The Pirate Bay has responded to concerns about its use of U.S.-based CDN service CloudFlare. According to the people behind the site, this is only a temporary measure to reduce the load on its servers. In addition, TPB now asks users to report fake torrents, noting that the staff's moderating capabilities are disabled for security reasons.

On Saturday The Pirate Bay made its long-awaited comeback. While most users were happy to see the site back online, others were suspicious about the new setup.

One of the issues that was discussed the most is Pirate Bay’s use of CloudFlare’s CDN and its SSL service. Several people voiced concerns that this would make it easy for U.S. authorities to spy on Pirate Bay’s users.

Others even went as far as rumoring that the FBI had already infiltrated the site. While this is complete nonsense, general security concerns of using a U.S.-based service are legitimate.

Today, the Pirate Bay responded to the possible security issue, explaining that it’s only using Cloudflare temporarily in order to cope with the continued stream of millions of visitors.

“We have seen that there has been some question to why we are using Cloudflare. This is only initially to handle the massive load upon the servers. It will be removed shortly,” TPB says in a statement.

Another concern is the lack of moderation on the site. The Pirate Bay previously decided to take away the rights of admins and moderators which resulted in a staff revolt and a subsequent pollution problem.

Since the site’s return many fake torrents have been posted to the site and without moderators these were not removed. The Pirate Bay operators now explain that the decision to keep the staff out was taken as a security measure.

“Due to severe security issues regarding the old moderator team all moderation has temporarily been disabled,” TPB notes.

To deal with the spam and fake torrent problem they’ve now added a report link to every torrent details page.

“Before we sort everything out we have instead added a ‘Report link’ to all torrents which you can find in the details page. We believe that the TPB community can help moderate the site for the time being.”

Already, several flagged torrents have been removed from the site so the report button seems to work. Whether it will be as effective as a full team of moderators has yet to be seen.

The locked out staffers are not really convinced by the security explanation and doubt that this is the true reason.

“Are we all to believe that the situation is what it is for security reasons? In that case the admins would remove the bad apples, and this is not what is going on now,” they tell TF in a joint statement.

Finally, it’s worth noting that The Pirate Bay’s .onion address has been brought back online too, which allows people to browse the site over the Tor network.

While The Pirate Bay may not have returned with a bang, it was certainly fuel for heated debates and conspiracy theories. The recent announcements may not resolve all concerns, especially not those of the moderators and admins, but it’s good that the people behind the site are speaking out again.