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How to keep checking for new torrents posted on your favorite private tracker
How do you check if a new torrent is posted on your favorite private tracker? Some of us use autodl-irssi and some of us rely on RSS.
The autodl-irssi is useful when you want to download all torrents or when you know what you want so that you can setup filters accordingly. RSS would be better if you just want to be updated and see what is being uploaded; if there is something that interests you, you can dig further, and you may snatch it. That said, RSS might be slow if you want to be the among the first to snatch. It is more important especially if you are new and trying to build a buffer.
Then there are some trackers which do not have announce channels and do not support RSS. These trackers are also more difficult to build ratio because of this. Example: TCG trackers.
For such trackers, you have to manually check for new torrents every few minutes. And that sucks.
In my case, I solved this problem with the help of Firefox add-on "Distill Web Monitor" (formerly known as alertbox): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...ddon/alertbox/
It enables you to monitor specific area of a webpage (or entire webpage). Every tracker's "browse" page normally relies on table element to display the list of torrents. I use it to monitor specific cell td in the torrent list. If there are pinned torrents, my monitored td would be below those pinned torrent, otherwise the first td would do.
After selecting the webpage area to be monitored, you can set rest of the options e.g. monitoring frequency and mode of alert. Usually I keep the monitoring frequency between 5-15 minutes. Once I have added this to my watchlist, I can set the add-on to play alert sound, or I can set it up to email me whenever the chosen cell changes, which is when new torrent is added.
It may sound complicated but it is not, and if you know a bit about HTML, it is really very easy.
Now this whole setup is useful for me because when I am not sleeping, I am almost always in front of my computer. As soon as new torrent is added to any of my monitored trackers, it plays an alert. I can rush to see what is new. If it interests me, I will snatch it, or else I will go back to work.
If you spend most of the time away from your PC, this trick won't serve the purpose. Distill offers a cloud based monitoring service also, but it comes at a price and I find the price rather steep.
In my experience, this is slower than autodl-irssi, but it is faster than RSS.
YMMV
I hope it helps a few of us.
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