Golden/Silver bookmark notifications

We have just launched a new feature that makes it possible to be notified when one of your bookmarks becomes a golden or silver torrent. This was originally suggested in the forums and it seemed like a nice feature that would be quite handy to have for many members, so we decided to implement it. After all, who wouldn't want to be notified that one of their desired torrents could now be downloaded with either zero ratio hit or at half the usual ratio hit?

Here's how the feature works: whenever a torrent is made golden or silver - whether that is by staff action, a bonus points reward purchase by a member, or the torrent becoming TotW - everyone who currently has the torrent bookmarked will immediately receive a PM informing them about the status change. Since we know there may be a few members who do not want to receive such notifications, we have also added a setting with which each member can control whether or not they will be sent the PMs. The notifications are enabled by default for everyone, but you can change the associated setting from your personal settings page, along with adjusting many other settings.

We hope this feature will prove useful to you, especially those of you who have trouble maintaining a good ratio. If nothing else, the notifications should make it so the members who are most interested in a torrent will be alerted to its new golden/silver status far more quickly, providing them with a great opportunity to boost their ratio while also grabbing something that they really want. If you have any questions or comments about this new feature, feel free to post them in this forum thread.

Rules for soundtrack uploads modified

We have also made changes to the rules covering what kinds of soundtrack torrents are allowed to be uploaded. The major component of these changes is that now only soundtracks in FLAC or MP3 formats may be uploaded. Previously, we allowed soundtracks in any format, which resulted in the occasional upload in an obscure format. But we have noticed a recent upswing in soundtracks uploaded in these other formats, as well as far more uncompressed soundtrack uploads, which serve no benefit to any of the downloaders. This upswing led to our decision to standardize the category a bit - at least when it comes to new uploads. We have no plans at the moment to mass delete the existing soundtracks that are in other formats, but we may delete them sometime down the road. The vast majority of soundtracks have always been uploaded in one of the two formats allowed under the updated rules, so the effect of these changes should be fairly minimal, and most of the other formats can be losslessly converted to FLAC and then uploaded.