Hi everyone,

First of all, thank you for making the first week of PassTheHeadphones such a runaway success! We're about to hit 150,000 torrents, of which over 65,000 are Perfect FLACs. This has been achieved by under 5,000 users which, frankly, is an amazing achievement and we should all be very proud.

Of course, we have so far to go to match the achievements of the place that we hope in time will be considered our spiritual predecessor. We want to build strong foundations, and then build upon what came before. We can only do this with your help - thank you for being here.

Priority Issues

Although we have much to work on, the priority issues for our development team at the moment are updating our site Logchecker and introducing reports.

Although our Logchecker is now fully functional, it is a years-old version that scores 100% for many torrents that previously would have scored far less. This is a testing process, and it will take time. We also believe that some torrents uploaded in the very early days of the website, before the Logchecker was introduced, maybe have no log saved in the system. This affects a very small number of low ID torrents and we are working on a solution to allow users to either add these logs in manually or trump themselves. We'll update you when we know more about this.

Reports are still unavailable for music torrents, but you can now report some non-music formats, including any applications. In the meantime, we have a Report Thread that users may use to let us know of rule infringements, trumps and duplicates.

Trumping V2

As we mentioned on Sunday, we have now added V2 to the V0 trumping tree. Its place in this, and our general trumping rules as of this time, is as follows:



We have started with the gentle removal of some V2 torrents where a V0 exists for the same release. Users that are using scripts that automatically convert FLAC to MP3 should amend their settings to remove V2.

Invites

We have currently suspended our policy of offering invites for every 15 uploads. We feel that this was an unhealthy pyramid scheme of sorts, and open to abuse. As of right now the only recruitment to PTH comes via users with existing invites and the class-restricted official threads on a select number of elite trackers. We have heard our user's pleas for more invites, however, and will be expanding recruitment gently in due course (although we have no plans to employ rash techniques such as open registration, ever, now or in the future). This may include interviews.

Various Artists and the Upload page

We would like to remind users that, when uploading a Various Artists compilation, it is a requirement to input all of the artists on the Upload page. It is not acceptable to simply add Various Artists as the artists, as this creates incredible disorganisation on the site that our dedicated user base then needs to clean up. Tools such as YADG for PTH can make this task easier. We will soon be adding a block to Various Artists as an artist, so that this cannot be done further.

We have also added Concert Recording and DJ Mix as upload types, and Blu-Ray as a source media (for audio only, of course). We have also retired Ogg Vorbis again; No, we're not sure why it was listed either!

Anthologies vs. Compilations

Another quick reminder for users that are perhaps not used to uploading (but we greatly appreciate that you are!) and are therefore confused about the difference between an Anthology and a Compilation.

Anthology - A single artist compilation, such as Rush - The Spirit of Radio: Greatest Hits 1974-1987 or The Jesus and Mary Chain - The Power of Negative Thinking: B-Sides and Rarities. The presence of a guest artist does not change this status, and sometimes two artists may be combined here (such as compilations with both Michael Jackson and The Jackson 5).

Compilation - A various artists compilation, made up of several different musicians, such as The Disco Box or Now That's What I Call Music! 56. This can include both sprawling boxsets and small record label samplers.

Introducing the Sandbox

We have created a forum called the Sandbox for user scripts and other development of exciting tools for use with PassTheHeadphones. Many of you may remember The Laboratory, and its epic archive of Greasemonkey tools and Python wizardry. We'd like to rebuild this, and hope you will do so here.

The Sandbox already includes a new version of YADG, the much-used upload metadata tool, and we're also excited that we may be working to introduce Sherlock, the unofficial but nonetheless adored ratio monitoring tool.

And finally...

We'd like to invite our users to contribute to our forums, and also to join us on IRC. We're at irc.passtheheadphones.me on port 6697 or 7000 for SSL access. We've already got a fledgling community, and our chat channels already include old favourites such as #indie, #linux and #lgbt. There's also a #pth-dev channel for those keen to discuss or even help with script and site development.

Thank you,
Vika and the PtH staff

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