After announcing it planned to move away from the format last month, The Pirate Bay has today given a date for the deletion of all .torrent files with more than ten peers. A statement from the popular torrent site's blog reads:

"In following with our decision to skip .torrent-files in the nearby future one of the biggest steps will come on the 29th of February. We will stop serving .torrent-files for all torrents that [have] more than ten peers from this date."

The Pirate Bay added magnet links to all its listings last month, and said the move was down to the plain-text format taking less bandwidth. Instead of downloading the torrent file from the site itself, the magnet link allows users to download it directly from other peers' computers — which explains why the site will, for now, keep torrent files with very few peers live on the site. The move to magnet links also makes the site's huge database easier to archive, as proved last week when an enterprising user compressed the entire site's content into a 90MB download (a torrent file archive would have taken many gigabytes to store). With the Bay's continuing legal troubles, archived links could prove an invaluable asset to the torrent community should the site ever be taken down.