After irritating copyright holders once too often, RuTracker, one of the world's largest torrent sites, was blocked by Russian authorities forever. Somehow, however, the site still helps its users grab a million downloads every day, a figure completely unchanged from one year ago, when the site was open to all.

While the site doesn’t get a lot of press in the West, Russia’s RuTracker is one of the biggest torrent sites on the planet.

It’s easily one of the top ten most popular torrent sites online and indexes a massive range of local and international content. Those with Google translate and a modicum of patience report a treasure trove of material.

The situation with RuTracker is somewhat curious. While it is regularly visited by users from a range of countries, the majority of its user base comes from the Russian Federation. However, after drawing the ire of copyright holders, the site is blocked by all local ISPs, a situation that will persist forever.

This so-called “eternal” block was put in place last year and was expected to do the site serious damage. But according to the site’s operators, they’re doing just fine. In fact, not a great deal has changed.

Speaking with local news outlet Apparat, a RuTracker representative confirmed that while attendances have dropped a little, there has been no change at all in the numbers of files being downloaded.

“According to our statistics the number of downloaded torrents has not changed. Every day more than a million torrents are downloaded from Rutracker. We had the same number before the block,” the source reveals.

“The load on our trackers has fallen by no more than 10%. In this case, when we say tracker, we mean the service address [announce URL], where the BitTorrent client recalls the list of peers.”

While the blockades have failed to impact levels of infringement, they have managed to reduce the volumes of traffic reaching the site. Interestingly, RuTracker believes that the kind of device used to access the platform has played a role in whether a user has been able to easily bypass the blocks.

“Most of all, blocking has affected the users of mobile devices. With these it is slightly more difficult to configure a bypass than on a desktop computer,” the rep says.

“Therefore, those users who came to the forum from mobile devices just to talk – and there are so many of them – are faced with problems. For those who used the forum from ordinary computers, the block delivered a minimum of inconveniences: there, a bypass is configured in just two clicks.”

As previously reported, the court-ordered blocking of RuTracker prompted the site to break off cooperation with all copyright holders. The way the site viewed it, why take content down when the punishment for not doing so has already been issued by the court?

“For more than seven years, we had not a single problem with any major vendor, but we were blocked because of the songs of one local rapper, who at the same time put out his songs for public access on social networks. The reason was purely formal, and the decision was political,” the rep explains.

Freed from having to remove content every day, the site is now far more happy doing nothing. In fact, it says that life is now much easier, since all the time and resources spent on taking things down can now be deployed elsewhere. Not to say that the site has a small staff though.

Currently the site has five employees, including programmers and systems administrators, who reportedly earn a salary for their work. On top the site has several volunteer forum administrators and a massive team of moderators, numbering 200 in all.

But as they have done for many years, the site’s operators say they will continue to remain anonymous while earning enough from advertising to balance the books. There are no big profits to report and there will be no Pirate Bay-style posturing.

“We are not a political organization, we do not put forward any demands, we do not call or agitate anything. Deanonymization will not bring any advantages, instead we will receive increased attention from the marginalized, from scammers, and state groups too.”

The site’s operators say they are not against cooperation as long as its based on mutual understanding and a constructive approach. But they weren’t getting that in Russia, it seems, so they’ve skipped out of reach instead.

“We are both physically and legally outside the borders of this wonderful country,” they conclude.