For the first time since the raid late last year, The Pirate Bay is allowing users to open new accounts again. Registrations have been closed for months due to security issues and to avoid the site from being flooded with fakes and spam.

Slowly but surely things are returning back to normal at the beleaguered Pirate Bay.

After weeks of downtime the site came back online late January, recovering from a raid that hit the site hard. The notorious torrent site has burned through several hosting companies since its return but the site is now relatively stable.

With many of the old moderators back on board the spam problems are under control as well. All this time, however, there was still one major feature missing from the site. Users were not able to register an account so they can publish content.

This last barrier was removed a few hours ago when TPB formally reopened user registrations.

“The registrations remained closed as a security precaution. But now that the mods are back and stable, new accounts won’t flood the site with fakes,” Pirate Bay’s Winston tells TF

Registrations are open



Over the past couple of months the moderator team undertook a thorough cleanup of all suspicious user accounts. Pretty much all fakers and scammers were removed, a number that ran into the thousands.

“A lot of the dormant accounts have been used up now,” long time TPB moderator Agricola tells TF, noting that fakers and scammers are more prevalent than most people believe.

“In my time on The Pirate Bay I have 30,000+ kills on my name, which is how we refer to deleted accounts. You are talking hundreds of accounts a day.”

So while the reopened registration feature is good news for users who want to join the six million strong army of Pirate Bay users, it means all hands on deck for the moderator team.

According to Agricola this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, that’s what they have been doing all along.

“We’re pretty much going back to the way it was before the raid,” Agricola says.

Looking back at the past few months we can conclude that things have pretty much returned to normal at TPB. The site took a hit in terms of traffic and is no longer the most used torrent site, but the ship is still afloat.