mutracker was a ratioless Private Torrent Tracker for MUSIC



Since even before the birth of muTracker, we’ve had an interesting history – the initial idea spawned by enthusiatic /mu/tants, with the goal of being able to survive on a private tracker without the financial requirements for a high-speed seedbox, or the home connection that might match one. While we’ve designed an economy for muTracker that would allow this (all that we ask is that you seed), and let you download whatever you wanted to your heart’s content, we were unfortunately no stranger to a myriad of issues along the way.

Out of excitement for the potential of muTracker we rushed to set up the server, and our unmodified installation of Gazelle (as well as our lack of experience within it) caused more than a few (temporary) security holes, that were made, not to our benefit, public elsewhere in the torrenting community. Not much consideration was taken into the hosting provider we chose for the site, and we subsequently suffered a number of denial of service attacks that left us with extended periods of downtime. As well as our future attacks, and our less-than-communicative hosts, we ran into many problems following the inconsistency between different versions of our site and tracker software, and inability to alter or manage it well – which left us with even longer downtime.

During the times we were actually up, we suffered from other problems. Uploading and forum activity started to stagnate because of the previous issues (as well as our reputation continuing to drop), and little was being done to nurture the niche we were trying to cater to. When our video category was eventually added, only the uploading rules for music had been finished, and effort wasn’t made to fill the site with this new content. To try and mitigate this, we opened registration several times, which as well as devaluing the credits and the few items you could buy (because nobody was using invites), did little to nothing in the long run, and we inevitably slowed back to a crawl time and time again. This stagnation wasn’t just apparent among the user activity, though. Between the time we formed in 2013 and now, we’ve lost over half of our admins and all but one of our developers. This stopped us from fixing any problems with the site or tracker immediately, and when the few admins we had left were absent, so was the entire staff team. As it stands, we have too few staffers to do anything worthwhile for the site.

Most recently, we failed to pay the server bill for our current host in time, and as a result, they’ve suspended the server. Rather than setting up again as quickly as we can and ending up with the continued dying activity (of staff and users) as we’ve already seen so far, we’ve decided now to take an indefinite hiatus, while we focus all our efforts towards development of our ‘new’ site (and some of you will have seen the posts over the last several months seeking devs for this purpose). We feel this, and perhaps the notion of hiring new staff, would be a better choice for muTracker than continuing the string of disappointments that the site is too familiar with. In addition, we plan to work on a large number of features that would not only suit the needs of muTracker’s content, but will prove invaluable and efficient to site users and staff alike. If you’d like to help out the few of us working on the project, and you have any PHP (or Symfony), JS, CSS, HTML, SQL or even writing abilities, contact us at mut@installgentoo.com or on our IRC (irc.mutracker.org) and we’ll respond to you as soon as possible. Anyone with extensive knowledge of video encoding would also be greatly helpful.

Nevertheless, we’ve had an exciting run, and an even more exciting community – we’ve always done our best to maintain an air of freedom and transparency here, and make using muTracker as simple and easygoing an experience as possible. And we will do no less upon our return (granted, with much more professionalism).

Goodbye, for now.