This is probably old news by now but we simply can’t ignore the fact that TorrentLeech went through it’s most significant upgrade since the trackers’ birth. TorrentLeech (aka TL), considered as the king of private torrent sites by many veteran torrenters, launched the third major revision of its tracker and web interface last night. TL v3 is a massive upgrade over the previous codebase and it’s been created from scratch by TL’s dedicated developer team. According to w00t, a TL SysOp, v3 was in development for more than a year – was the wait worth it? Hell yes. There are a number of noticeable enhancements in the new version, including many changes to visual features as well as under the hood changes that result in improved site speed, faster navigation and overall site efficiency.
First thing I noticed with TL v3 was their new slogan. TorrentLeech, which carried the tagline ‘Not Here, Not Scene’ for many years has now changed it to ‘This is what happens when you seed’. Even the logo appears to have changed. But these are probably the least important of recently implemented changes. Although this post does not aim to be a full review of TL v3, mentioned below are some of the highlights of this release, just to give an understanding about the scope of the upgrade:
- Completely new, polished looking visual layout based on a new codebase
- Revamped search engine which delivers more accurate search results, along with enhancements such as results filtering, filename searching and support for searchable, user customizable torrent tags.
- Enhanced torrent Browsing with browse by category & browse by tags options. Supports filtering by Tags, Categories, Size and Uploaded Date.
- Automatic IMDB discovery and automatic IMDB information retrieval (including cover image and adding genres as tags for the torrent) for movie and TV torrents.
- New torrent description page with a tabbed layout. All available information about a particular torrent is now organized into 5 tabs; Torrent Info, NFO, Comments, Gallery and Files.
- New invitation system and invite signup process. Invitations can be sent and tracked through the Invitations Tab in the user profile.
- Speed improvements – browsing, site functions, searches and navigation are now notably faster.
- Revamped torrent bookmarking feature.
- Enhancements to in-site PM and messaging system – this is still a work in progress.
- Plus many more
Added below are several screenshots showcasing some of the new features and visual features introduced in TL v3:
New search and browse options with category and tag filtering.
New torrent description page - tabbed structured makes it easier to locate the information you need.
TorrentLeech main index with some of the new category icons.
The only drawback I found in TL v3 was with the category icons. They seemed a little too similar to each other – the old icons were easily distinguishable and it was easy to spot certain types of releases instantly on the main index. Either way this issue will hopefully resolve itself as members get used to the look and feel of the new icon set.
Note that TL v3 is still in its beta phase. Like any other web development project, it’s bound to have undiscovered bugs and glitches at this stage. There are many fixes still being deployed and during the first 48-72 hours since v3 launch, TL will only be open to power users and VIP members. Any other member trying to log in at this point will get invalid username/password errors.
Additionally, make sure to update your bookmarks. If you had bookmarked an internal page instead of the TL homepage (for example the torrent browse page - http://www.torrentleech.org/browse.php ), there is a high likelihood this link will return page not found errors. Pages ending with .php are gone – either change your bookmarks to direct to TL homepage or update them with the correct internal page URL.
After having featured more than 10 TorrentLeech invitation giveaways as well as two mass invite campaigns on this blog, we have reasons to believe most of our readership are already members of this tracker. If you still aren’t in TL, don’t lose hope – while the site is currently closed for registrations, there will most likely be mass invite campaigns and IRC giveaways in future (although we don’t exactly know when). If any such event occurs we will be updating this blog as usual– stay tuned.
Site Name: TorrentLeech (http://www.torrentleech.org)
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