Posted on January 13th, 2026…
Update on January 15th… 2025?
Talk about shared human experience of still writing the previous year down in the first month of the new year.
Yoooo my Ledger keeper has been doing this constantly all month too haha. Makes for some fun auditing.
They got his ass out of timeline.
Dang, fitgirl is doing some real reverse engineering here.
People still use 1337?
Why? My Prowlarr stats show that, after Usenet, 1337 has the most successful retrievals of the torrent trackers I use.
Is it more of an issue of trying to find things manually? My setup is all automated, so maybe the bad stuff is just getting weeded out? I could definitely be having some confirmation bias here since I rarely have to find something manually.
they have very lax standards and some sus moderating. A few years ago there was a chain of accounts sending crypto miners along with cracks, and they were most likely complicit
Ah, I see. I’ve just been lucky with my setup, then. I keep Radarr/Prowlarr synced with the Trash Guides. I also have Cleanuparr set up to keep my torrent queue clean, and it includes a malware component that tells qbit to ignore most non-media file extensions.
Did something happen that we shouldn’t be?
I know it’s not easy or viable for a lot of people, but folks really should try to embrace the private tracker world if they can because it involves a lot of moderators who help prevent malware from being uploaded to begin with by having strict rules. It’s not completely perfect and not everything gets caught, but it’s got more safeguards than a public site without a moderation queue.
Actually folks shouldn’t embrace the private trackers they make finding content harder, make regarded rules (like you can’t seed these files on another tracker), and feed ego of moderating pricks.
What do you recommend to find a private tracker? A while back, I tried to find one, but none of them were available for new users. Granted that I haven’t used torrents in a while.
Opentrackers.org posts open signups. TorrentLeech is at least as good as the public ones, and it has open signups a few times per year.
Otherwise, you can apply/interview for RED and a few others, work your way up through the ranks, and use the invite forums. This is how you get to the really big and really good trackers. But it’s also a lot of time and effort, which most people don’t want to do.
You might get lucky on the open signups. Every top-tier tracker was once a tiny site with no users. If you join and contribute, they could be the next big thing, and you joined with minimal effort.
I recently tried torrent leech as my first private tracker and I’m not really happy with the experience. They discourage you from downloading older torrents (old, obscure stuff) due to it potentially tanking your ratio and it seems there’s limited content available.
They also encourage signing up for other paid services to get an invite which just kinda rubs me the wrong way.
There is a ratio, which may be a new experience if you’ve only used public trackers. It’s not really a big deal if you have some patience, though.
TL (as do most ratio trackers) gives you bonus points for your time seeding, even if you have done nothing more than make it available. You don’t have to upload even a single byte unless someone wants it, and you’ll still get points. These points can be used to buy upload credit.
If you simply keep seeding everything you download, and buy credits as needed, you’ll quickly have more ratio than you could ever hope to burn. No need to spend money or anything.
As for limited content, it’s a general tracker. You probably have niche interests, so you would be better suited on a more specific tracker. I’ve almost never had issues finding anything mainstream, although quality can be a crapshoot. That’s the main reason I usually use other trackers.
So deal with Reddit style mods and hoops and maybe you can do exactly what you are already doing? No thank you.
Torrentleech periodically opens signups. Can’t speak to any others personally
No one should use either tpb or 1337, because of this exact reason
What should I use?
I’d recommend a private tracker, there is a list of them at https://fmhy.net/torrenting
