A few weeks ago the The Pirate Bay tracker went down and many .torrents stopped working properly. This got me curious again and knowing, from previous readings, that bittorrent trackers use HTTP the idea for trackhub started to grow on my head. I started to wonder if BT clients followed HTTP redirects. After searching the web for bittorrent+redirect, I found that some BT clients used standard libraries and thus had this already built in.
The plan was in motion, I created the app instance on GAE and started coding. A few tests later and sure enough some guys were able to download. I started to ask some questions on irc.freenode.net/#bittorrent and fixed some bugs and functionality, released it to github and fired an email to torrentfreak.com editor Ernesto. After the article on torrentfreak traffic immediately spiked and a few bug fixes had to be done. But soon enough it was obvious that trackhub would not survive.
Why? There are a few reasons for this:
- trackhub sucks, help it suck less
- keeps logs and is US based
- GAE resources are limited
- Popular bt clients misbehave
- .torrent creators put trackhub next to other trackers
But the idea is not completely stupid. In my opinion it helps shed light on some problems with BT. What's needed?
- More public trackers that can be trusted
- Bt clients that speak proper http
- pirates that walk the walk, develop and/or donate to these projects
- .torrent creators use proper tools to create the .torrent files and use tiers
- UDP trackers, DHT, PEX, etc.