Ikr! That is what my thought was. I always prefer to be anonymous online and giving them all my personal info seems like a very bad idea.

So true... honestly at this point I hope it just gets worse so people jump ship to lemmy. Might be hopeful thinking that people will actually switch. But having a company control public discourse always seems to end badly. Not looking at you twitter.

Welcome to the private tracker community! It is a lovely place to be.

I personally am not a member of torrentleech but here is some advice to get you started!

1. Make use of the bonus points system

Typically most private trackers have some sort of economy in which permaseeding is rewarded with points. These points can then be used to buy upload credit to improve your ratio.

2. Download freeleech content

Often they also have freeleech content that does not count towards you download (thus preserving your ratio). Most trackers require you maintain a certain ratio. At first you can just manually search or download new freeleech content. Eventually, you may want to set up autobrr to automatically download new freeleech torrents. Other users have provided helpful links to get you started. Keep in mind as you explore other trackers some do not allow autobrr to be used.

3. Get connectable

The need for a VPN is not always as crucial as it is for public torrents. That being said, sometimes it is difficult to get connectable (forward ports) on your home network. Thus some users use a VPN such as AirVPN that allow port forwarding. You don't need to be connectable to seed, however you are unable to seed to other non-connectable users (thus decreasing your upload potential).

4. Avoid the forums and chat

This advice is often over said and most of the time the forums and chat are pretty decent. It comes from the odd power hungry moderator getting a bit too ban happy. However, what I will say is avoiding the chat and forums is not a terrible idea if you are not too familiar with the sites rules. Sometimes they are very specific and can get you if your not paying attention.

5. Upload content once you are familiar with the site

Once you feel comfortable with the above, uploading can really help your ratio. Make sure you follow all the rules of torrentleech if you are going to upload. Often private trackers have very strict and stringent rules. This is why I generally don't recommend uploading if you're new to the whole torrents scene.

Typically, the uploading process goes something like this. Create the .torrent file using qbittorrent or something similar. Make sure you mark the torrent as private in the creation tool and include your unique tracker url (you get this from the private tracker). Upload the .torrent file and actual file to your seedbox (or if you're just seeding from the computer begin seeding once you create the torrent). Sometimes you need to do a force recheck to get it seeding. Then you upload the torrent to the private tracker and add relevant metadata. Force re-announce the torrent on qbittorrent and it usually shows up. You will need to be connectable to upload.

Don't use invites to gain access to a private tracker. If the person who invited you gets banned you will get banned. Go through official interview process for MAM, OPS, or RED. That will get you in and you can jump to other trackers from there.

Yeah I was watching a show recently on Prime and now they are injecting 1min plus long ads like every 10-20 minutes. It's worse than watching cable tv.

It sucks that at this point both systems suck. Apple is not great but at least it’s been pretty stable. If Apple allowed side loading that would be the dream.

Your best bet is to join MAM. From there, you can progress to Aither and other sites within a reasonable amount of time through the invite forums.

It depends where you are in the world. Some countries care more about copyright laws. Sometimes you can get away with torrenting with little to no consequences.

Otherwise, stick to direct download and streaming websites. There are a lot of great sites for movies and tv shows. They tend to come and go. Just remember to install an ad blocker. For games, you'll need to look at direct downloads. Some good links in other comments.

Perhaps I will take a look at that. Yeah serial transfers are an absolute pain.

MAM economy is actually so easy. I’m at 10 TiB of upload and still have bp left over. I think my actual upload is something like 700 GiB.

Always excited to see a new project like this. I would def move away from reddit and Github. Both have a track record of going after piracy projects. Reddit used to be safe but they are going full hammer rn. Github seems to be fine unless its too obvious its piracy. Discord is still safe.

lmao that would be a wild time... also attacking California would be hilarious 🤣

It it incredibly difficult to vet with 100% certainty that a binary you run it safe. If you have the source code, its so much easier. As others have said, the best way in piracy to be safe is downloading from a reputable source. Monkrus is pretty good. I am assuming you're referring to the Adobe master collection? If so, GenP is excellent (and open source).

If you are on windows, one thing you can do is run any programs in sandboxie and see what it writes to the disc. If it tries to edit things that it shouldn't like the registry or parts of the os that would be a red flag.

You could also setup firewall rules to block the application from accessing the internet. I am on macOS so I use a program called little snitch (lulu by objective see is also good). I am not familiar with the windows side of things. But essentially what I do is block the program and any processes it starts.

If you want to learn more about malware, https://objective-see.org/ is a great resource. It's macOS focused however but I've learned a ton from it. In particular their book on mac malware teaches a lot of analysis techniques.

I find this so ironic. For so many years the US has been sort of the anti-piracy centre of the world. Now their just blatantly allowing piracy for the sake of progress.

Yeah it appears they are cracking down heavily on piracy. I would not be surprised if more subreddits go down.

Yes, you just need to copy the .app file. Adobe Zii patches that file so that is all you need. Don't need to worry about copying any of the ~/Library files. One thing to keep in mind as macOS gets to future versions finding an older version of Adobe applications that still works can be finicky.