Even though it's subjected to massive ISP blocking in Russia, torrent giant RuTracker refuses to give up the fight. After regular mirrors and proxies were easily scooped up by the country's blocking regime, RuTracker has a new plan. If you're a user and have a domain name to hand, the site will help you set up your very own access portal with a minimum of effort.

As Russia’s largest torrent site and one that earned itself a mention in TF’s list of most popular torrent sites 2018, RuTracker is continuously under fire.

The site has an extremely dedicated following but Russia’s telecoms watchdog, spurred on by copyright holders brandishing court rulings, does everything in its power to ensure that people can’t access the site easily.

As a result, RuTracker’s main domains are blocked by all ISPs, meaning that people have to resort to VPNs or the many dozens of proxy and mirror sites that have been set up to facilitate access to the popular tracker.

While all of these methods used to work just fine, new legislation that came into force during October means that mirror and proxy sites can be added to block lists without copyright holders having to return to court. And, following legislation introduced in November, local VPN services are forbidden from providing access to blocked sites.

While RuTracker has always insisted that web blockades have little effect on the numbers of people sharing content, direct traffic to their main domains has definitely suffered. To solve this problem and go some way towards mitigating VPN and proxy bans, the site has just come up with a new plan to keep the torrents flowing.

The scheme was quietly announced, not on RuTracker’s main forum, but to a smaller set of users on local site Leprosorium. The idea was that a quieter launch there would allow for controlled testing before a release to the masses. The project is called My.RuTracker and here’s how it works.

Instead of blocked users fruitlessly trying to find public circumvention methods that once seen are immediately blocked, they are invited to register their own domains. These can be single use, for the person who registers them, but it’s envisioned that they’ll be shared out between friends, family, and online groups, to better make use of the resource.

Once domains are registered, users are invited to contact a special user account on the RuTracker site (operated by the site’s operators) which will provide them with precise technical details on how to set up their domain (.ru domains are not allowed) to gain access to RuTracker.

“In response, after a while (usually every other day), a list of NS-addresses will be sent to the registrar’s domain settings. Under this scheme, the user domain will be redirected to the RuTracker site via a dynamic IP address: this will avoid blocking the torrent tracker for a particular IP address,” the scheme envisages.

According to local news resource Tjournal, 62 personal mirrors were launched following the initial appeal, with the operators of RuTracker now planning to publicly announce the project to their community. As more are added, the site will keep track of traffic from each of the personal “mirrors” for balancing the load on the site.

At least in theory, this seems like a pretty innovative scheme. Currently, the authorities rely on the scale and public awareness of a particular proxy or mirror in order to earmark it for blocking. This much more decentralized plan, in which only small numbers of people should know each domain, seems like a much more robust system – at least until the authorities and indeed the law catches up.

And so the cat-and-mouse game continues.