If you’ve been reading us for some time you probably have read about PTN, a ratio free private torrent tracker for movies. And if you have read about PTN, you are likely to have read about PTN v2, the major site overhaul that’s been on the cards for some time :) Good news is that PTN v2 is now finally live – has the wait been worth it? Short answer is Yes. So much has changed in v2 that PTN now looks like an entirely new site. From browse pages to notification windows to category icons, virtually everything has changed. And it’s not just the new visual layout and new themes that are highlights of the new version, the site’s coders have managed to put together some useful, interesting new features into the mix as well (which is a good thing). Another notable change is that from now on PTN will become a pure movie torrent tracker – TV shows are no longer allowed on site after v2 launch.
There’s an entire forum section dedicated to explaining the new features (along with screenshots) introduced in PTN v2. Below is a summarized list of features compiled using the information available in this forum. In some cases, we directly quoted the feature descriptions on PTN as there really was no way of explaining it better:
- Faster load times and on-the-fly-searches - The browse page was entirely re-designed and it now loads, navigates and searches faster.
- Browse by Torrents/Movies - You can now browse by Movies, which allows you to easily find and download torrents using a movies context rather than the usual torrents context. If you don’t like the new layout, the old list based layout is still available.
- Movie details page – A single page capturing all available information about a particular movie including Movie Information, Directors Information, Actors Information, Images - Thumbnails, Posters and Banners, Trailers, Torrents, Soundtracks, Other movies you might like, Tags, References & subscriptions
- Director details page – A single page capturing all available information about a particular director including Director details and links, Director 's movies in PtN and Director 's Filmography with direct link
- Action details page – Lists all available information related to a particular actor including Actor details and links, Actor's movies in PtN and Actor's Filmography with direct link
- Compression (RAR’d and UNRAR’d torrents) - compression notation has been added to allow uploaders to mark their releases as rared/unrared. An "Unrared torrent" icon will then appear next to unrared torrents in the browse page.
- New visual elements - For those of you who use a 1280x720 resolution or higher two new wide-screen styles have been added: v2 Blue & v2 Grey. For those of you who use lower resolutions - a new v2 Black theme has been added.
To better utilize the space, the use panel has been narrowed down and the site's links have been moved to a new panel on the left side of the screen.
A Movie of the Week section has also been added to the left side panel.
A new right side panel has been added to hold the site notifications (message, announcements, etc...) This panel will only be visible when there are notifications. - Tags - Tags allow you too add words or phrases that best describe a movie. Tagging a movie will later allow other users to search/find that movie by running a search that is indirectly related to the Torrent/Movie information. This allows much easier search and to easily find movie by interest rather than by category and name.
For example: Adding the tag "Boxing" to the movie "Million Dollar Baby" will allow users to find this movie when searching for a boxing movie. - Subscriptions - Subscriptions allows you to automatically receive a notification when certain torrent qualities has been released for a specific movie. Subscriptions can save you that lazy browsing, looking for a good quality release for a movie that you would like to see. In the future, you will be able to subscribe to a movie even if no release of that movie even exists.
- Category Icons - You can now choose your preferred category icons through your profile page (In the Torrents section). You can also select the default categories that you would like to view in the browse page and movie details page. Torrents are strongly bounded into movies now (Or to multiple movies). Torrent/Movies can now have multiple categories, these categories are set automatically when the movie's data is retrieved. You can also manually add/remove categories from a movie. Searching by categories - If a movie has the categories Drama & Comedy. Filtering out Comedies will not make the torrent/movie invisible. Only when Comedies and Dramas are filtered out, the torrent/movie will become invisible.
- Filtering - Movies and Torrents can be now filtered using Name, Year, Rating, Language and ofcuz.
- Bookmarks - The bookmarks view was incorporated into the main browse page.
As you can see it’s a long list of features. Below is a screenshot of the new ‘Browse by movies’ view on PTN, which is without a doubt one of the most notable new additions to the site:
In movies view mode, this is how movies are listed in the main index (this is not the torrent description page, which is much more detailed). If you prefer the old list based view, you can switch to it using the top toolbar.
And the screenshot below showcases the new main toolbar and search box, through which you can instantly change the look and feel of the torrent index:
There are tons more new features but we obviously can’t include screenshots of all of them - to read more about them in detail, login to the site and browse the PTN v2 forums – each feature has its own thread and you can find detailed information about a particular feature along with screenshots.
Signups for PTN v2 are currently closed and so are the online invite applications. Invite apps were open just a month ago (prior to v2 launch) and most of our readers should have got in when we announced this in the blog. In case you haven’t got in yet, don’t lose hope as PTN have been recruiting on a regular basis and there is a possibility that invite applications will open again in future (although we cannot tell when).
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