Orpheus.network News - Welcome Back

Welcome Back, Welcome Home!

Welcome Back, Welcome Home!
It took an awfully long time, but we are finally back in action! In this announcement, we will explain what has happened, and what the way forward is. Please read all of this announcement, since all of it is important.

What happened?
On the 14th of August, the payment for Apollo's back-end server ran out. This was not the first time this happened, but it apparently was the last. O had gone offline from IRC a few weeks earlier due to server problems on his end, and W never was on IRC. Therefore, there was no way for staff to contact either of them. (Both O and W always refused other ways of communication, such as email)

Initially, we thought one of them would come around and pay the server, like it had been for multiple times in the past. However, as the days went by, we got the realization that this was becoming very unlikely. About a week after the site going down, Athena got into contact with the host, and she was told that the server was indeed unpaid, and had been wiped. (Since it wasn't paid a week after the expiry date)

At this point, we considered the site lost and gone, until a few days after, when O suddenly contacted us. O told us that he and W were no longer interested in running the site, and that they were going to let the site die. W was supposed to put up a RIP page, but this never happened, we are not sure why. (This is what O told us)

O said that W had made a full backup of the site and that he would ask W to give the database to the remaining staff, since Athena and Spine expressed desire to continue running the site. After about a week and a half O contacted us and said that W had agreed on transferring the database and that he would contact us for the handover soon. However, two weeks went by and nothing happened. O popped into IRC once or twice to tell us he was still waiting for W to upload it, but we never got the actual database. Also, we haven't heard from O nor W since.

About a week and a half after O had promised us the database, Athena discovered a backup of the Apollo site from the summer of 2017. This is a backup O had made during A's absence in the summer of 2017, and he would have used it to resurrect the site in case A would not return.

As you may know, A returned shorty after O had bought a new domain and servers, and this backup was never used. However, they left this database backup on the IRC server. (This backup was initially made on the IRC server by using the IRC bot's details to scrape all data from the back-end server) Our theory is that O simply forgot to remove or encrypt the database after A's return, and so it remained on the IRC server.

However, before we could use this backup to resurrect the site, we ran into a lot of problems. First of all, this database wasn't a regular SQL-dump, but consisted out of multiple text files with the encoding completely out of whack. This resulted in a lot of text being malformed, and most importantly, all torrent files completely dysfunctional. Bifrost and Spine spent about 50 hours combined in order to fix this complete mess, and in the end they were able to fully restore all the data.

Besides the database being malformed, we also had a lot of hardware issues with one of our servers, which took the host a long time to resolve. When these were finally resolved, we opened up for early access, which unfortunately revealed more problems.

We discovered some issues with Gazelle and Ocelot that prevented the site and tracker from operating properly. One of the larger issues was using wine for our EAC logchecker, which we've solved through switching to a python package which is far slimmer to run, eac-logchecker (available to check out on our GitHub), as well as some issues with getting Ocelot up and running smoothly. We wanted to clean these issues up before putting ourselves under massive load to ensure the best opening possible. This is why the initial ETA of Monday was not met. We could have opened a bit earlier, but we wanted to be sure that everything worked correctly before doing so.

What do you need to do after registering to Orpheus?
If you have used the special recovery page to use your old Apollo account to get access to Orpheus, all your uploads will be credited back to you very soon, if you were a part of the site in the summer of 2017. Your old upload/download buffer stats will also be transferred, although there will have been a buffer reduction to compensate for the insane amount of excess buffer that resulted from the site's initial global freeleech. We realize that this might be an inconvenience to some of you, but we really believe this to be in the site's best interest, as this will result in a much healthier economy.

If you were not in the database of June 2017, and you have signed up either via the recovery page or the referral system, you will not have any torrents credited to your account, nor any up/download stats. (apart from the default 3 GB up, of course) Since your account was not in the database, it is not possible for us to change your up/download stats to their values as they were on Apollo. We hope for your understanding here, this is the best we can possibly do with the data we have.

After signing up and reading this post, your first priority should be to get the torrents in your client seeding again. You can do this very easily by changing the announce URL in your old Apollo torrents to your current Orpheus announce URL (which you can find at the top of the upload page). It is recommended that you have all your torrents in the 'paused' state, you change the announce URL for your torrents, and then you re-check your torrents to ensure the torrent client finds your data. This is just in case if the directory structure changed or if files were moved around to prevent mass downloading all the torrents again. You are responsible for your downloads. We do not want any accidental users in ratio watch for accidentally re-downloading their whole collection due to not re-checking their torrents. In some clients, like uTorrent, you can easily mass-select the torrents and change the announce URL. However not all clients are that simple. To allow for easy mass-changing of announce URLs, we developed Greeny, a tool that can easily mass-change the announce URLs for a number of clients, on both Windows and Linux. More information about Greeny can be found here: wiki.php?action=article&id=112

Since the backup dates from June 17th, 2017, all torrents uploaded after that will unfortunately be lost. All torrents that have been uploaded after the backup date will have to be re-uploaded to the Orpheus site. Please be nice and allow people to re-upload their own rips, out of respect for the hard work they have put in. However, since this is pretty much impossible to enforce, we will count on your good will regarding this matter. After two weeks, this grace period will end and everyone will be allowed to upload everything.

Previous Apollo members should also read this wiki article for more information: wiki.php?action=article&id=114

Orpheus will be music only
On Apollo, applications, comic books, ebooks, comedy, audiobooks, and elearning videos were allowed alongside music torrents. However, Orpheus will be a tracker dedicated to music only. This means only music and content related to music, such as artist biographies, ebooks about learning to play instruments and elearning videos about music will be allowed. In addition to this, music related video, such as documentaries and concert films will be allowed at a later date that is currently undetermined.

In the very near future, the rules will be officially edited to reflect these changes. Music on Video however, will need a lot of development before we can make it work. It will happen, but don't expect it in the near future.

IRC
For those of you not aware, Orpheus also has an IRC server:

irc.orpheus.network
port +7000 for SSL (recommended)

The main chat channel on the IRC network is #orpheus, and you can join it just like you did on Apollo, using the Hermes bot. Please note that you will need to be connected with SSL in order to join this channel, as well as any other member-restricted channels. #help is open to anyone, and can be used for support. Idling is not allowed in #help.

Donations
Like any tracker, Orpheus relies on donations in order to keep all servers paid and the site up and running. Our current operation costs are about 350 dollars monthly, and we don't expect this to change in the near future. A donation system is currently under construction, and will be finished soon. In the meantime, please contact Athena if you want to donate, and she will handle your donation manually. For now, the minimum amount for donating is 10 USD, and we only accept Bitcoin (BTC). Please only send a PM if you really want to donate. If you have questions about donating, please send a StaffPM

Final remarks
Before going about our music torrenting business, it's good to point a few last things out:

First off, we want to thank everyone that has helped us in the past couple of weeks. A lot of people, and especially the developers, have put in a tremendous amount of work in order to get this site back on the road. The early access team has allowed us to discover and fix multiple bugs as well as starting to seed a substantial portion of the torrent database. Besides developers and early access members, there are a lot more people that helped us, but it would simply be too much to name all of them. You know who you are, thank you! :heart:

If you find any bugs, please report them in the Bugs forum, and we will try to fix everything as soon as possible. We have done our very best to get everything perfect, but there will probably be some rough edges here and there.

Finally, we want to address the issue of trust. Apollo wasn't a very stable tracker, and it had many issues. We want to do things differently, and we are very motivated to do so. Once we have ironed out any bugs that might appear, we will be much more reliable than the old Apollo site. We realize that trust is not earned by words, but by actions, so time will tell that this is true.

Now, it's time to download some music, shitpost in the forums and make a lot of collages. We hope that you will love this site as much, or even more, as you loved Apollo. We certainly do.

Much love,

The new Sysops and the rest of the Orpheus Staff :heart:

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