Generally speaking, when a BitTorrent tracker or torrent indexing site gets taken down by either voluntary reasons or pressure/force from the copyright industry, it is a good bet that the service is not going to be making a full return.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
There has been a case in the past where an eDonkey2000 hash indexing site announced a return, but the vibrant community did not make a return as was likely hoped by the administrators. TorrentIt, on the other hand, hopes to be one of the few sites to actually make a full return to the file-sharing community.
Last year, Slyck reported on BREIN targeting TorrentIt. “BREIN, a Dutch antipiracy industry coalition, issued TorrentIt.com’s domain holder with a cease-and-desist, backed with the threat of a lawsuit.” TorrentIt staff explained in a press release (PDF), “A possible domain sale was initiated to protect our members, effectively ‘moving’ Torrent It – but the integrity of the site we loved so much couldn’t be ensured and the sale was stopped.”
TorrentIt confirmed in that they had not been raided. No hardware was seized and no personal information was given out; the decision was strictly on a voluntary basis while administration could figure out how to deal with BREIN’s cease-and-desist letter that was issued to their domain holder.
“[…] you can imagine we wanted to do something big [for the one year anniversary of the cease-and-desist order]. We could have organised a get-together in remembrance; broke out the rum and chatted about the good old days, but we thought we’d go one better. We thought we’d bring TorrentIt back!” The press release said, “This isn’t a one-time only deal, we’re not just opening for the day – we’re back and we’re back for good.”
They further explained that TorrentIt.info will be going live in May and the plan is to introduce new features, backed by the new staff that has been assembled. The new promised features include ways of extending the pirate theme with revamped user ranks. Another feature is a tagging system to complement the category system. The tagging system would be implemented into a search cloud – a feature that has become standard in other large BitTorrent websites. Also promised is an offer system to complement a request system, and a system for users who contribute to the overall community to complement the share ratio system. The community contributions to complement the ratio system is certainly a new feature, given that for some communities, some users find that the best thing to do is maintain a good ratio and keep an otherwise low profile in the community on tracking websites that enforce ratios.
The staff has many familiar names to those who know and were a part of the TorrentIt community. The announced staff is as follows:
Tux, Pleb and TFKyle – technical
Lermy and monkeynut – administrators
BlastGT1, Nightmeare and Soepkip – content
ATA2D, casper3380, craig1427, Davinity, DJcrazyChris, Prestonia24, SirusVirus, Smiler and Vidde – moderators
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
