Banhammer has fallen on Romania, once again. Latest private tracker to issue a country ban on Romania is StoreThe.Net (STN). I wasn’t aware of this until we got some mails from several readers who got ‘country ban’ messages upon registration. Checked with the STN admin and apparently it’s true - .ro is banned. As usual the ban is imposed due to a large percentage of users from Romania cheating and scamming the tracker, violating its rules. First thing that came to my mind after hearing this was ‘Why would anyone cheat on a ratio free tracker’? Anyways currently the ban only applies to potential new registrations from Romania and known cheaters. Romanian users who already signed up and used the site legitimately need not worry.
Country bans are generally met with frowns and groans as a fair share of legitimate users also get affected (in a bad way) due to the actions of a few. In this case however, you really cannot blame the admin – from what we hear more than 50% of users ( 80 users out of ~150) who signed up from Romania were found to be cheating. Some were even found to be bridging STN’s private tracker to Romanian public trackers.
With SCC, ScT, GFT and now STN banning .ro IP ranges, Romanians are missing out on some of the best General/0Day torrent trackers in the BitTorrent community. However they do have a ton of private trackers hosted on their own country, including some pretty large ones such as TorrentBits, LastTorrents, SceneFZ, CZTEAM, iPlay and XtremeZone.
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