• Uncut_Lemon@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Torrents are pretty terrible without private trackers. Since majority of free sites have no access to an API and require prowlarr/jacket to create one, a cloudflare slover to bypass bot protections and even then it’s janky.

        If you use private trackers, you now have to keep seeding downloads to keep your ratio healthy, and require additional trickery to allow files to be seeded after sorting by sonarr.

        Usenet is plug and play, as the indexes are built with this functionality in mind and it’s far less likely to run into malicious uploads, as there is curation occuring on the paid indexes, ie, they are insentivised to make the paying customer happy.

        • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
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          12 hours ago

          I disagree. I have some private trackers, but I never use 'em anymore, mostly due to ratio requirements. I just don’t have the space on my local drive to hold and seed all those files forever. Spending a bit of time on your initial *arr configs, means everything just works, even using all public trackers. I can’t remember the last time my system grabbed a wrong/bad file. Been dialed in for years at this point.

        • HeyJoe@lemmy.world
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          22 hours ago

          I have been using private trackers for 15 years now and have been extremely happy with them. I dont mind seeding back, plus not all of them have the ratio requirement. My tv show site knows it would be very hard to keep that from slipping so instead of ratio its just a certain length for episodes and season grabs. I really dont care about keeping my bittorrent app running since i leave my pc on anyway. As for sonarr it just copies the file to the new directory and renames it, after a few months ill do a cleanup that takes 2 min.

          As for usenet, my coworker loves it but he definitely says it has issues which may or may not be an issue today or workarounds for it? He has said the takedown requests are so fast now that finding a lot of stuff that releases quickly can be difficult if you dont use sonarr or radarr to grab right away. Every now and then he has to ask me to find stuff.

          The only real issues ive ever had is the instability where sometimes theres outages and not much you can do. I remember last year or maybe year before that one of the biggest had a 2 month outage and things looked bleak.

      • SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Hold on, even if you’re using torrents, you still have to pay for a decent indexer right? Or has stuff changed in the last few years?

        • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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          23 hours ago

          1000004726

          I’ve been at this since Napster was a thing, so imagine my surprise to hear that folks are paying to pirate.

          Usenet I get, but private trackers? only real benefit would be a risk reduction of being caught by your ISP, but that’s easily overcome by using a VPN.

          • Nik282000@lemmy.ca
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            22 hours ago

            VPN and public trackers gets you more shows and films than any human could ever consume. I’m not sure why any other method exists.

            • Hal@piefed.nz
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              18 hours ago

              The two main benefits I’ve seen of private trackers are that you avoid the issue in the OP which happens all the time on public trackers, and that shows download in seconds.

              Not sure how helpful they would be if things weren’t automated. I just have things set up so my Jellyfin users can request shows and they get downloaded automatically.

              But with that said, “private” doesn’t mean it costs money, just that it requires an account (and usually that is an application process). It means they can kick people off for uploading things they shouldn’t.

              • Andres@social.ridetrans.it
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                13 hours ago

                @Hal @nik282000 Some private trackers function as recommendation systems, too. It’s sort of like having a netflix account where you can see what they’re recommending (or what’s popular), but instead it’s your fellow pirates talking about how much they loved or hated a show or movie.

                You use them long enough, you also learn which users prefer absolute garbage and which ones have solid recommendations. Much better than paid ads or some easily-gamed algorithm, imo.

                • Hal@piefed.nz
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                  12 hours ago

                  I probably miss out on that aspect as I have everything automated 🤷

        • mlg@lemmy.world
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          18 hours ago

          Uh no, most if not all of the paid indexers are not worth it compared to just waiting for an open invite from a quality one.

          Not even the gold tier quality ones allow paid entry AFAIK. They only allow people who are long time seeders and uploaders with reputation.

          The one thing you might have to pay for is a VPN in case you want to torrent on public indexers, which is often worth it because not everything will end up on private indexers, and you usually have to wait a couple of months before you can join a solid private indexer.

        • frongt@lemmy.zip
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          22 hours ago

          No, most public ones are fine. Always have been. I’ve never used a private tracker and have had very few issues. Especially after using Radarr, etc. to pick out good and bad torrents.

          • iocase@lemmy.zip
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            22 hours ago

            Search lists in qbit are how most people manage.

            I personally use torrentleech which is a private tracker but has basically everything and super permissive rules. Very very easy to maintain ratio and to also get invited and started. I have 4.8TB of upload credit. Searching in qbittorrent or manually across public sites took too long for me when i usually want to find a higher res or higher bitrate version of something. I also always saturate my download speed even with only a few seeds since they’re almost always seedboxes.

            • SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world
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              19 hours ago

              AH ratio - I knew there was a valid reason I chose Usenet back when I set everything up, my upload speed sucks! :)

              • iocase@lemmy.zip
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                9 hours ago

                Yeah depends on the tracker some just credit you for seeding at all which helps people like you with bad upload.

        • dustyData@lemmy.world
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          23 hours ago

          Many indexers have donations optional, or a points system today. The tradeoff is that invitations are now even rarer and harder to get.