Mac users missing the community spirit they enjoyed at BrokenStones are on an urgent mission to save an endangered manatee-like sea mammal which lives almost entirely on sea cabbage. But that will have to wait. There's a brand new Gazelle-based Mac tracker in town - and it promises to be fun. We take a look.

For a commnunity more used to a certain calm, things have been quite turbulent in the Mac torrent scene recently. After hosting issues took down the BrokenStones tracker the mood was low. So, when another site, Vortex Network, offered much as a potential replacement but ultimately proved too controversial, the mood fell lower still.

What the community needs right now is less drama, a place to call home and some well-deserved fun. We spoke to a senior staffer at the brand new mac tracker, SaveTheCoratee.org, to get some answers on the important stuff – like what the hell a coratee is?

“A coratee is an animal that is similar to a manatee, its primary diet is sea cabbage” he told us. “It was hunted and killed by tuna companies and sold to you because they are easier to fish. They are slow and stupid animals that are loving and soft and on the brink of extinction, meaning they are in desperate need of saving.”

The BrokenStones community parallels are obvious – minus the “slow and stupid bit” perhaps. But, an equal (if not greater) amount of love, of course. And cabbage.

“We picked Save the Coratee because of two real reasons. One, I try to live my life and everything I do with a healthy sense of the ridiculous. Two, the mac community is a creative and innovative community. Hand them a fake animal with no description rather than ‘It’s kinda like a manatee’ and people love it. It builds community and creates a family feeling that is ‘fun’.”

So bizarre mammal protection aside, what inspired the staff to start the site? Our source told us: “When BrokenStones went down we started talking with people about getting a site up but Vortex beat us to it.” As we know, things didn’t go to plan at Vortex but in the background, slowly but surely, SaveTheCoratee was still in development. “We started talking and we were kinda moving slow, brain-storming etc. Then stuff started to go down hill at Vortex so we kicked it into gear,” the staff member said.

So, apart from all the regular categories and well-seeded torrents and cabbage-eating sea mammals one would expect at a site like this, what else is there to this site? Well, for a start, the site is based on the Project Gazelle codebase, but it’s been put together ‘in-house’. The team at What.cd weren’t involved beyond the initial development, although they did save the first coratee (a female), and managed to effect some sort of virgin birth and a successful breeding program. I didn’t pry any deeper.

Nevertheless, I was told that a big achievement during the development was that the coders managed to convert the music-based source of Gazelle into a multi-app, multi-purpose site in just 4 days, which certainly sounds like an achievement.

The staff member further told us that SaveTheCoratee hopes to develop into a small, dedicated group (5,000 members, maybe more) of users who love both Apple Computers and BitTorrent sites: “I never want the site to be big or to loose personality” he told us. The site currently has around 1000 members but it’s growing fast.

So what might convince potential users of the site to head over to their IRC channel with a big bucket of sea-cabbage bribes to smooth the entrance interview?

Our source told us: “We included a lot of…. how would I put this… win in the site……or love…….”

According to a message on the site, once you have loved a coratee, you cannot go back to a plain old manatee, because it will seem rough and stupid by comparison.

Sounds like a good time to stock up on sea-cabbage.