If you’ve been using private trackers for some time, you should be no stranger to country bans. A ‘country ban’ is when a private tracker bans all IP ranges coming from a particular country, making the site inaccessible to anyone from the region. These mass bans are usually imposed when tracker staff notices increased amount of cheating, invite selling or any other form of scamming coming from a higher-than-normal percentage of users from a particular country. Talks of country bans have now been renewed with DigitalHive (DH), one of the leading General/0Day torrent trackers, banning Romania effective from yesterday (24th). This is not the first time Romania was banned from a private tracker – if the statistics provided by DH are correct, it doesn’t look like site staff were left with much choice with their decision either.
Quoted below is an announcement posted by ACiD, one of the site’s SysOps:
We've decided to ban the country of Romania from accessing Digitalhive.
We've been debating this for years and well, we're tired of banning cheaters, traders, dupes and bad users from this country. Today alone I've personally banned 10+ users with Romanian IP addresses. We debated doing this when a bunch of other sites did but we held off, we always just left it alone but enough is enough.
Look at these statistics:
1,181 Romanian Users on Digitalhive
1,076 are banned for cheating, dupe accounts, trading or bad ratio.
That leaves 105 active Romanian accounts on DH, those 105 active accounts will be allowed to pm us with a static IP to be put on the allowed list.
We aren't happy we have to do this but this will give our staff more time to do other things on the site and focus less on these bad users and stop wasting our time hunting them down.
Israel may be next. Out of 355 users, 284 are banned/disabled.
:: ACiD
If the stats are correct, more than 90% of Romanian users on DH have already been banned for site breaking rules. That really is an unusually high percentage of users engaging in undesirable activities – as to why it’s so high, I have no idea. DH however is not the first tracker to issue a country ban on Romania – it’s already banned on several leading trackers including BitMeTV (warned), GFT, What.CD and more. Although Romanians seem to get themselves banned from every torrent site on the planet, they themselves have quite a few large private trackers including LastTorrents (Open), ExtremeShare (Open), TorrentBits (Open), FileList.Ro, iPlay, etc which all seem to be pretty successful and popular (and these sites obviously welcome Romanian users with open arms).
In other news, DigitalHive is currently open for signup. For those who haven’t heard about it, DH is a decent General/0Day tracker with 17000 users and 20500+ torrents. The site recently rolled out v2.0 with new features and a brand new visual theme – you can read all about it here.
Site Name: Digital Hive (http://www.digitalhive.org)
Signup URL: http://www.digitalhive.org/signup.php
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