Whenever there was a discussion about TV trackers in the last couple of weeks, the spotlight has been on BTN. While BTN definitely is a feature filled private tracker, it is not the only TV torrent site that’s been improving. This post is about ShareTheRemote (better known as STR), another gazelle based tracker that’s grown a fair bit since it’s launch several months ago. STR recently introduced a number of changes to its ratio system – this includes new free leech modes (half leech, double upload), changes to what users placed under ‘ratio watch’ can download, changes to their TV show database (TheTVDB) and other minor tweaks. ShareTheRemote is currently closed for signup but they do have an official invites IRC channel where potential new members can get invited.

Quoted below are some of the recent changes made to STR, as posted on news items on site homepage:

We have modified our tracker to support two new freeleech types. These are 'half-leech' and 'double upload'. Their functions are just as their names imply; when downloading half-leech torrents, only half of the data you download will be counted, and double upload torrents will award double the upload credit that you seed.

Effective Immediately: Torrents over 25GB are no longer freeleech, they are now half-leech.

Although this change may be met with some disparity, it is for the better of the site's health. Allowing so many large torrents to be freeleech was having detrimental effects on their seeder retention and the site's economy. We will be evaluating ways to counterbalance the loss of this freeleech for new users, so feel free to make suggestions!

We plan to use double upload as an incentive for people to download and seed underseeded torrents. We haven't came up with exact numbers for this yet, but we hope to have it implemented within the next few days.

Finally, due to TheTVDB's frequent downtime and decision to block embedding images from another torrent site, banners hosted on TheTVDB may no longer be used. It is still encouraged to use banners from that site, however you should first upload them to an image hosting site such as imgur. Since we felt that the ratio brackets were not adequate for the size of torrents on this site, we've increased them by a factor of 1.5. This effectively increases the grace period for new users to 15GB. A full list of ratio requirements is available at rules.php?p=ratio. We've rolled out another set of tracker changes that we hope you guys will enjoy.

The most notable of these changes is that users on ratio watch can now download full freeleech torrents. We hope that this will help users who find themselves on ratio watch without torrents that receive frequent traffic work their ways off of it.

To fix an oversight on my part, torrents may now be any logical combination of the three freeleech types. The main reasoning behind this change is to allow underseeded half-leech torrents to be double upload as well.

Additionally, the tracker now supports 'single user freeleech'. This feature treats every torrent as freeleech for any user who has this flag set. Although we do not know how or if this feature will be used, we decided to add it to prevent a later recompile if we decide to implement it.

Although somewhat overshadowed by the success of BTN, ShareTheRemote too boats an impressive set of site features. They too have a TV Shows Database, detailed series pages, staff picks and even a TV news section. Series pages are similar to that of BTN – individual episodes and season packs for a particular show are accessible from a single location. The collector add-on found on these pages makes downloading all available full season packs for a particular show a breeze. In addition to the widgets you can see in the screenshot to the right, there is a recommendations add-on which suggests other similar shows to the user.

Currently, there are over 7200 users and nearly 5000 torrents indexed on this tracker. Some of these torrents are full season packs and some, as said earlier, are individual episodes. While STR already has a healthy flow of new daily torrents, they would need to improve this aspect if they are to compete against the likes of BTN, BMTV, etc who definitely add more content every day.

STR has been open for registration several times in the past but the site is currently invite only. However, there’s still hope for those who missed the open registrations (or for those hearing about this tracker for the first time right now). Although many are unaware, STR has an official invites channel hosted on their IRC server. You may get an invite by following the procedure mentioned on the channel topic.

Site Name: ShareTheRemote (http://sharetheremote.org/)

IRC Channel Details:

Server : irc.sharetheremote.org

: irc.sharetheremote.org Channel : #invite

: #invite Direct Link: irc://irc.sharetheremote.org/invite

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