Torrent Damage is one of those trackers that does not ride waves of hype or publicity. It’s been online for several years and has silently grown into one of the best General/0Day trackers in existence. Initially built on a TBDEV tracker script, Torrent Damage launched TDv2 back in early 2009, an upgraded version of the site based on the Gazelle codebase. Now in 2011, TD staff are all set to roll out the next major version, TDv3. Needless to say TDv3 is yet another huge milestone for this veteran BitTorrent tracker. Based on a heavily customized version of Gazelle RC2, this is a major upgrade promised to bring in a lot of improvements and enhancements to both usability and performance of the existing implementation of TD’s web interface and the tracker. Unlike the last time, not much has been revealed in detail about the upcoming changes in v3. However, users might not have to wait for long as the roll out is expected to complete very soon, despite a minor delay.

The following is quoted from a forum post by one of the staff members:

Well as some of you are already aware, TDv2 is based on Gazelle (the first release), with some major modifications to make TD what it is today. Some say we didn't give them the credit they deserved, and for that we apologise - we didn't mean for people to think we made the site completely ourselves.

TDv3 is based on the current Gazelle RC2, again with major modifications. Gazelle is great for sites which have primarily audio releases, and as a result, it features many things that a 0 day tracker (which is what we are) do not need. This means making modifications to quite a large amount of sections, stripping out stuff that we're never likely to use.

Nonetheless, it works, and we're very happy with how it's coming along - it's just that the two primary developers and our in-house design specialist do have full time jobs, and cannot work on the site constantly - which is why we've just plain and simply run out of time. Gazelle's code does not have many div tags and in order to make our site really looking good, we need to modify a lot of source code to do so. As we've been developing the site, we've been doing modest testing ourselves, and to be quite frank we're not entirely comfortable putting a half finished site live without our ancillary staff being given the opportunity to test it - like which was done for TDv2.

So, as we previously mentioned, TDv2 will have it's main features re-enabled, and as a little incentive for both us (to complete the site) and you (to bear with us), we have decided to enable our standard RATIO BUILDING until we are ready to migrate to the new site.

‘Ratio building’ should not be an unfamiliar term for loyal members of TD. This is not the first time its happening and it really is a great opportunity to build your ratio if you are an existing member:

The way this works is, whatever you download, only counts 50% towards your download statistics, and whatever you upload counts 150% towards your upload statistics. This gives you an effective 300% ratio boost!

Currently there does not appear to be a fixed launch date for TDv3. However, it shouldn’t be a long delay - ‘ratio building’ event (which has usually only run for 2-3 days in previous occasions) would not have started unless the impending launch was just around the corner. As for the upcoming features in v3, staff are keeping things under wraps for now - “We will not be providing a sneak peak of the site - we'd rather keep it a nice surprise and something to look forward to.”. If you are an existing TD member, expect some big changes to happen soon.

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