AnimaTooniC and Comic-Releech – Shut Down

Well we usually bring good news when it comes to BitTorrent and private torrent trackers but today is an exception. Two specialized private trackers that were recently featured on this blog have been shut down. Comics/Cartoons/Anime tracker Animatoonic (ATC) and comedy tracker Comic-Releech (CoR) have closed down for good. If it makes you feel any better – there were no legal threats involved, there were no raids and nobody went to jail. ATC shut down due to tracker staff not having enough time to run the site while CoR closed its doors due to lack of torrent activity on site.

AnimaTooniC

It was really surprising to see ATC shut down as it really was a fast growing tracker (hell we even gave away invites for that). The decision obviously wasn’t an easy one for tracker staff. Quoted below is the last news item posted before the tracker shut down:

Animatoonic

We are closing

To our ATC Members,

It is with heavy hearts that we have to inform you that AnimaToonic will be closing as a site and tracker in a week from now (10th December 2009). The decision was hard to make and we tried to think of any possible way to keep the tracker opened, but was unable to find a pleasurable solution. When we first opened AnimaToonic we had big dreams of building a great tracker specified in animated media for our members. We knew that we would make friends through this tracker but we would never have guessed that we would find a family. We have gone through good times and bad times and in each occurrence it has just made us work together harder to solve any dilemmas that we might come across.

We were overjoyed when we saw how fast this tracker was growing. It motivated us to work even harder and to ensure that the tracker was sufficient for the growing demand. As many of you already know, the activity has dropped significantly and it takes a lot of time for our staff to keep this site going. In these hard times, our staff collaborated to find a way to bring our activity back up. We called upon our members to work together to solve the situation. But even with all of our dedication, our staff has found it too difficult to try and manage their everyday lives as well as trying to run the tracker.

Even though this was a very hard and sad decision, we have decided it is in the best interest of our staff to close down AnimaToonic. We are uncertain if the close will be permanent, which I am sure that most of you as well as we hope that it won't, because we all had a good time. So in the hopes that we one day in the future will re-open AnimaToonic, we would like to keep the database intact excluding the torrents and IP address logs. If you feel that your place is no longer with AnimaToonic, and you would like to delete your account from our database, Please PM BlueJay or E and we will be happy to fulfill that request for you.

We appreciate each and every one of our members for joining and contributing to our tracker, but most of all I want to thank you for being part of our project. You all are very special to us and we are lucky to have been able to meet you. I would also like to extend a very special thanks to our Staff Team for all of their hard work and dedication to this tracker. Without our staff we would have never been able to learn the true meaning of working together as a team. Once again thank you all.

Edit: Oh, I forgot - site is on Freeleech until closing date. Enjoy.

It is indeed very sad to see another specialized tracker fade into the night. If you want to know more information about ATC and see how it looked when it was online, refer to our recent review of the site.

Comic-Releech

Another Gazelle based tracker, Comic-Releech (CoR) too closed down for good this month. CoR’s final news post is quoted below:

Comic Releech

Hi everyone.

This will likely be the last news post that's made. CoR hasnt had as much activity as we would have hoped! So CoR is shutting down, permanently. It's been a nice year, for those of you who have stuck on from the beginning, and to those of you who just joined, it was nice having you. The site will go down in a few days, but the irc network will remain up. Laugh it up for the brothas' who couldn't join us today.

<3 The CoR Team

Sad part about this shut down is that there are currently no replacements to CoR – it was the only specialized comedy tracker in the BitTorrent community. If you want to see how CoR looked in the past and what sort of content it tracked, refer to our recent review of the site found here. R.I.P. CoR and thanks for the laughs!

While it’s indeed sad to see trackers go down, this has pretty much been nature of BitTorrent since the early 2000s. New communities are launched and sometimes even huge, well known trackers die – but BT as a whole moves on.