Tracker/Site Startup

Hello FileSharingTalk,

We are starting a new tracker website. It has been completely written from the ground up. (It does not use the TBDev codebase) We are looking for staff members to; start the community, help decide on policies, decide the way the site will become available to other users(invites, open sign-up, etc..), moderators for the forums and website, content uploaders, etc.

We have a need for someone with experience in cascading style sheets to work on different skins for the website. We have a default one, but would like to offer more to our users, and do not want to tax our main programmer that designed the default skin.

We are looking for maybe 5-6 people with the skills and abilities we have listed. If you are interested please PM me with any relevant information and I maybe be able to give you more information on our website.

You didn't really think this through, did you? First of all noone can PM you until you have PM capabilities.

Nobody can pm you unless you hit 20 posts, and (I think) 15-20 days of account lifetime longevity.

Provide people with another way to contact you, or you're forced to wait. If you were to ask for my opinion, just set up a quick gmail address, and you're off.

Yeah, did not see that. Anyways, if you are interested you can leave a reply in this thread.

Please prove you have a from the ground up tracker.

One question that I have with these trackers.
What actually goes in their creation?
Don't you need a top-notch "server" computer so that you can handle any of the website processes, in addition to a large hard drive, possibly about a couple of Terabytes, maybe even more, for the torrents themselves.

For the "ground up" tracker, have you worked out all the kinks? I haven't tried any specific website programming languages, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can check them by running some sort of tests.

Unless you have a pretty big torrent site the hard drives don't need to be TBs big.

I assume by "from the ground up" he's talking about the php frontend rather than the tracker itself. And I'd assume further they just took one of the more obscure codebases and modified it :P

Re: The above, cutting it down to super basics, you need a tracker, a database, and a php frontend for the site, running on a server.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gman_Link

One question that I have with these trackers.
What actually goes in their creation?
Don't you need a top-notch "server" computer so that you can handle any of the website processes, in addition to a large hard drive, possibly about a couple of Terabytes, maybe even more, for the torrents themselves.

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Not necessarily a top notch computer, I know quite a few "good" trackers, that run on less than a fraction of what some people's seedboxes cost. You have to account for the server costs, since a better server will logically cost more.*

Besides those costs there's other kinds of costs that come into play. It's not everyday that you find coders that are willing to be benevolent and help outright at no cost, especially at something so insecure. Some times the coders will want an initial "cut", so will the designers.

Again, you have to find a source for material. It's all the rave now to have trackers with an auto-upload bot, but I only know one person who knows enough PHP to code a release drop bot (egg drop, egg bomb, or whatever, I'm no coder). What even complicates things, is paying for topsite access, if you want the most recent releases, or gathering enough competent uploaders with their own sources if you're creating a dedicated tracker.

Some of the most important things that make a tracker are usually taken for granted.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gman_Link

For the "ground up" tracker, have you worked out all the kinks? I haven't tried any specific website programming languages, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can check them by running some sort of tests.

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I'm sure that if he knows what he's doing, he'll have a beta test stage, 30-40 people hammering the server as much as they can before the final release.

________

* - A better explanation, food for thought, if you may:

Spoiler: Show

Trackers can always offer less services to the end user in order to minimize server load, and be able to rent out a cheaper server, while other trackers take it upon themselves to even hire a guy in the data center to help them out specifically, due to the nature of the content provided/material on the servers.

It all comes down to how secure you want to be, and how well/how many services you'll be providing to the end user. Remember that everything a tracker does, it has to account for, from all the different incoming connections, to the routing of the tracker side of things itself, to SSL connections if the staff want to offer it, etc. It's not always a clear cut decision of "Oh, that server looks fine to me."

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gman_Link

One question that I have with these trackers.
What actually goes in their creation?
Don't you need a top-notch "server" computer so that you can handle any of the website processes, in addition to a large hard drive, possibly about a couple of Terabytes, maybe even more, for the torrents themselves.

For the "ground up" tracker, have you worked out all the kinks? I haven't tried any specific website programming languages, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can check them by running some sort of tests.

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Average tracker it goes.

1 ) Planning -> figure out what's what. Start of any life cycle.
2 ) Prep Tracker Codebase -> since most trackers run either gazelle or tbdev. Word is TBDev needs hell of alot of work to make it anywhere near secure, as it's meant to be a SQL injection playground. And from looking at the code I can believe that. Then there's the modifications everyone wants imdb/tvrage/etc scrapping, bonus system, invite app system you know all the cool stuff. This part takes ages.
3 ) Test -> It's nearly impossible to write code free software, so you need to test the shit out of it with a good error logging system. (Because hardly anyone actually reports bugs.)
4 ) Secure uploader -> Either get someone willing to do it by hand or just get an auto upload like all the cool kids.
5 ) Try and look cool

Knowing me I most likely left something out.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TheVoidz

We are looking for maybe 5-6 people with the skills and abilities we have listed. If you are interested please PM me with any relevant information and I maybe be able to give you more information on our website.

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May I ask who exactly are the "we" you were referring to, and what experience do you and your current staff have in coding/staffing a tracker?

If you want a piece of advice from someone who have been around a bit and knows the sort of people who roam these forums, you would be better off looking for staffers and especially people who are proficient in coding/styling a tracker elsewhere. There is simply no way of knowing who you'll get here, and you may end up with far worse problems than have only a single stylesheet.

Good luck!

p.s.: just out of pure curiosity, why have you chosen to write a tracker from the grounds up and not use the tbdev/gazelle templates? Which programming languages have you used to do so?