AlphaOmega.me | AO | Ratioless | 2011

**Factotum** · 05-31-2011

AlphaOmega.me | AO | General | Ratioless | 2010/2011
http://www.alphaomega.me/

IRC
Non SSL = /server irc.alphaomega.me:6667
SSL = /server ssl.alphaomega.me:+7000

Channels
#AlphaOmega (Main)
#AO.Announce (announce)
#Athena (pre)
#Atlas (support)
#AOBots (bots)
#Orion (recruitment)

AlphaOmega is a new tracker, started by former members and staff on a few top name private trackers. They have access to major groups and have a lot of auto-uploaded material each day. Apart from great pretimes, every new torrent is also seeded with the help of powerful seedboxes, which grants users great speeds. The number of torrents and users grow by each day.

The design is very clean, yet very simple. Almost everything is easily found and accessible. Things have changed in the last month that AO has been up and running. We have seen them go from a General Ratio Tracker to a General Ratio Free Tracker which puts it amoungst just a very select few.

AO seems to have the goal of establishing themselves in the private tracker world. Even if it might still be a long way to the top, they have made a good start, and count on them being a very serious competitor within the few months to come.

Introduction

Categories and torrents

Good pretimes and lots of torrents (see below for statistics). As you can see the number of leechers/seeders is slowly but steadily increasing, compared to when this review was first written. The categories are more than enough to help you browse through the torrents.

Overall stats.: (as of 27/12/2010)

Total torrents.......: 7,937 (24/01/2011)
Total size........: 12.27 TB
Total files........: 313,020

Mean torrents per user...: 1
Mean torrent size..: 2.35 GB
Mean files per torrent..: 59
Mean filesize.....: 41.12 MB

Requests

Requests can only be made when you reach a certain user class (which you do by increased upload stats).

Forums

A lot of new forum sections, as well as an increased acticity due to the increased number of members. It's starting to evolve more and more into a community, and the staff and users alike are very helpful. The suggestions holds a decent amount of activity and it seems as if the staff really listen to the suggestions of the users (one example would be the idea of a change to a ratioless tracker, an idea that has been present in the forums since the start of the tracker).

Staff

Staff, categorised according to greek mythology.

Top 10

A welcomed addition to the site.

Rules

Nothing unique with the rules really, just as any other tracker, although they have been updated since the start. Might be a good thing to edit the rules according to the new ratioless system, but I'm betting that it's on its way (there have been a lot information on the subject here on TI).

IRC rules

IRC Mibbit

FAQ/Wiki

An updated FAQ/Wiki with exstensive information and everything you need to know before getting started. This has also been updated with A LOT of information since the startup.

User profiles

Clean design, with a good overview of the user information.

Invitations

Right now invitations are easy to come by, when AO first opened they were giving out 20 invites to everyone, this changed in December when they started to only give out 2 invites per person. According to the AO-staff this will also change again in the not too distant future, where everyone apparantely will be having all invites reset and a maximum of 1 or 2 invites will be issued per person.

Invite tree

Donations

The donation system resembles that of most other trackers, and AO seems to be getting a good amount of donation to help the tracker stay up and running.

Inbox

Private message

Personal RSS

It took some time, but now, AO has got an RSS feed up and running, so now everyone can enjoy the freedom of downloading what they desire when it is released.

Conclusion

Since that was written, AO has come far. The one thing I still personally miss and would like to see implemented is a home/start page (and maybe, but just maybe another stylesheet alternative) (these have now been implemented). Other than that, I can't really think of anything other for this tracker to get better overall. Sure, there are always things that can be improved, but since AO went ratioless, it established itself as one of my absolute favourite trackers, with very few downsides.

Since startup it has been constantly growing, and keeps on doing so to this day, and my personal prediction still is that it will establish itself as one of the really great trackers in a few months time.

Community wise, not every community gets better due to an increased amount of members. In AO's case, I the additional members were definately needed, and I think that new members are needed still. They've come far in a short time though, and the community is starting to take shape with growing forum activity and an active IRC channel.

Content wise I personally haven't noticed that big of a change, there is still a good amount of great quality content, whilst the staff are currently recruiting new uploaders. Although good already, I'd say that there is room for a big improvement on this front, which we probably can await due to the recruitment and increasing number of users.

What about the speeds then? Apart from trackers here in my home country, AO is one of the few trackers which maxes out my bandwidth. The seedboxes had a negative effect in that it was hard competing with them for upload, but now that the tracker has gone ratioless, it's not that big of a deal anymore.

In conclusion, I think AO is a good tracker for anyone not wanting to go through the hassle of trying to obtain an invite for any 'hard to get'-tracker. People new to torrenting have also got a solid first choice, since there's still open registration (until January 1st) and a lot of invites after that date.

Community: 4/5 (The community is a lot more active compared to just a few weeks ago)
Content: 4/5
Speeds: 5/5

Almost all pictures in this review have been provided by AO staff, so don't worry about them not being edited.