The Pirate Bay remains one of the most popular pirate sites on the web. The notorious torrent site has survived plenty of legal and technical challenges during its long history, but a recent issue seems hard to tackle. After more than three months, TPB still hasn't opened user registrations, a measure it took to prevent spammers from exploiting the platform.

When The Pirate Bay launched in the second half of 2003, it set out to be the bastion of uncensored information.

The site categorically rejects takedown requests from copyright holders and allows anyone to upload almost anything.

During its sixteen years of operation, The Pirate Bay has always been free to use and open to the public at large. Those who wanted to share files only had to register an account, which was easy enough.

The last sentence is in the past tense, as user registrations have become a problem this year. For more than three months The Pirate Bay’s user registrations have been closed. The last ‘new’ user was added to the torrent site on May 22 and there is no sign that this will change anytime soon.

As we reported previously, the TPB team said that registrations were closed to stop floods of malware torrents. This was done in by the site’s operator, ‘Winston,’ in response to a request from a moderator.

The plan was to address the problem by putting a limit on the number of torrents users could upload in a short timeframe. That would prevent hundreds of spam torrents being uploaded at once. After this fix, TPB could accept new users again and continue business as usual.

However, after pretty much an entire summer with closed registrations, there doesn’t appear to be any progress. TorrentFreak spoke to a TPB moderator who notes that there is still no word on the issue from ‘Winston,’ who’s in charge of the backend.

“I have no idea if and when he’ll reopen them,” TPB staffer Spud17 tells us, adding that the temporary measure does limit the spam problem.

At the time of writing, the “register” button remains present in the site. However, following the required steps persistently returns the following error message: “Wrong code x. The username and/or e-mail address is already in use.“

Interestingly, closed registrations don’t appear to affect the site’s popularity, perhaps because only a fraction of the users upload content. However, every now and then a complaint pops up in the official TPB forums.

Questioning or complaining users are usually told that there is no news on the registration issue yet. In other words, prospective users have to be patient.

All of the major uploaders, who are responsible for the vast majority of the popular content on TPB, remain active, of course. This means that there is no significant decrease in the volume of new torrents, apart from those containing spam and malware.