarbg was. They make it easy to search for files stored in the providers. They usually require a subscription as well, and some require invites, but are really cheap and easy to get [3]. nzbgeek doesn’t require an invite and is pretty complete. nzbplanet and drunkenslug have more content, but require invites. You can get invites for those on r/UsenetInvites Finally, you need something to download the files. There are many options available for that, but I find that the best one is sabnzb [4]. It is pretty complete and has a lot of moving parts, so I recommend following the trash-guides article on it to get started[5] [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/faq/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/faq/ [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/ https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/ [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/indexers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/indexers/ [4]: https://sabnzbd.org/ https://sabnzbd.org/ [5]: https://trash-guides.info/Downloaders/SABnzbd/Basic-Setup/ https://trash-guides.info/Downloaders/SABnzbd/Basic-Setup/

yieldcrv 3y ago

note: this has no more information about the shut down than the blurb posted on rarbg's website

cronix 3y ago
That's because it's an archive of that blurb from the rarbg site.

saiya-jin 3y ago

Not only they had clean, easy-to-navigate UI, they also produced tons of their own releases. As big fan of saving space, x265 1080p releases from them were taking minimal space with good quality, practically always bundled with subtitles. That's how quality service looks like. Glad I pulled (here legally) all the movies I wanted in my private collection. RIP.

haunter 3y ago

Pray for https://nyaa.si/ https://nyaa.si/ that's the goat tracker for anything Japan

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
nyaa has already died once, and this replacement is nowhere near the old one wrt peer counts and content availability (the old one already wasn't great). I wish torrent trackers had kept their databases open, maybe by regularly publishing encrypted dumps with a dead man's switch on decryption keys. At least the new nyaa is FOSS, although the code isn't very useful without data.

dmix 3y ago

Kinda makes sense the team was (partially) operating out of Eastern Europe and then had some issues with rising costs given the war and inflation. Maybe it will come back in the future when things settle down or a new backer comes in.

johnvanommen 3y ago
The first time I went on vacation in Eastern Europe, almost two decades ago, I noticed that basically everyone pirated content.
- m00dy 3y ago
  Ive had best parties of my life in Eastern Europe :)

Giorgi 3y ago

Damn. I used to use their "popular movies" feature the most. RIP

rwmj 3y ago

I notice that "anti-piracy efforts", DMCA notices, etc don't figure at all.

BossHogg 3y ago
Given the Bulgarian heritage, I'd assume looming laws[0] were in fact a factor even if not mentioned. [0] https://torrentfreak.com/bulgaria-approves-draft-law-that-turns-pirate-site-operators-into-criminals-230425/ https://torrentfreak.com/bulgaria-approves-draft-law-that-tu...
userbinator 3y ago
DMCA would be completely irrelevant as they are not in the US.
- paulcole 3y ago
  Is “completely irrelevant” accurate? In reality, the influence of the US extends far beyond where the jurisdiction of US laws ends.
  - omniglottal 3y ago
    In the case of DMCA notices, yes. 100.00% of those which are relevany are served within US jurisdiction.
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      Wait, so EU businesses don't have to comply with DMCA? Neat.
    - pixxel 3y ago
      KimDotcom?

cheapliquor 3y ago

RIP RARBG It was a good site.

fsociety999 3y ago

Previous hn thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36136819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36136819

zfxfr 3y ago

Wow that came as a shock. I used to check every couple of days if they had interesting movie I could watch with my wife. I wonder what is the cost of running such a site and I guess they must also earn some money in crypto with all the donation and also the advertisements. Well, that's the end of something

yieldcrv 3y ago
its probably not the money cost, its the effort involved with more manual hosting if you can't risk being cancelled in the convenient data centers or platforms
makach 3y ago
One Man's Death Is Another Man's Bread
- tawayasdf 3y ago
  >> One Man's Death Is Another Man's Bread Who's bread is it? Most of the classic bt sites seem to have gone away from what I could see. Sad to see rarbg go.
  - abwizz 3y ago
    the "younger generation" (>2k) aren't used to the open net, they grew into moderated groups (fb), hence i suspect there is a massive number of hidden/private trackers
    - thatguy0900 3y ago
      I think the younger generation just uses streaming sites. FMovies and 9anime work fine. I don't know anyone who torrents shows or movies now.
      - lax4ever 3y ago
        Those who don't want to be dependent on the whims of a conglomerate and would like to actually possess the data files.

Simulacra 3y ago

Until another site takes its place

dopa42365 3y ago
>until it has always been just one of many such sites, no need to wait
- vachina 3y ago
  Nothing rivals the curation of rarbg though. It’s so well maintained it actually felt like browsing a library. Unfortunately none of the proxies copied that feature.

villgax 3y ago

The only way I was able to archive certain show after the studios pulled it from any reasonable avenue of purchase....

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

I really liked their rss feature, it made it easy to filter stuff and auto-download stuff... They will be missed!

sbdaman 3y ago

It's absolutely insane how many of these incredibly important torrent sites are just managed and hosted by a rag-tag group of people with the site barely clinging to life.

best_one_there 3y ago
Basically all of an actual software company is bullshit jobs unrelated to the core product like legal, marketing, investor relations, HR, maybe even developers for R&D etc. Running a website doesn't require that many people. I've worked at companies with 4 developers and 30+ "other stuff". The company would not be profitable and we would not get paid without them, but the actual product would work just fine if we wanted it to.
- jahewson 3y ago
  Anecdotally, I’ve never met anyone who thought this way who’s product didn’t suck.
  - best_one_there 3y ago
    It's not an opinion. Legal is very useful in the general case, but if you're an anonymous torrent site operator who fully intends to ignore the law anyway it's a waste of time.
  - George83728 3y ago
    Stack Overflow seems to still be running well.
  - ebiester 3y ago
    I don't understand this. If you build a system for resilience, it should not take significant effort to maintain. You should be able to keep the lights on with 10-20% of the engineering team. The rest is growth. Growth may be making the product better, creating new product lines, or improving the scalability - for example, allowing larger numbers of users or entries. However, you can make the choice to make a well constrained product that serves a valuable use but doesn't need growth. Consider Bingo Card Creator, for example.

westmeal 3y ago

Damn there goes another titan RIP to real ones

pallas_athena 3y ago

Does anyone know how to find where a certain team uploads stuff? I loved VXT stuff on rarbg, and would love to find them again.

misterbishop 3y ago

That site has been Comcast's honeypot for like 10 years.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
If Comcast is your ISP in this context, it's not their honeypot. They're the ones receiving the requests that downloads cease from the copyright holders and Comcast acts on those requests as they see fit.
boomboomsubban 3y ago
Running a torrent site as a honeypot seems like a stupid move for an ISP given how cheap it would be to run a bot that automatically downloads every release and tracks the IP addresses. And Comcast would only bother with that as they own NBC, so probably have been running such a bot for about 14 years now.
crumpled 3y ago
Someone already mentioned the Comcast angle, and they are correct. The ISP isn't involved until they get the notification from an agent of the owner of the content. The honeypot isn't the torrent site. You can use any site in the world or no site at all and still get busted. It's a peer to peer network, and the people busting you are seeding the torrents themselves. They catch you when you peer with them. Use a VPN, and read more.
- crumpled 3y ago
  Just to be clear, the rights holders probably aren't publishing torrents, they just also download them and monitor anybody that happens to connect with their seed. In a way, they are helping us with better download speeds.
  - 8organicbits 3y ago
    I'd be interested in the legal argument that by sharing their media in this way, the rights holders are authorizing the download.