Thursday, January 22, 2009

About uploading torrents

As you surely already know, we launched just a couple of weeks ago, so we desperately need more quantity and variety of content.
In this post, i want to encourage our users to upload new torrents, but also i want to talk about the kind of torrents we need right now. As a such young website we are, we still don't have much traffic, and that means less torrents downloaded and shared, and that's is a problem with the submitted torrents created by you that have only one seeder, they don't tend to get much distribution, they die fast, and nobody wants a website full of dead torrents.
So, until we get more traffic, i wanted to ask you to not upload torrents created by yourselves, and just just download .torrent files of your favorites albums/bands that we don't have yet from other (public) sites (like The Pirate Bay, Mininova, etc), healthy torrents with a good number of seeders, and upload them here. It's also easier and faster, and it's very likely that your albums are already there. Remember that, after all, we are only a public directory, and not a private tracker where someone is going to download and seed your album just to keep a ratio.
Another reason for this request is that we are still working in "the reaper", an automated process that will automatically delete the torrents that doesn't show any seeder in n days (probably 5, to be decided). But for now, we don't have any way to delete the dead torrents and his albums.
Thanks for your understanding, and thanks to those who were already uploading healthy torrents, we are growing fast in contents thanks to them.
If you have a question or a suggestion about this issue, please feel free to post it in the comments.
Cheers !
Filed under

8 comments:

  1. Can I ask how are torrents accepted? When we submit them - what happens? Do you have some sort of script/code that goes and checks the release against Amazon and then populates the required fields and creates the artist/album page and then waits for your final approval or is it much more manual than that?

    The reason I ask all of this is that - I have been uploading pretty much mainstream pop/rock and R&B releases for the site. I tend to not go for anything with less than 10 seeders, since all the stuff I upload is pretty mainstream, everything is listed on Amazon. Now what puzzles me is that I had a release that was sitting in my pending torrents queue for more than 6 days and it never got accepted. The whole time I was uploading other stuff - these all got accepted, but this one file I uploaded was not and still has not been accepted and I am trying to figure it out. The artist is known, the album is well seeded and it's definitely listed on Amazon for nearly a year and the tracks are encoded at 192 VBR. So I just want to know what has stopped it from being accepted? If I know what criteria you guys use - then it will help me for future uploads. I'm sure nobody wants things sitting in their pending torrents section for weeks and weeks. I also have another release of a well known kids musical - a soundtrack and this is a scene release - yet this also has been waiting while other torrents I upload get accepted.

    I also had another album that was sitting in my queue - it was a deluxe edition (scene release) with more than 500+ seeders - but after 5 days of not being accepted, I deleted the torrent and uploaded the same album - but regular version (so less tracks than the deluxe) and with only 20+ seeders - and then this got accepted? So I don't understand why a version with more tracks and more seeders did not get accepted yet a version with less tracks and with much less seeders got accepted?


    I would like to say a few more things:

    1. It would be good if 192 bitrate was the minimum bitrate for acceptance and this was added to "Upload rules" on the upload page. This is not 1997 - nobody wants rubbish 128 bitrate!

    2. The genre should be added to each album page in the album details area.

    3. Tracklistings for a lot of albums don't match the torrent and this should be fixed otherwise people will not be getting the songs they think they are getting.

    4. I know that in a users profile only the last 35 uploaded albums is shown, but it would still be nice if we could see everything we have uploaded. Perhaps at the bottom - we could have page or next arrows to view the earlier releases we have uploaded.

    5. Now that we can edit pending torrents - we need to edit the Artist and Album Title fields too. It could save us having to delete and re-upload again.

    6. I have one album torrent that refuses to be uploaded. I've tried nearly 10 times. Everytime I try - I get the error page - only on this torrent. There are no foreign characters or anything in the name of the file - why is it getting rejected?

    Thanks for your time!! keep up the great work!
    ReplyDelete
  2. Dimsum:

    Thanks for your interest and suggestions. I will proceed to answer your questions:

    When you submit a torrent, it appears in a queue in our backend, used by our moderators. Then, as you guessed, we run a script against the torrent that fetches the metadata from webservices of Amazon and other sites, using as input your description. Then we see and choose the set of data that matches better the contents of the torrent, and with one click gets published.
    But, the thing is, we can't edit that data, we don't have that functionality yet, so sometimes we have to conform with data that doesn't matches exactly the contents of the torrent.
    And about the two torrents you mentioned, the problem with these was that Amazon was returning a lot of embedded HTML along the description, with images, banners and loads of crap that we can't remove manually yet, as i explained earlier. That torrents would we accepted, eventually.
    Except for issues like that (we are working to fix them) we accept anything we can, regardless of the music genre and format.

    About your other suggestions:

    1. Yes, it could be, 128k is too low, i agree.

    2. We will, but later, when we add the option to browse by subgenre, that would we show too in the album page. We already have them in the database, so we won't take long to add that feature. The genres assigned to the albums are too broad, and wouldn't we of much use unless we list the subgenres too.

    3. I know, sometimes happens for the reason i explained before, we can't found a set of metadata that matches exactly the contents of a torrent.

    4. Planned (but with low priority), with a paginator like the one you can see in other pages of the website.

    5. Planned.

    6. Some few torrents have non-standard metadata inside them, and that ones can't be read by our website, that torrent must be one of these.

    Remember, we are very young, and still in beta, but we are working hard to get the site better and better each day, and your feedback it's very appreciated to help us to set priorities.

    Later i will publish a new post explaining in what features are we working right now, and what are we going to do next.

    Thanks for your feedback and torrents contributions, you are one of our top uploaders, helping us a lot with our contents.

    Cheers !
    ReplyDelete
  3. I don't really understand why you only want torrents that are active on other sites. Isn't original content good? If it's about seeders, one peer seeding at 1mbit/s is better than 100 peers seeding at a capped amount of 1kb/s.

    To me it just seems like it's heading in the wrong direction. You should be encouraging rare content instead of pushing it away.
    ReplyDelete
  4. It may be a good thing to make a link to this post on the website, because everybody should read it.
    Anyway, I'm very enthusiastic about this site, and I'm gonna contribute too :)
    ReplyDelete
  5. Not saying I'm not going to try and contribute any way but it would be better, in my opinion, if we could upload some rare stuff unto the site.

    I for one got tons or hard-to-get/golden-oldies lying around waiting to get shared~
    ReplyDelete
  6. sarkken: I agree with you, but, as I explained in the post, I think it's the best FOR NOW, temporally, until we sustain more traffic and I finish and deploy the reaper. Could be one excellent seeder, with a lot of bandwidth as you say, but we don't know that, also could be a crappy one that would be down before others start seeding.
    Keep tuned, I will make a new announcement when we revert this policy. Thanks for your feedback !
    ReplyDelete
  7. Hello

    I have a question :
    Direct Links (RapidShare , Megaupload...) Would be better (faster , anonymous , dont need many seeders , why don't you want to use direct links ?

    Great Site , Good luck.
    ReplyDelete
  8. Admin: Get what you're saying. I must say that this is the most well-thought/planned torrent site for music up-to-date and I will use it as my primary site to get ahold of music from here on out! Keep up the great work and I shall be waiting for that policy to get reverted so I can start uploading some rare gems unto the site!
    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)