HDChina Open For Signup – Great HD Tracker

We’ve on numerous occasions discussed HD torrent trackers that have their roots in China. Out of all the Chinese trackers featured on this blog, HDChina is probably the largest both it terms of content as well as user base. It’s a specialized High Definition torrent site that tracks a lot of English movies and TV series. Releases indexed here being untouched Blu Ray or x264 encoded rips, video quality of torrents tracked by HDChina are usually very good. HD is a private community and is usually invite-only. However, it does occasionally open signups to the public and the good news is that one such open registrations session is currently ongoing. Their server seems to be getting hammered by a lot of new users trying to sign up all at once but if you keep trying, you will eventually be able to get in.

Although not very popular in the western world, HDChina is a huge private tracker and is one of the largest HD trackers ever. As of 28/10/2010 there are close to 25000 registered members on HDC and it has a huge torrent index consisting of 18000+ torrents. The reason for it’s relative lack of popularity in English speaking countries might be the whole ‘Chinese connection’. After having a glance at the signup page filled with Chinese characters, many people seem to turn away, assuming this to be a BitTorrent tracker with releases local to China. This however is far from the truth. Majority of the content on HDC are English with international releases such as Hollywood blockbusters being indexed. Even the site interface can easily be switched to English if required - Once logged in, just click on the English flag icon on the top left corner of the page to change the language. Also note that this site labels almost all torrents including English only releases using both Chinese and English wording. So just know that a torrent having a Chinese label doesn’t mean it’s a Chinese release.

As for the content, HDC is movie/TV tracker. A list of categories and video formats found on this tracker are summarized below:

• Movie: Blu-ray, 1080i, 1080p, 720p
• TV Episode: TV EP (CN/HK/TW), TV EP (JP/KR), TV EP (US/UK)
• TV PACK: TV Pack China (HK/TW), TV Pack JP/KR, TV Pack US/UK
• Others: Sports, Animation, Documentary, Music Video
• Audio: Lossless, Audio Track

Individual releases (which include 0day uploads) are accompanied by large torrent packs. These are pretty huge, with some packs exceeding 400GB in file size. A screenshot capturing part of the torrent index may be found below:

Torrents indexed on HDC have very good health thanks to the large seeder base. Some of the most popular torrents have over 500 seeds each and download speeds are generally very good. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the HDC’s web page navigation. Navigation becomes a pain in the ass when the server is busy (when there are a lot of people online, when there is an open signup ongoing, etc). When this happens, you need to hit refresh several times just to get to the torrent browse page from the HDC homepage (which is pretty annoying).

Overall this is a pretty decent HD tracker. For those who want to get in,HDC is currently having open signups as well as sitewide free leech. These won’t last last forever so get in while you can. Be warned that if your account has 0kb upload/download after 7 days since registration, it will automatically be deleted.

Site Name: HDChina (http://hdchina.org/login.php)

Signup URL: http://hdchina.org/signup.php

Note: If you encounter ‘page cannot be displayed’, ‘page currently not available’ errors or other similar error messages, keep trying. These are caused by server issues and not because the signups are closed. If you get any of the error messages after hitting signup, you’ll have to re-fill the signup form and resubmit. Refreshing the error message might not work and give you a ‘you did not agree to the rules’ error.

P.S. – You might have to use Google Translate or AIRTranslate Desktop App to decipher error messages in Chinese.

Other HD trackers based on China previously discussed on this blog:

• OurDiSC – Private Tracker For Full R1, R3 DVD And Blu-Ray Disks
• HDCity – Another HD BitTorrent Tracker From China
• HDStar – Decent HD & Blu-Ray Torrent Tracker
• CHDBits – High Definition Private Tracker
• CCFBits – Chinese HD torrent tracker with English releases
• HDRoad.ORG - Private HD Torrent Tracker

ShareBus – DDL Forum For AFR Rips Of New & Retro Movies (English + Foreign)

There are lots and lots of Direct Download Link (DLL) forums around but there aren’t many that index retro or classic movies. ShareBus is one of those rare sites that index both new movies as well as rare gems from a bygone era. It indexes a huge collection of both English and non English flicks ranging from the latest blockbuster hits in U.S to rarely heard of movies released in far eastern countries (in addition to movies, TV series are also available). Indexed movies come in a wide variety of video formats including XViD, Blu Ray, HDDVD and more. In addition, ShareBus is one of the best places on the net to find and download AFR releases (Advanced Filesize Regulation which focuses more on quality rather than file size – explained in detail later). ShareBus is a private community. However, becoming a member of this forum is pretty easy as it’s currently open for registrations.

Naturally, some of you may be hearing about this forum for the first time.  However, ShareBus is neither a new forum nor a small sized, lesser known site on the net. With over 100000 registered members it has a pretty large following. More importantly, the community here is buzzing with activity – many new uploads are posted daily and hundreds of thread updated.

As the title of this article states, ShareBus is an excellent place to get your hands on AFR rips. If you are wondering what AFR rips are, the following explanation should put you in the clear:

In short, AFR releases do not follow the scene rules. Scene groups (e.g. DiAMOND,NeDivX) split their movies up into one or two CD's, 700MB avi files (the size of a CD-R).

AFR releases aim for quality: the files are bigger and there's no split. The old concept of a 1xCD rip has been replaced by a single ~0744 MB file which is 1/6 DVD-R sized. A single ~1490 MB file (1/3 DVD-R) replaces the traditional 2xCD rip, and finally there are ~2236 MB files (1/2 DVD-R) instead of 3xCD rips. We call this the Advanced Filesize Regulation (AFR).

The above was quoted from a forum thread on Nattawat. For the original source as well as a list of P2P groups that release AFR rips, read the thread here.

Coming back to ShareBus, it’s a forum of Turkish origin. Some of the messages and forum content is Turkish but download sections are clearly marked with English labels (in brackets) so international users should have no problems finding their way around the site.

 

The screenshot above shows some of the download categories (only a few of the many that are available) on ShareBus. Each of these sections have hundreds of subpages each full of threads which contain direct download links to movies. By Movies we mean all sorts of them – ShareBus indexes a lot of retro/classic movies as well as foreign flicks, at the same time indexing latest hits from Hollywood as well. Individual releases are occasionally accompanied by  movie packs - for example, check the ‘Collection Movies’ category in Movies section. There are TV series (mostly full season packs) available as well. It might take a while to get used to the site interface and browse the sheer number of threads here – but once you get used to it, you’ll realize that this is a great place to be, especially if you are a movie buff.

Downloads are hosted on one click hosting services such as RapidShare, Hotfile, Sharebase, Storage.to, etc. A single movie usually has more than one set of download links ensuring better availability. Of course, there is no need to fear of fakes as most of the indexed links on ShareBus are verified and tested. Movie posts are usually accompanied by screen captures of the release making it easy for members to find and download movies with desired video quality.

As we mentioned at the start of this article, ShareBus is currently open for registration. Registration is important since you need to be logged into the site in order to browse internal pages. If you are looking to download movies (let it be old or new) off one click hoster sites, check ShareBus out – it’s an active forum with tons of content.

Site Name: ShareBus (http://sharebus.com)

Signup URL: http://sharebus.com/index.php?act=Reg&CODE=00

Battlefield Bad Company 2 Mouse and Keyboard Control Issues Only For Pirates?

There’s no need to reiterate the fact that Battlefield : Bad Company 2 is one of the most anticipated games of the year. Thanks to the success of previous installments, the series now seem to have millions of fans across the globe. BF : Bad Company 2 is scheduled to be released on the 2nd of March in North America, 3rd March in Russia and 5th March in Europe. However, like all PC and console games these days, the title has leaked online several days beforehand. RELOADED, a veteran group from the warez scene pre’d a full DVD ISO of the game along with a modified executable that circumvent’s the game’s DRM, earlier today. However, quite a few pirates who downloaded this release seem to be having issues with the game – some even making the game unplayable.

According to comments on several file sharing websites, most BF : BC2 players seem to be having problems with mouse movements in game. Some players seem to be having inverted mouse movement (when you look left the in-game character looks right) while others can look at the sky or air (see YouTube video here). Some have reported odd behavior with keyboard controls as well as CTD or random crashes as well. Needless to say these annoyances make the the game almost unplayable.

There could be several explanations as to why this is happening. It could be a bug with the actual game or it could also be a compatibility issue with any of the controllers you have connected to your PC. If this is really the case, unplugging the controllers, restarting the PC and launching the game with Mouse + Keyboard setup should fix it. However if it’s a bug with the game you’ll have to wait for a patch from the developers.

Another more plausible reason is that these problems are caused by DRM triggers. BF : BC 2 is protected by SecuROM which can ‘break’ certain parts of the game if it detects someone has tampered with the protection. If the release group (RELOADED in this case) removed the DRM from exe without removing all triggers, it would cause showstopper bugs appear at various points of the game, making the gameplay a nightmare for pirates. Perhaps the problematic mouse movement is one such trigger. In this case pirates can only wait for a PROPER release – or they can just buy the game when it’s released in a couple of days :p
EDIT: See comment 1 for a possible fix.

Note: Do not request or post links to cracks or torrents here. This post is for informational purposes only.

SyncTheBits (StB) – Mobile BitTorrent Tracker Open Again

If you are on the lookout for private torrent trackers with content for mobile devices, one of the best sites catering this niche just opened signups. SyncTheBits’s (aka StB), latest open registration period comes almost 10 months since the last. StB tracks applications, games, themes, mobile optimized movies, ebooks, etc for a number of mobile platforms including iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, PSP, Java, BlackBerry and more. It is one of the first specialized mobile trackers to hit the BitTorrent scene and has been live since 2008. After being online for several years, it looks like StB has a lot in store for the future, including a planned move to the famed Gazelle codebase.

A brief notice is posted on site homepage which covers details about the current open signup, Gazelle movie, etc

Feb-24-10 - Open Doors?

It has been a while since we have opened the doors and I had planned not to open the doors until we made the move over to gazelle but we have decided to open the doors for a short period of time.
If you are a new member to the site please check out our IRC and FORUMS and make sure you understand our rules.  If you have any questions feel free to ask.
We are still looking to add a coder to our dev team so if you have any experience with php/mysql and looking for Tracker to call home please let us know.  We are still trying to get our gazelle source reworked to handle our type of torrents and categories.
Enjoy the Site
//Reese

As mentioned earlier, StB tracks everything mobile related from games to specially encoded movies and TV shows. The screenshot below shows some of the torrent categories found on this tracker:

Best thing about this tracker is that it has been keeping up to date with the technology. For example back when StB launched, there was no Android and iPhone was not as popular. But by now StB has added new categories, new torrents and new media for these platforms and is one of the very few torrent trackers that index such content. It has also helped debunk the myth ‘mobile trackers can’t be successful - they can’t compete with DDL forums out there’

As of now there are 3400+ registered users on StB and it indexes over 3200 torrents. However, there are some torrents without seeds and the site definitely needs more leechers. Hopefully the current open signup will attract new blood and boost the activity of this great tracker.

Site Name: SyncTheBits (http://www.syncthebits.com)

Signup URL: http://www.syncthebits.com/signup.php

How to fix steam_api.dll file missing error, crash in Napoleon : Total War

Well what do you know? Another Total War game has hit the gaming scene. Those of you who played Empire : Total War, must be eyeing this game with a little skepticism. Although it became a hit, ETW by no means was a perfect game. It felt a little unpolished and there were plenty of bugs present during the game’s initial release - some of those remain unresolved to date, even after 9 update patches. However, the story with Napoleon Total War is different – the game is seemingly free of showstopper bugs, has improved AI and is better than ETW in most technical aspects. So far, we didn’t get a lot of queries from our readers to post a dedicated troubleshooting article but here are some possible fixes for a common problem some of you seem to be having with the game.

Napoleon Total War is distributed via Valve’s Steam content distribution platform. Sometimes you may encounter a steam_api.dll not found error and game will crash upon launch. There are three possible workarounds that may alleviate this problem:

1. If you are launching the game from a desktop or quick launch shortcut, try running the game directly. Browse to the game’s installation folder and double click on the game executable.
2. Reinstall – reinstalling both the game and the Stream client may fix this problem. It’s a possibility that the initial installation somehow got messed up without all required dll files being copied to your hard drive.
3. Copy the missing dll files from a full installation of Empire – Total War. If you are a TW fan chances are high that you already have ETW installed. Browse to the game installation dir, search for the missing dll, when found make a copy of the dll file and copy it to appropriate folder in NTW.'

I will add more fixes/post a separate article if any more issues are reported. Feel free to post the problems you are facing as comments.

TRAC3.ME – Public PreDB, Scene Release Index and Torrent Tracer

It was after seeing the feedback we received for the previous post that I decided to write this article. Apparently, a lot more people (than we initially thought) do care about pre times and torrent races. If you are interested in a multi role site that acts as scene releases index, a pre database as well as a web based torrent pre times tracker (aka a tracer) you might want to check out TRAC3.ME. Trace.M3 maintains a pre database that indexes hundreds of scene and p2p releases daily. However, T.ME’s PreDB differs from those run by pure sceners  – first of all it’s publicly accessibly by anyone. Second, all releases indexed on Trac3.Me contain torrent racing information (which tracker indexed the release first) along with nuke information, file count and more.

Although not very popular (Alexa rank above 500000), Trac3.me is not a young site. It’s a joint project APNet and ScnSrc that went public last October. During this time. the site has indexed 125621 scene releases which is not a bad feat at all. At the same time, it pulls torrent racing information from 60+ different private and semi private BitTorrent trackers.

Although we’ve been talking about it a lot, some of you might be unfamiliar with the term ‘torrent racing’. In the world of BitTorrent, the value of a site goes a lot higher if they are able to index a release within seconds after it’s leaked by a warez group in the scene (aka pre’d). Pre time on torrent trackers is usually the difference between time of original scene release and the time it was uploaded to the tracker. What Trac3.me does is that it ranks torrent sites by the best pre times.

Those little icons you see below a release name all represent a torrent site. If you hover the mouse cursor over them, you’ll see the time each tracker took to upload the release. The first tracker to upload a release wins that particular race. Following trackers have registered the most number of race wins on Trac3.me, so far:

• SCC – 16673
• PTM – 9424
• DDT – 8323
• DH – 6662
• TB – 6434

As mentioned above Trac3.me is public. Registration is not required and anyone free to access the site and use all of its features including search.

[Click Here] to visit Trace.M3 homepage.

SweNews – A Web Based Tracer For Swedish Torrent Trackers

During the past few days we’ve continuously been posting about new private torrent trackers. Well here’s something different – SweNews is related to private trackers but is not a private tracker. It’s a web based service that traces torrents from 8 leading Swedish private torrent sites. It’s somewhat of a cross between reduced functionality version of Tottler and a pre database. The homepage of SweNews indexes a list of HDTV releases, DVDR releases and HD movie releases. Clicking on a release name takes you to a separate page which includes not only an NFO but also torrent racing information such as which tracker was the first to index that particular release.

SweNews is a pretty new service which is still in its early days. It currently extracts release and tracer information 8 leading Swedish private trackers including XNT, SparVar, TTi, SweTV, SweBits and SceneHD. Releases that fall under the following categories are indexed - DVDR PAL, HD 720p, TV SWE, DVDR CUSTOM, HD 1080p, TV-SWE 720p, DVDR TV, HD-TV 720p, HD-TV 1080p. It’s interesting to note that no XViD releases are not indexed at all.

As mentioned earlier, clicking on a release name takes you to a detailed description page which looks something like the screenshot below:

If you are interested in ‘torrent racing’ this site might be helpful. It does not require you to connect to an IRC channel, offers an easy to use search feature as well as category based sorting. However the limited number of trackers it features as well as the limited number of release categories used for indexing might be turn offs for some readers. Anyways the service is free and requires no registration – check it out.

[Click Here] to visit SweNews homepage

Related Articles

• Tottler – Private tracker search and web based torrent tracer service

BTN Invite Applications Now Online – Ratio Free TV Tracker

For several years, the private TV Torrent tracker scene has been dominated by three major players – BitMeTV, TVTorrents.Com and Tv.Torrents.Ro. Although there have been many smaller sites popping up on a regular basis, no one has really been able to pose a challenge for these three tracker so far. This however might soon change. Several promising new TV trackers have launched in the last couple of months that seem to have the potential to be the next BMTV (or even more). One of them is STR (ShareTheRemote) which we covered earlier. This post features BTN, another feature rich TV tracker that aims to revolutionize this niche.  Launched to the public last January, BTN is already making waves in the BitTorrent scene – it packed with tons of unique features, has great pre times and is ratio free.

Although BTN has been online since 2009, it wasn’t well known until January/February 2010. Even today, the site is one of those discrete trackers which doesn’t allow posting of URL or full name in public. However, that hasn’t stopped avid torrenters from getting into the tracker. Despite being invite only since launch BTN has already attracted close to 3000 active members which is quite impressive. This may have been because there was a lot of hype about BTN during the first few days since their public launch. What’s important is that the tracker has managed to actually live up to that hype.

As we mentioned in the first paragraph, BTN is a feature rich site. It’s based on Gazelle codebase and is a prime example of how customizable & flexible this tracker script by What.CD’s coders actually is. One of the most noticeable innovations on this site is the series pages. At BTN, each TV series has it’s own page. In this page, all torrents related to a specific series are indexed. Individual episodes are separated from full season packs and this makes it a lot easier to find the torrents you need. That’s not all – series pages also hold a lot of additional information about the actual TV show. This includes series info, latest episode details, next episode details. series discussions, fan art, posters, YouTube links, statistics, actor information (upcoming feature) and it even integrates any pending/fulfilled torrent requests related to the show. Getting to a series page is easy – just click on a show name or a banner on main torrent index.

Additionally, you may notice that some of the torrents are marked with a special symbol on the main index. The ones with green background and numbers stand for upload multipliers. The yellow lighting symbol indicates that it’s a FastTorrent. FastTorrents are torrents served on high speed (24mbit or more) lines - usually seedbox hosted uploads.

But that’s not all, there are tons of other features hidden on this gem of a tracker. Following is a summary of some noticeable value added features you can find on BTN:

• TV Schedule – A daily updated broadcast schedule for major TV shows aired on US networks
• TV Favorites – A user customizable page where you can add and monitor your favorite TV shows
• Shows List – A full list of shows indexed on BTN
• Series List - A full index of series page for all shows tracked on BTN, which can be filtered by network, first letter, status or night
• PreDB – BTN pre database
• Knowledge Base – Site help, getting started manual, tutorials and more

All of the above can easily be accessed from the ‘Links’ section on site homepage.

Another highlight of this tracker are the blazing fast torrent indexing speeds. Although TV trackers don’t usually care a lot about pre times, BTN seems to take them seriously. According to all time site statistics on irc://irc.p2p-net.eu/tr.chat, BTN is among the top 10 fastest trackers based on the number of overall race wins:

And before we forget, BTN is a ratio free tracker. You do not need to maintain a global upload : download ratio as on most other private trackers. However there are some other rules all members must adhere to:

• There is NO RATIO.
• Seed all individual TV eps 1:1 or 24 hours.
• Seed all Season packs 1:1 or 120 hours.
• Torrents will not be considered a HnR if you download less than 10%, dont abuse this.
• If you pause a torrent, you have 12 hours to restart it or it will become a HnR.
• Seeding torrents will not show as a HnR.
• You MUST seed the torrent to the required amounts within 2 weeks or you will receive a warning or even a ban.

-Quoted from BTN rules page

To make life easier for it’s members, BTN also maintains a bonus system. Bonus points are awarded for seeding completed torrents. Every 15 minutes you are awarded 0.25 points for each completed torrent you're seeding. You can spend bonus points at the BP Store. The store allows you to exchange upload credit/points, gift credits to others and even purchase site invites.

How to get into BTN

No matter how good a tracker is, it would be of little use to our readers if there was no way to get in. Thankfully, BTN is not an uber l33t elite tracker beyond reach of everyone. Although it’s not open for signup, there are ways interested members can join for free. Earlier on, BTN used to recruit members through IRC. They have now made things easier for applicants (and for those who don’t like IRC) and have made available a web based invite application. There are 11 questions you need to answer and if your application is accepted by staff, you will receive a BTN invite.

Site Name: BTN

Invite Applications URL: http://passmetheremote.org/

Related Articles

• ShareTheRemote TV Tracker Open Again – Now With More Torrents And New Features
• BzEe.TV – A New Ratio Free TV Tracker
• Best BitTorrent Trackers To Download British (UK) TV Shows

ScenePalace – Scene Torrent Tracker Open For Signup Once Again

Out of the many new General/0Day trackers that pop up every day, only a few sites manage to make a lasting impression. ScP is one of those few general trackers that has shown a good potential for future growth – within just two and a half months since launch, the site has attracted a significant user base, added many torrents and maintained the very fast pre times that made the site popular during it’s first few days of being online. ScenePalace is a scene only torrent tracker that indexes releases from the warez scene, including movies, games, music, TV shows and content related to many other categories. After being invite only since last January, ScP has once again opened registrations in an attempt to bring in some new blood into the tracker.

Although publicly launched back in January 2010, ScP technically is still in beta. Site is currently at v1.2 with plans to launch V2.0 probably in March. Site administration has been very secretive so far about upcoming new features in V2 – however we’ve been told that a brand new design in on the pipeline, along with many other enhancements. Anyways ScP’s progress so far has been impressive – they have recruited close to 5000 members and have indexed around 6000 torrents in just over two months time.

When ScP first came onto the scene, there was much talk about it’s pre times. Thankfully, the tracker has lived up to the hype and still  indexes torrents at blazing speeds (although there have been instances where larger torrents such as games having slightly worse pre times). According all time site statistics on Tracers channel on P2P-NET (irc://irc.p2p-net.eu/tr.chat), ScP has so far registered 525+ wins and is among the top 10 fastest trackers monitored by the channel.

Like most scene only trackers, ScP organizes its torrent index using multiple browse pages. There are three separate pages for general releases, MP3/0Day releases and even an archive page that lists older torrents. The interface does not have many bells and whistles but it’s clean, uncluttered and easily navigable.

And as the title of this post says, ScP has once again opened registrations to the public. A post on the homepage reads:

2010-02-20 - March Madness!

As you can see the site has been heavily modified since we launched it the 1/1-10 - We still have a long way to go and currently we're in version 1.2 beta and soon we will go out of beta and into an official 2.0 version. March month will be a crazy month with a lot of changes so prepare yourselves!
A lot of users have expressed a wish to invite friends and saying we were a bit too fast to lock down the site and go "invite only"  therefor together with the celebration of the implementation of our new scripts and your wishes we have decided to open up signups for new members.
However this has a limited time window so if you have a friend you'd like to be on ScP it's better to get him here this week rather than the next week - We have also enabled a more aggressive hit'n'run policy to ensure we won't open the flood gates for leechers and bad users.

We have been told by ScenePalace administration that they will be closing signups once the user limit of 7500 is reached. This leaves around 3000 more free slots so if you are interested in becoming a member of a new scene tracker, check ScP out.

Site Name: ScenePalace (http://www.scenepalace.org)

Signup URL:  http://www.scenepalace.org/signup.php

Special thanks to ScenePalace owners for the information provided.

SceneTorrents.Biz Is Not ScT Reborn

If you’ve been watching open signup threads on various BitTorrent forums, you may have stumbled across a new site, www.scenetorrents.biz. Not only does this tracker have the same name, favicon, logo, category icons as the legendary ScT (now defunct) but its staff even claims it to be a resurrection of SceneTorrents known as ScT v2.0. As much as old ScT members would like to hail the return of their beloved torrent site, these claims simply aren't true. SceneTorrents.biz is not ScT reborn – it’s just another General/0Day torrent tracker that tries to ride the popularity of a BitTorrent legend. Not only has the impostor site been shot down on ScT IRC channel but SCC, another respected scene tracker, has issued a warning about ScT.biz administrators having ‘malicious intentions’.

When SceneTorrents.biz opened up a couple of days before, there was an interesting message on the homepage (quoted below). As you can see, site admin claims they have brought ScT back from the dead (although not in very good English):

Hello Friends ... After R.I.P. Old Stuff Decides Bring SCT Back to Alive Again!!

Us Will Take Some Time to Config Old Dump Again (1,2 Months), Us Need Uploaders If You Have Server With +100Mbit and Scene Acess Contact Staff on Menu INFO and SUPPORT
Us NEED DONATIONS, to KEEP us ALIVE, Dont Let SCT Dies Again.
Old Users if can PROOF old stats, Send Jpeg Link For Us With Your Old Stats on Menu INFO on SUPPORT, and Soon Your Old Status Will Be Recovered.
About IRCD. Nomore ANNOUNCE on IRC will be used. Security Reasons!

Kind Regards,
The SCT Staff Leader.

However, the trusted IRC channel of SceneTorrents (called ex-user hangout channel after the shutdown) refuses this claim. Quoted below is the channel topic from a few days before:

* Now talking in #SceneTorrents
* Topic is '[scenetorrents ex-user hangout chan] :: no invite asking / trading / offering :: ScTBDev - Out Soon :: SCT-SCC Theme - 0.9 :: - ENGLISH ONLY - scenetorrents.biz is a fake scam site.'
* Set by feeling on Wed Feb 17 02:51:30

If the above was not enough proof for skeptics, another warning came from SCC, a well respected private tracker in the BT scene. SCC issued the following security reminder to all its members through their homepage. Pay attention to the text in bold:

Security Reminder

We would like to remind you that you should NOT use the same password on SCC as you do on other sites. Additionally, it is important to use a complex password, with at least 8 characters (and not easily guessable, but easy for you to remember). Not all websites encrypt the user passwords, meaning they will be able to see them in clear text. We thought it would be a good idea to remind everyone of this as there has been a ScT "Scam" site popping up under a .biz domain, we have reasons to believe they have malicious intentions with the site.

We’re not quite sure what these malicious intentions are but user account theft would be a fine guess. We have so far not heard from anyone who signed up with ScT.biz that their accounts got stolen but it’s always good to heed the warnings and change your passwords ASAP if you did register there.

If you’ve been reading us for long, you’d have noticed that we rarely flame BitTorrent trackers. However, there’s been some cases where sites we thought to be trustworthy turning out to be rogue trackers. For example, we received so many complaints from our readers regarding password theft by a MusicThe.Net , a tracker we reviewed couple of weeks ago [Read the comments here].The morale here is you can’t trust anyone these days. As we have highlighted many times before, using different login details for different trackers can go a long way in protecting your tracker accounts. If you can’t remember them, save the login information in your browser. It’s best to back up the saved credentials with a tool such as XMarks so you’d never lose them even if your PC fails.

Related Articles

• SCC to SceneTorrents Conversion Script Beta
• SceneTorrents.The.Final.Notice-ScT
• ScT Tracker (SceneTorrents) To Shut Down, Rumors Galore, Alternatives

ShadyURL – The Opposite Of URL Shorteners

A couple of years back, there weren’t too many URL shorteners around. There was tinyURL and a few others. Situation today is different – there are hundreds of these services around, all focused on making long URLs shorter and easily readable. But have you heard about a URL ‘lengthener’? ShadyURL is one such service that does it. ShadyURL sure as hell wouldn’t shorten your URL. Instead, it’ll disguise your link as something malicious no one in their right mind would click. You heard correct, their tagline is “Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening”. If you need to see what generated URLs look like, few links we created are posted below:

Original Link: http://www.filenetworks.net
ShadyURL: http://5z8.info/this_persons_account_has_been_hacked_t4x3l_taliban-meetup

Original Link: http://filenetworks.blogspot.com
ShadyURL: http://5z8.info/top-ten-vietnam-massacres_w3o3x_38--start.spamBot--this-ip--

Original Link: http://www.google.lk/
ShadyURL: http://5z8.info/ip-stealer_n6v1l_cockfights

Original Link: http://www.torrentleech.org/
ShadyURL: http://5z8.info/pirate-anything_e9m8q_getPersonalData-start

Original Link: http://thepiratebay.org/
ShadyURL : http://5z8.info/girlsgonewildpart1.wmv_s7x1x_titstitstitstits

FYI none of the above links contain any malware or some other crap. All ShadyURLs will redirect to the stated original site :p. If you want to actually make your URLs relatively shorter and look a little less menacing, ShadyURL has an option for that too. Just tick the ‘Shorten’ checkbox before generating the link.

[Click Here] to visit ShadyURL homepage.

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• Find And Preview Actual URL In Shortened Links – ExpandMyURL
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Vuze and Deluge To Be Banned on What.cd And Waffles.fm

UPDATE: Article update with BitMeTV response. See end of post.
If you’re familiar with private torrent trackers, chances are high that you’ve heard about ‘allowed client lists’. On most private trackers, you can’t just use any BitTorrent client to download torrents – the program you use must be a version that’s allowed by tracker staff. If they feel that a particular client/version is harming the overall health of torrent swarm, they usually don’t think twice about naming it a banned client. However, while it’s normal for lesser known and alpha/beta versions of clients to get banned on private torrent sites, popular clients such as Vuze and uTorrent are allowed on almost every torrent site. However this is soon going to change. What.CD and Waffles.Fm, arguable the two most popular and largest music trackers out there, have just announced that they are planning to ban all versions of Vuze and Deluge from their client whitelists pretty soon.

Following announcement which explains the motives behind this sudden decision is quoted from What.Cd

As staff on this tracker, one of our responsibilities is policing the swarms and making sure that everyone plays fair. Another related responsibility is the management of the client whitelist, to ensure that new clients are added as they're deemed safe, and old clients are removed as they're deemed irrelevant/problematic. On Monday the 22nd, we will be performing a significant set of changes to the client whitelist.
Deluge will be removed from the whitelist. After performing an analysis on our swarms, we found that over 4088 downloads, deluge downloaded, on average, 15.4% more data than the size of the torrent. As it is hard enough for users to maintain ratios already, we feel that it is a bad idea to allow deluge to make this situation worse. This change affects 1.3% of our userbase.
More importantly, all versions of azureus/vuze will be removed from the whitelist. This move is being made in conjunction with our friends over at waffles.fm.
Vuze's twilight hour started approaching when they changed their name from Azureus and began to commercialize their already bloated client. Over the years, this caused its market share to shrink considerably in favour of uTorrent, rtorrent, and transmission. Its ease of modification by cheat client developers and habit of constantly reporting very low upload speeds when no one is downloading anything cause unnecessary headaches for the staff. Additionally, the notoriety of the vuze developers for disliking and refusing to cooperate with private tracker staff has only served to worsen the situation. Vuze's market share has shrunken to 7.1% of our userbase. We are well aware that you 7.1% are still a lot of people - however, we feel that in the long run, you and the rest of the userbase will benefit if you change to a better client.

Our client recommendations are as follows:

Windows: uTorrent 2.x and uTorrent 1.8.x. There is a certain level of controversy surrounding the 'unfairness' of uTorrent 2.0's new protocol (uTP) in the private tracker community. Failing to find evidence of this unfairness ourselves, and seeing significant benefits to the adoption of uTP, we have decided to make uTorrent 2.0 our #1 recommended client - however, be aware that you may not be able to use this client on other trackers.
Mac: uTorrent Mac 0.9.x and Transmission 1.8.x. Both clients are excellent, and transmission has a very friendly and cooperative dev team. To create torrents, you can use the CreateTorrent dashboard widget or the mktorrent command line utility.
Linux: rtorrent 0.8.x, Transmission 1.8.x, KTorrent 3.x, and uTorrent in WINE. rtorrent is WhatMan's very fast personal favourite, and all hardcore linux users should be using it. There also exist numerous frontends for it, such as ntorrent, rutorrent and wTorrent, in case you aren't up to using the console like a man.

If you use deluge or vuze, we understand that this change may be inconvenient for you. We also understand that you may feel a great deal of rage right now, due to the loss of your traditional client which has no doubt treated you with loyalty for many years. However, we implore you to think of the long term benefits for the site and staff, and yourselves - you'll be surprised at what your system can do with the RAM that vuze isn't hogging anymore.
In order to make the transition easier, we have given all users the ability to download a zip file with all of their snatches - click [download] next to the 'Snatched' stat on your profile. This also means that all users now have access to the collector - a feature to download all torrents by an artist, in a collage, or in your bookmarks.

We apologize for the short term inconvenience this will cause, and thank you for your cooperation.
--The What.CD and waffles.fm staff

Waffles.fm staff have expressed their views in a similar statement which is quoted below:

Waffles, working together with What.cd, has concluded over the course of several months, that Vuze and Deluge are problematic to the overall health of torrent swarms.
Deluge, through careful testing, has been discovered to download a significantly higher amount of data per torrent than comparable clients.
Vuze, on the other hand, has been increasingly used by ratio cheaters through various modifications to the program. We are aware there's a handful of legitimate users, though, thus we are making this announcement. Effective Monday February 22, both clients will be banned from both sites. If you continue to use either program past this date, you will not be banned from Waffles, but your ability to seed and leech will cease (and you will only get a message to switch clients from the tracker) until you choose new torrent software.

For Windows, if you don't want to use µTorrent for some reason (though we highly recommend it!), we do allow the official BitTorrent client, along with the latest versions of BitComet and BitTornado. If you do choose µTorrent, we highly suggest using version 2.0 or later. Using 2.0 will allow you to take advantage of the new uTP technology, which connects to peers faster, is home router friendly, and doesn't overload your system connections like other torrent clients. The downside to uTP is that outdated clients that don't support it will get lower priority when connections are made. If you use one of these older clients, we recommend that request the authors of those clients add uTP support.
On the Mac, we suggest Transmission or µTorrent Mac. Currently on Waffles, the 1.8.x branch of Transmission is banned, as we've discovered some instances where it may misrepresent transfer stats, but we are working diligently with the Transmission developers to correct this problem.
Finally, for Linux, we suggest Transmission, rtorrent, or ktorrent.

We know that this will upset a few of you, but we believe that we must do this for the betterment of the community as a whole.

I’m not sure about Deluge but the decision to ban Vuze wouldn’t be too popular. The new interface of Vuze is bloated as hell but there are many people who run the client using classic UI which resembles Azureuz 2.X and 3.X look and feel. However, what tracker staff say about cheat mods is true – Vuze is one of the most common clients exploited by cheat mod developers and there are several versions of hacked Vuze clients available, most of them capable of polluting the swarm with fake data.

All in all it’s an interesting decision by What and Waffles and definitely a bold move. It remains to be seen if other major trackers will follow suit and ban these clients into oblivion.

EDIT: BitMeTV, a leading TV torrent tracker, has responded that they will not be banning Azureuz/Vuze anytime soon. Quoted from homepage:

UPDATE
On another relevant note: We will NOT be banning Azureus/Vuze as some other sites have just done. :)

Torrents.Ru Is Down – Site Moved to RuTracker.Org

Users of private torrent tracker Torrents.Ru were in for a surprise today. When they tried to access the site using its regular URL www.torrents.ru, they got redirected to a different domain. This was not a simple mistake or a prank played by Torrents.Ru’s admins – the Russian based tracker is apparently having a dispute with authorities about it’s old domain name. It appears that the domain torrents.ru has temporarily been suspended until the matter is resolved. However, the site’s members need not worry – Torrents.Ru is up and running on an alternative location http://rutracker.org. Earlier, TRU’s old URL used to automatically redirect users to the new location. However, this seems to have stopped now, causing panic among quite a few user’s who are unaware of the new domain.

As we once discussed on this blog, Torrents.Ru is probably the world's largest private BitTorrent tracker. It has more than two million registered users and when the site goes down, some of these users begin to worry :p Thankfully, TRU administrators have been kind enough to post an update on the current situation on site’s new homepage. A translated version of the announcement (which was originally in Russian) is given below:

Dear users!
Today (February 18, 2010) by "Ru-Center" (Moscow, Leningrad Prospect, д.74, korp.4 Tel 7 (495) 994-46-01 7 (495) 737-06-01, www.nic . ru) without warning, and any notice has been suspended domain delegation TORRENTS.RU. According to information from the "Ru-Center" Delegating domain TORRENTS.RU suspended by order of the Investigative Division of Chertanovskaya Moscow regional prosecutor's office from 16.02.2010g "
In "En-Center sent the corresponding request, however, it is likely that the clarification would take some time, during which torrents.ru address will not be available.

In this regard, we had to urgently change the domain name to rutracker.org. Technically, this means that in order to continue the exchange of information you need to change the address in the tracker have downloaded a torrent file with bt.torrents.ru on bt.rutracker.org, (instead of bt can be bt2, bt3 and bt4) or download the torrent files again (they already have a new address tracker). All the other links on the forum will be changed automatically, but you may need to re-enter login and password when you log on the forum to the browser to remember the new address.

Good news about the move is that there hasn't been any data loss apart from the domain change - all user accounts, torrents, stats, forums posts, etc are in tact. The site is now up and running on RuTracker.org and guess what, even registrations are open.

Site URL: Torrents.Ru (http://rutracker.org/forum/index.php)

Signup URL: http://rutracker.org/forum/profile.php?mode=register

IRC Channel: irc.p2p-network.net/torrents.ru

Related Articles

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• Torrents.Ru - Russian private torrent tracker registrations open

MultReactor – Russian Tracker With English Kids TV Shows and Cartoon Packs

It’s been a while a kids tracker was featured on this blog. Last one we covered was NepToons, a torrent site that specialized in full season packs of retro cartoons. MultReactor (MR) is a similar tracker – it tracks a lot of kids cartoons, movies and live action drama including plenty of full season packs and complete series packs both old and new. With it’s roots in Russia, MultReactor is part of the DisneyJazz network (await separate article on DJ). Even though a site of Russian origin, good news for English speaking users is that MR indexes a lot of cartoons with English audio. This private tracker is currently open for signup and if you are looking for a new torrent site with lots of cartoon, give this one a go.

Although it’s not a much hyped tracker in the BitTorrent community, MR is not exactly a new site. It has been online since early 2008 and is almost three years old. As of 18/2/2010 MR tracks close to 1500 torrents with an active registered user base of 10500+ members. Considering the fact that this is a niche tracker, most would agree with us when we say that this is a successful tracker that hasn’t failed.

Majority of the content here are p2p uploads. MR has its own internal encoder group who are responsible for some of the high quality season packs of popular cartoons found on the tracker. Although majority of the releases have English audio, be warned that some are dubbed in Russian. You can spot these torrents as they usually carry the ‘RUS’ tag on title. Speaking of titles, every torrent name is spelled both in English and Russian in the main index. However, having its name spelt in Russian doesn’t mean the release is intended only for Russian audiences – as said above most cartoons indexed on MR have English audio.

MultReactor is based on the TB Dev SZ Edition tracker script and has a decent UI. It’s nothing mind blowing but the site is very navigable and easy to use. Interface language can be switched to English and once done so, all major site functions will get English labels (language in forum posts, messages, etc will not change and they will remain to be in original language which is Russian in most cases).

Anyways if you are looking for a BitTorrent tracker that has a lot of cartoons, MultReactor is a worthy site to have. Registrations are currently open so feel free to check it out.

Site Name: MultReactor (http://www.multreactor.ru)

Signup URL: http://www.multreactor.ru/signup.php

Related Articles:

• NepToonS Tracker – Cartoon Torrents, Old Toons, Season Packs & More

Fix Aliens Vs Predator 3 (AVP 3 - 2010) Crash, Audio Issues And More

They just keep coming don’t they? Another highly anticipated PC title Aliens vs Predator (commonly known as AVP 3 or AVP 2010) was released to the public  yesterday. AVP 2010 is the third game in the series which kicked off back in 1999. While the game is mainly bug free, some people seem to be having intermittent crashes to desktop (CTD), black screens, stuttering, distorted, delayed or lagging audio both in game + in cutscenes and various other problems. Most of the crashes and other issues seem to be related to DirectX 11 mode and system audio sampling rate. Thankfully, it’s not hard to bypass these annoyances. In this article we list some fixes that will hopefully solve your problems for good and let you enjoy the game without bugs and glitches.

Change the audio sampling rate

If your system’s audio sampling rate is set to anything above 48hz, it’ll likely cause AVP 3 to go haywire. Most users who experienced crashing, black screens at launch, audio problems and other issues seem to have solved them by reducing the audio sampling rate to a lower value – one that the game can handle. Follow the steps below to change the audio sampling rate.

For Windows 7 / Windows Vista

1. Go to your sound card’s control panel.
2. Locate the option that allows you change the default audio format for the card.
3. Set the default format to 24-bits, 48000Hz or less (if it doesn't work with 48000Hz, try 24 bits, 44100Hz)

Image: How the default format selection looks in RealTek HD Audio manager (select your playback device in  Audio Manager and select the ‘default format’ tab)

If you set your sound card’s audio format to anything higher than 24 Bits, 48000 Hz, you may experience audio issues or crashes with Aliens vs predator 3. Note that this is not an in-game setting. This setting should be changed from your audio card’s control panel (Realtek HD Audio Manager, etc). If you cannot find the option in your sound card software you can try the generic fix below:

1. Right click volume control on system tray and choose Playback devices.
2. Choose the your default playback device (usually Speakers) and click properties.
3. Go to the advanced tab. The default audio format should be selectable from there.

Most of the time adjusting this setting using your sound card’s software will automatically change the same in Windows. However, you may be required to adjust the sampling rate both in your sound card’s software and Windows Audio devices manually if the sound card software does not automatically handle that.

For Windows XP

If you are using Windows XP follow the instructions below to change audio settings:

1. Click the Start button > Settings > Control Panel.
2. Double-click the Sounds and Audio Devices icon.
3. Click the Volume tab.
4. Under Speaker settings, click the Advanced button.
5. Click the Performance tab.
6. Reduce the Hardware acceleration to Basic, the 2nd notch from the left.
7. Click Apply and then OK 2 times. Run the game now. Don't forget to turn the acceleration back up to restore the high-end features for your sound card when using other applications.

(XP fix quoted from a forum thread for Prototype on Activision forums – applies to AVP 3 as well):

Note that the above is a very popular fix among gamers and was used heavily with games such as Call of Duty 5 and Prototype.

Crashes too often? Don’t run the game using DirectX 11

If you have a look at the AVP 3 installation directory, you’ll notice that there are two main executable files – one that’ll run the game in DX11 mode and the other on Dx10/DX9 depending on your OS. DX11 mode will render better graphics but might also cause crashes on certain hardware configurations. For example, lots of people playing on DX11 have reported crashes when using flashlight in the marine campaign. If you begin to have frequent CTDs or any other graphics glitches, best bet is to try and run the game on a non DX11 configuration. To do this just launch the game using the regular exe in installation directory (not the DX11 executable). Before your try this, please take a moment to update your system using the links below:

• Install the latest DirectX runtime – Latest DirectX should be available in your Steam directory but if it’s not (or if you didn’t buy the game from Steam), you can download the latest monthly runtime from here. This is a standalone installer that will work in offline mode as well.
• Install Microsoft Visual C++ runtime libraries – I’m not sure if this is an absolute necessity for this game but it’s required for most games nowadays (as demonstrated by the case with Dragon Age : Origins). You can download the required files from this link.
• Update sound card and motherboard drivers – Overlooked by many but an essential step to playing games crash free. Please download latest video, audio and motherboard drivers from your hardware manufacturer. If you are too lazy to manually search, Click Here to download 3DP Chip for Windows Vista/XP/7 – This program will automatically detect your hardware and search for updated drivers for them.

Please feel free to report your issues/solutions/findings in the comments section.

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Read our Private Trackers section for latest BitTorrent news.

News – Open Signups, No Olympic Torrents On BitMeTV, HT Merges With PolishSource

A quick update from the BitTorrent front – three more good looking private torrent trackers have opened signup. nTorrents - a games tracker that focuses a lot on Nintendo stuff, PackMe.In – a ratio free packs only tracker which indexes torrent collections and ElbitZ – one of the oldest E-Learning trackers around, are all currently open to the public. In the meantime, HeavenTracker has merged with PolishSource to form a new Gazelle based 0Day tracker named HeavenSource. In other news the popular TV Torrent tracker BitMeTV has decided not to index any Olympic 2010 torrents ahead of a major crackdown on Olympic piracy by rights holders. For detailed versions of these news stories please continue reading.

Open Signups

nTorrents
  
Site Name: NTorrents (http://ntorrents.net)
Signup URL: http://ntorrents.net/register.php
Stats: 5400+ torrents and 13700+ users
Description: nTorrents is a great tracker for all things Nintendo. From SNES games to latest Wii releases, you can find pretty much any Nintendo console game on this tracker. NT is now three years old and they’ve have opened signups to the public in celebration. For more information and screenshots please refer to the full review linked to below.  (Credit to Liga who first posted this news in previous thread)
Full Review: [Click Here]

PiN
 
Site Name: PackMe.In (https://packme.in)
Invite Application URL: https://packme.in/inviteapp.php
Stats: 1000+ packs
Description: PackMe.In is a ratio free packs only torrent tracker –Just after several months since launch, PiN has managed to index more than 1000 torrent packs which is pretty impressive. For more information about this tracker, it’s highly recommended that you read the full review.
Full review + More Information: [Click Here]

ElbitZ
 
Site Name: ElbitZ (http://elbitz.net)
Signup URL: http://elbitz.net/signup.php
Statistics: 8700+ torrents
Description: ElbitZ is an E-Learning torrent tracker with lots of educational content such as Ebooks, exam engines, test papers, etc. This site opens to the public once every month and open signups usually last for 2 days.  
Full Review: [Click Here]

HeavenTracker + PolishSource = HeavenSource
 
HeavenTracker (HT) and PolishSource, two General/0Day torrent trackers that have been around for a while, have merged together to form a brand new tracker. New site which is called HeavenSource is based on Gazelle codebase. It’s currently closed for registrations but previous HT or PolishSource members are able to login with their old credentials. If you were an old HT/PloishSource member and can’t login to HeavenSource, the following might help:

In case of having problems logging in please recover your account details here.
If that won't help, and only then, you're welcome to join our irc support channel #hs-support on irc.vaultnet.org network.

Note that some parts of the new site such as the logo are still under construction.
Site Name: HeavenSource (http://heavensource.org/)

No Olympic 2010 Torrents on BitMeTV
 
If you were looking forward to download Olympic 2010 torrents using the popular private TV tracker BitMeTV, there’s a bit of a bad news. Ahead of a major crackdown on Olympic piracy, BMTV has decided to play it safe and have banned all Olympic 2010 torrents from being uploaded to the tracker. BitMeTV is hosted on Canada which is where the 2010 Winter Olympic games are also held. Despite efforts by rights holders, Olympic torrents have already leaked to several other BitTorrent trackers (both private and public) and are being downloaded by thousands of individuals as we speak.

11 Best DDL Forums To Download E-Books, Mobile Appz, Documentaries, Comics & More

Long time readers of FILEnetworks Blog would be familiar with our collective open signup updates for private torrent trackers. Each month, we post an article with summarized information about notable private trackers that were frequently reviewed on the blog. However, we’ve been writing about a lot of Direct Download Link (DDL) forums lately, in addition to private trackers. Since we don’t post summarized updates for DDL forums, some of our readers seem to have missed out on some pretty cool sites that were covered here before. In the hope of alleviating this problem, we’ve decided to feature collective updates for DDL forums as well – this is the first of a series of articles that revisit the some awesome forums that were covered earlier on FILEnetworks Blog. 11 sites are featured in this round – each of these specialize on a specific category such as EBooks, Documentaries, Cartoons, Magazines, Games and even Comics.

All of the forums mentioned below are open for registration at time of posting. Statistics were lasted updated on 16/2/2010. As usual, please take the time to read the full review (when available) before joining to see if the forum really has what you are looking for. Also, note that most of the sites featured here require you to register and log in for the downloads sections to get unlocked.

Docs4You 
   
Site Name: Docs4You (http://www.docs4you.org)
Signup URL: http://www.docs4you.org/forum/index.php?act=Reg&CODE=00
Stats :40000+ members
Description: Docs4You is without a doubt one of the best direct download forums in existence for premium documentaries. If you are looking to download BBC, Discover, NAT Geo, History Channel etc documentaries for free, this is a great place to start.  
Full Review: [Click Here]

Gigapedia
 
Site Name: Gigapedia (http://gigapedia.com)
Signup URL: http://gigapedia.com/register
Stats: 350000+ Releases
Description: Not necessarily a forum but a huge DDL link repository nevertheless. Gigapedia is one of the largest sites on the net to download pirated E-books – academic, fiction, non fiction – you name it they’ve got it. Read the full review for a detailed explanation on how to register and download from this awesome site.
Full Review: [Click Here]

Son of Shun
 
Site Name: Son of Shun (http://www.sonofshun.com)
Signup URL: http://www.sonofshun.com/forums/profile.php?mode=register
Stats: 11500+ registered users
Description: Another great forum for documentary fans. Son of Shun indexes verified public torrent links for selected documentary series. Although torrents are tracked by public trackers, you don’t have to worry about fakes or malware as all of the indexed links are verified and reliable. For more info, refer to full review.
Full Review: [Click Here]

Classic Nick Shows
 
Site Name: Classic Nick Shows (http://www.classicnickshows.info)
Signup URL: http://www.classicnickshows.info/register.php 
Stats: 6500+ registered users
Description: Classic Nick Shows is a unique forum that specializes in Nickelodeon cartoons. If memory servers, correct, this site is run by the same folks who run NepToons/Fox Kids torrent trackers. Great site if you are a fan of Nick shows.
Full Review: [Click Here]

RetroMags
 
Site Name: RetroMags (http://www.retromags.com/)
Signup URL: http://www.retromags.com/forums/register.html
Downloads Section URL : http://www.retromags.com/forums/index.php?autocom=downloads
Stats: ~3000 members
Description: A really great forum that covers some pretty rare stuff on the internet. RetroMags indexes scanned versions of old video game magazines. Their downloads section goes way back into the good old ATARI 2600 days and should help bring back memories from the golden age of video gaming. Read full review for screenshots.
Full Review: [Click Here]

iPmart Forum
 
Site Name: IPmart Forum (http://www.ipmart-forum.com)
Signup URL: http://www.ipmart-forum.com/register.php
Stats: 2 million threads by 1.3 million registered users
Description: There are lots of forums offering direct download links to cracked mobile applications, games and themes. Although most of these offer more or less the same content, iPmart forum is one of the largest communities when it comes to this niche. From Java to Symbian to iPhone to Android, you can find tons of apps, games and other stuff to jazz up your mobile device here. You can find more sites that offer mobile content from here and here.
Full Review: N/A

CS.RIN.RU
 
Site Name: CS.RIN.RU - Steam Underground Community
English Forums Link: http://cs.rin.ru/forum/viewforum.php?f=27
Registration URL: http://cs.rin.ru/forum/ucp.php?mode=register
Stats: 110000+ members
Description: CS.RIN.RU is an underground community dedicated to discussing Steam, the digital content distribution system by Valve. This forum is a heaven for those looking to download full Steam games, Steam hacks, cracks, Steam updates, patches, tutorials, etc. This is in fact the birthplace of initial cracked versions of several popular games including FEAR 2 Project Origin. A great communit y indeed. Read full review for more.
Full Review: [Click Here]

EBOOKIE
 
Site Name: EBOOKEE (http://www.ebookee.com)
Signup URL: http://www.ebookee.com/register.php
Stats: 467000+ books
Description: EBOOKIE is another huge direct download link repository for all sorts of E-books including academic and non academic content. Indexes close to half a million books so might worth checking out :p
Full Review: [Click Here]

AZNV
 
Site Name: AZNV.TV (http://aznv.tv)
Signup URL: http://aznv.tv/?p=register
Stats: ~1500 movies, ~1000 drama series, 500 Anime releases, ~100 TV episodes
Description: AZNV.TV is not exactly a DDL forum. It’s an online video streaming site with high quality streams for Asian movies. For a detailed overview of how this site functions, please refer to the full review linked below.
Full Review: [Click Here]

Comic Kingdom
 
Site Name: Comic Kingdom (http://comickingdom.co.uk)
Signup URL: http://www.comickingdom.co.uk/ucp.php?mode=register
Stats: 3600+ members
Description: Comic Kingdom is a discussion forum that offers download links to latest comic releases. Check the ‘Downloads’ section to the bottom of the page for newest releases. Register on the forum and make at least 5 forum posts to unlock Comic Kingdom archives section which includes hundreds of old comics, graphic novels and manga. Downloads are hosted in sites such as RapidShare.
Full Review: N/A

FreeBookSpot
 
Site Name:  FreeBookSpot (http://www.freebookspot.in)
Signup URL: http://www.freebookspot.in/Login.aspx
Stats: N/A
Description: Another great site to download books in electronic form. FreeBookSpot indexes thousands of one click hosting links to PDF, LIT, DOC, TXT eBooks. A single book is usually hosted on multiple one click hosts ensuring extended lifetime.
Full Review: N/A

There’s more to come – await further updates in future articles. At the same time you can follow us on Twitter via http://twitter.com/filenetworks