It’s another sad day for French P2P users. Popular private torrent site GuiKs has shut down operations of it’s BitTorrent tracker indefinitely. GuiKs was a popular site that tracked a lot of French content (along with some international releases) ranging from movies, TV shows to music. Exact reason for shut down is not clear – however it can be assumed that it had something to do with the tight anti p2p regulations in France. Visitors who open GuiKs homepage are now greeted with the following message (translated from French to English):
GuiKs ends today
This is the adventure finally ends. Thank you for spending some time with us and good luck for the future. If they want to stop P2P, they will cut off the Internet. But hey, that's another story. Try though you integrate your new communities need to shout that you always come here.A bit of propaganda
Remember that we have the right to vote for the most part, and some political parties are finally beginning to say what you think. I invite you to take a ride on the Pirate Party website, or even register to them. This 10 year € 1 € see if you're in deep shit. Otherwise, just go vote is a good thing and not vote = vote for the winner ...The result for us
We close the site for the moment the forum is expected to reopen later, but will most certainly a virgin: if we want to keep the current posts we must keep your user accounts, so your info, do not count. Everything will be deleted. It is therefore likely that GuiKs reopened for a purpose which is entirely legal right to allow you to have some contact with former members, and for us to disseminate what we've put a lot of time coding.For my part, I'll go back to my real work I've put some time aside to take care of GuiKs, so if you need someone to manage your servers, please.
At the time of it’s shut down, GuiKs was a widely accessed site which had an Alexa ranking of ~50000. Even if it re-opens as a legal service, GuiKs is unlikely to retain this popularity with the BitTorrent tracker being site’s main attraction.
Either way France is rapidly becoming a hell for BitTorrent trackers – it wasn’t long ago when popular French tracker SnowTigers was raided and shut down by the police. However all is not lost of torrenters in France. Several well known French trackers are still up and running and couple of new sites such as BlueTigers (ratio free – signups open) have recently been launched.
