Why don't all trackers have open signup?

[dragoi92]

open signups piratebay

[jbloggs]

^^ From my understanding mininova is not a tracker but rather links to content on other trackers.

As for why trackers don't have open sign up, I agree with all that has been already said and to add to that I believe it give members a sense of 'security' even though it may be a false sense of security. But the main reason I would have thought is because it makes it alot easier to manage the tracker for their owners/admis/mods if they have some control on its members.

[TheFoX]

Open signups can be abused. One person can create numerous accounts, especially if they use a proxy server, allowing them to abuse the tracker.

A closed signup, or invite only, site means that members only get one account, and that they are more likely to take care of that account because it is not a throwaway resource.

[Time-Traveller]

Remember in the good old day a lot of these rarer and not so rare private sites were always open sign-up and when it was discovered the problems this caused for the tracker they switched to invitation / recomendation based to try and help combat it.

[benficao]

tracker collectors, species, would end.

[Albo Da Kid]

tracker collectors, species, would end.

FST would also have some crisis. They would need to change their whole site around. Maybe they'd become more liek warez.bb

[bblogs]

I would be too worried about the law types getting in(RIAA, MPAA, etc). I mean, these type of people are going to get in regardless if they want to. I'm sure every single tracker has at least one of these type of people as a member.

You just very successfully contradicted yourself. You were right in saying that they'll get in if they wanted to, and they probably are. So you can get over your fear of the RIAA/MPAA, they could go after you if they wanted, but most private trackers aren't a good target.

[Artemis]

Revolt a private membership forum tried just this experiment about 15months ago. The forum opened up signups but limited the amount of new members able to sign up to 500. Within 1 week of reviewing the new signups 4 out of 5 accounts were disabled as dupes or known traders and within 3 weeks only about 50 accounts were left.
Simply put, the more rare the site is, the more cheating/scamming/ duplicate account creation will go on, so if say FSC was to have open signup for a day the evil horde would descend and of course a huge amount of the new accounts would be duplicates all ready for the staff to spend ages wading through weblogs to find the duplications. Why the hell should they ?
I mean that seriously, if the site is already established, has a good userbase that they are happy with and the invitation system brings in new blood and decent new members why on earth would they want to change that?

[PlayeR]

yeah. that does make sense.

i read about this old thread..revolt is a good forum from what I read/heard, and it opened for a while
and a lot of people created multiple acc. or they just created the acc for trade in the next day. and alot of the accounts were disabled. that was a shame, they were given a change to sign up but you didnt create it to participate in the forums.

so yes, if priv trackers were to open signups, this will just happen again and the staffs will have a lot of work to do. to clean up all these dupe accounts. because from all the people that signed up. there are only few that will really use it.
so they better have their own system to get new members rather than do open signups.

[cstrik3]

Open signups can be abused. One person can create numerous accounts, especially if they use a proxy server, allowing them to abuse the tracker.

A closed signup, or invite only, site means that members only get one account, and that they are more likely to take care of that account because it is not a throwaway resource.

Agree 100%