Torrentshack News

Staff Changes.

You would usually find BoB making these news items. But I find myself making this news post today due to us loosing one of our beloved Admins to that horrible thing called "Real Life".

BoB has been instrumental in the progress of this site for countless years now and it's with a heavy heart that we wish him the best for the future. The door will always be open for him should he wish to return to staff. Although it will be a hard act to follow, we are looking at adding somebody new to fill his position which is currently being discussed. Users shall be notified accordingly.

Code/Features/Site changes.

As you will have been aware, we recently added a Hit and Run feature to the site. Thanks to feedback from you guys we were made aware of a few small issues which are currently being looked in to. Whilst this is happening the feature has been removed from the eyes of you, the users. It is however still accessable by staff so that we can monitor the changes made and bug fix further where needed. Whilst trying to fix this feature we took the opportunity to upgrade our tracker to the very latest Ocelot code which we hope will be more stable overall.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that we will still remain a ratio free site. This however does NOT mean people can leech a torrent and give nothing back. This site was built to give people with slower connections in less fortunate circumstance the means too be part of a community without the need for a Gbit seedbox with 8TB of disc space. You can download as much as you like, but you need to make the effort to seed back. Users making no attempt to seed back some of what they download are not the sort of people the site needs. We want to increase retention and the best way to do this is to remove the deadwood.

You have plenty of warning with this news item so no whining when you find your accounts disabled.
As a private community we should share, which in turn makes the whole experience better for everyone involved.

We have also altered the criteria for userclass promotions. Users will now no longer be able to get promoted to the higher classes via forum posts alone. The new criteria can be found "Here in the Wiki." Please be aware that users who do not meet the new criteria will be adjusted to the new user level. We do understand this might seem frustrating but we feel it's a necessary evil that will benefit the site in the long term.

Whilst doing this we have also altered the requirements for achievements on site. In most cases these have been lowered to make them easier to get hold of for those with slower connections rather than cater for seedboxes alone. We will likely add some higher levels in due course.

A new feature we have added to the site is the "Bonus Point Credit" given when users choose to upload something from either the "Request" section or the "Pre DB" section of the site. Users will currently be gifted 500 bonus points as a thank you for their efforts.


Donations.

As you may be aware, due to the issues affecting many sites such as ourselves we currently only accept BTC as a donation method. We have had 2 PayPal accounts shut down and other methods have also come to nothing. BTC is the only method we are aware of where we know the money you give us can be kept safe.

If anyone has any suggestions as to other avenues we can take a in to then please let us know. We understand that donating via BTC might not be the easiest thing in the world, but at the same time, give it a try..... You may just find it's not as much of a nightmare as you first imagined.


And finally I would like to go back to the start of this post and once again bid BoB a fond farewell from all of the staff here at TorrentShack. I hope we can do you proud in your absence and don't be a stranger my friend.


//Staff