I really miss the gaming sites. BCG / BG / UG.
GGN is the only one left.
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I really miss the gaming sites. BCG / BG / UG.
GGN is the only one left.
UG exists in the shadow http://retrowith.in/Quote:
Originally Posted by Jordan
Other gaming trackers also there
playbits.org
bitgamer.ch
ultimategamer.club
There's also UGC and PleasureDome!Quote:
Originally Posted by Jordan
I really miss U-G's invite forum :weirdo:
Thanks for the info. Where can I get invites for UGC and Retro? I tried the PTP forums but they don't have it.Quote:
Originally Posted by illusive
A friend told me ugc recruits on waffles but i'm not sure as i'm not a member there. I've seen users offer retrowithin on invite forums like ti.orgQuote:
Originally Posted by Jordan
my guess is it's due to age, less time and less interest - the site operators are getting older and have more rl responsibilities and less free time plus lose interest in the project over time - you can't expect people to be interested in the same thing forever or be as passionate about it as in the beginning. to outsiders it might seem websites run on autopilot - but it`s really not.
and i can totally understand the rationale that the siteops rather quit & wipe everything than hand over years of hard work to some unkown random person - it`s a responsibility to the community to protect sensitive user data from potentially malicious strangers.
oh and the users have less interest, too - it`s a worldwide phenomenon - nowadays there are affordable & comfortable official alternatives to filesharing and people embrace them and those subscription services contributed to the overall decline in filesharing.
personally i`m really sad about the demise of underground-gamer & it`s sister site bitgamer and asiandvdclub. not that i downloaded a ton from there or was an active forum or irc poster - i really loved the spirit of the community and the passion. in adcs & ugs case such huge archives are lost forever and can`t ever be rebuild or recovered. the younger gen doesn`t care and the older gen doesn`t, too, because they don`t have so much time left anymore anyway.
people always bring up that hydra proverb with filesharing sites "for every head cut off, two more heads grow back" - but sadly it`s never the case. there have been no decent alternatives or spiritual successors - and probably never will be. eveyt time some copycats emerge for a brief time to grab some user info but they quickly vanish into obscurity.
only recently after doing a lot of research i was able to find out how the cms (content-management-system) of those trackers was called. i forgot it already. it´s called "TBSource". i always loved how trackers that deployed it looked so clean and minimalist - really pleasant to the eyes - and how fast and easy it was to browse and navigate - really an efficient user experience.
i keep reading that "gazelle / ocelot" from what.cd is considered by many the "gold standard" of tracker cms. i have to disagree, it looks really ugly and is super inefficient and full of javascript.
only that pos "unit3d" is worse, such a chore to navigate and even with just a few tabs open brings most cpus down to their knees. and it's so ugly with it's excessively huge fonts optimized for mobile, like who torrents on tablets and smartphones?
i miss the pre-smartphone/tablet era web 1.0. now the internet is so commercialized / polypolized with eveything in the hands of a few.
in the late 90s / early 2000s i really thought the web would be split between many small players.
i really hate how the general public is ok with giving up their privacy and all their actions being monitored by coporations & goverments 24-7.
I think the main reason will be streaming, every year it is more accesible for everyone ,it is more practical than download movies , music and TV shows , people always look for easier ways to get things. Even music videos are now very easy to find them on youtube.Quote:
Originally Posted by slikrapid
I'm glad someone pointed this out. Chain of trust in particular is a universally sensitive issue. Trusting your staff doesn't just mean picking someone capable for the job - they must also never turn on you for whatever reason, relay confidential information to others, or get compromised in any way. The only way three people can keep a secret, etc. The 2010 hostile takeovers of PTP and BTN, 2011 What.cd donation scandal and 2019 32pag.es breach are just a few (and very prominent) examples of things going wrong.Quote:
Originally Posted by hazz030
RetroWith.in is supposed to be U-G's successor, though I'm not a member and have no idea what they're like. Romulation.net and Archive.org are decent substitutes. eMule can also be surprisingly good for abandonware games, depending on which generation and platform you're interested on. Of course, what U-G had going for it was everything being centralized in a single place, following upload rules and rarely going unseeded, plus a community of people who were very enthusiastic about retro gamesQuote:
personally i`m really sad about the demise of underground-gamer & it`s sister site bitgamer and asiandvdclub. not that i downloaded a ton from there or was an active forum or irc poster - i really loved the spirit of the community and the passion. in adcs & ugs case such huge archives are lost forever and can`t ever be rebuild or recovered. the younger gen doesn`t care and the older gen doesn`t, too, because they don`t have so much time left anymore anyway.
but would often downvote your forum posts without explanation. The ridiculousness of them shutting down over a takedown claim for FIFA 99 is a strong argument in favor of copyright reform, but it is what it is.
All I know about ADC is that there was a revival attempt which falsely claimed to be official, and might have also been a cash grab. AvistaZ and KG are the oft-quoted alternatives, but good luck joining the latter.
The hydra was definitely a thing back in the day, but the existence of attractive legal alternatives as you and Blocker mentioned, and increasing barriers to entry when it comes to starting and running a secure tracker, have made it much more difficult for its heads to grow back.Quote:
nowadays there are affordable & comfortable official alternatives to filesharing
people always bring up that hydra proverb with filesharing sites "for every head cut off, two more heads grow back" - but sadly it`s never the case.
I don't think there's a gold standard, it depends on what you want to do. Gazelle actually has a good and responsive design (which shows the most in the Kuro, Proton and Anorex stylesheets), but takes work to morph from a music tracker into something else, logs an insane amount of data, and has at least three different active forks. In turn, the TB source is probably better suited for general trackers, but requires extensive patching if you want to run it efficiently on a modern setup and don't like SQL injections or RCE exploits.Quote:
i keep reading that "gazelle / ocelot" from what.cd is considered by many the "gold standard" of tracker cms.
Small history lesson: the "TB" stands for TorrentBits, which wasn't the first private tracker, but codified the concept as we know it today. After its closure, some of its former staff went on to found TorrentBytes, which referenced this in its site banner for a few years. Neither has any relation to the long-defunct TorrentBits.ro. Also, see http://www.sb-innovation.de/showthread.php?t=14163.
People's mentality was different, but there was less to do and access was slow and expensive. Anyway, that was then and this is now.Quote:
i miss the pre-smartphone/tablet era web 1.0.
This happend with all swedish trackers, its rare/imposible to find or join one today started from 2009 indeed when they started trail first with public trackers like Thepiratebay
I remember how valuable SweDVDR was to traders, as it had great content plus high rarity, and accounts were only usable from Scandinavian IPs. TTi hosted a large periphery demographic of members from outside that region, since it was a comfy general tracker with a nice seed hour system.
:shockkk!: I had a TTi account , it was good tracker . Also what about pretimes ? are people still caring about them?Quote:
Originally Posted by anon
It's been a long time since I last saw anyone do so. In hindsight, the only thing pretimes were good for was determining the solidity of a tracker's scene access (very important back then as the P2P release group boom was only beginning to begin), or whether they had such access at all. Not that this stopped people from using them as a reason to request "better" invites, even though the differences were of a few minutes at worst, and typically less than one :stupid:Quote:
Originally Posted by Blocker
Don't forget packs, and of course, the community!
ScT, FTWR, What.cd, Underground-Gamer, syncthebits,Quote:
Originally Posted by anon
these were the sites i really wanted to get in... never had the chance, and now i never would have
ScT was the pinnacle of scene trackers. Very low pretimes, excellent speeds, great retention (partly in the form of exclusive packs), and cheating was very easy :gsmile: Sure, it's not like you'd die if you didn't get in (which expectedly wasn't trivial; invites only awarded via donation plus a user cap of 20,000 slots). There was no shortage of alternatives carrying the same content, just like there isn't now. But they had everything in one place, and their good reputation was very well-earned.
FTWR's only appeal was its rarity, just like UK-T and FTN. You missed nothing.
What.cd was like RED, but with less autosnatch spam. Surprised you weren't a member, invites were easy to find and I had five active accounts at one point :gredface:
U-G was the ScT of its niche, and as was discussed above, doesn't really have a successor. Also surprised you weren't in, they regularly had open signups.
STB was perhaps ahead of its time. The target audience just wasn't there - phones were fairly underpowered, compatibility was shaky, and overall they didn't have much to offer other than some packs buried in a mass of <1 MB torrents.
It would be interesting to see what ScT and STB would look like if they were still active today, given the boom in P2P releases and mobile apps that took place not so long after their death.