Some of our readers may remember Wunza - a private tracker we featured on this blog about an year back. Wunza was one of the very first torrent sites to be based on Gazelle codebase and was off to a good start as a specialized movie tracker. However, things didn’t go so well and the site went offline about three months ago. This downtime seemed permanent but good news is that Wunza has returned from the grave. The site (which is run by a new owner) is now back online with open registrations. That’s not all – new ownership seems to be making much needed changes to the tracker including UI enhancements that look pretty cool.
While it’s good that Wunza returned after a prolonged downtime, their torrent and user databases seem to have got reset in the process – the site is basically starting over from scratch. As a result, at the time this post is being written Wunza doesn’t track that many torrents. Site statistics as of 27/12/2009 list around 60 torrent files and close to 400 registered members.
Even after the return, Wunza continues to be a specialized movie tracker. It indexes movies encoded in multiple formats including XViD, x264 as well as untouched DVDR and Blu-Ray. Both scene and p2p releases are indexed. Right now all the uploaded torrents are on free leech and we hear from staff that it may remain this way forever (if that happens, Wunza could almost become a ratio free tracker).
A notable change in the resurrected site is their new torrent browse page. It certainly looks beautiful but there’s also the risk of alienating users who are used to the traditional browse page (perhaps another theme that retains the classic layout may solve this issue).
Anyways looks alone wouldn’t make Wunza a successful BitTorrent site. There are already quite a few specialized movie trackers out there like PTP, Tehconnection, 700MBz, CN, etc which are doing quite well. The start has been promising but only time will tell if Wunza could survive in the long run amidst intense competition from larger sites.
In the meantime, signups for this tracker are currently open. You get 5 invites upon signup and if you use the invites to get other members into the tracker, you’ll get gigabytes of free upload credit.
Site Name: Wunza (http://wunza.ws)
Signup URL: http://wunza.ws/register.php
