A Christmas Miracle (Merry Christmas, Happy New Year... Shitter Was Full!)

A Christmas Miracle

The air is cold, the snow is falling here in the northern hemisphere, and we have some things to bring to the attention of you, our users. So kick off your shoes, get some hot cocoa and let's discuss some of the updates we have for PTP, as well as looking towards the future with what we have in the pipeline. This is a rather large update, be warned.

Staff Roster Updates

Back in 2023 we teased two new developers coming on board once things shuffled behind the scenes, and now we are fully ready to go. We're sorry it has taken so long. Without further ado, please congratulations Socrates on their promotion to Developer and pterodactyl to the staff team also as a Developer! We look forward to their contributions, and hopefully finally breathing some new life via new features into the site.

As a reminder our Suggestions forums exist and now more than ever, we'd love for our users to make their voices heard for new features they'd like to see. Keep in mind the search function exists, so you don't mistakenly suggest something that has already been thought of. Now more than ever, we want to hear from the community about what you'd love to see on the site.

We also wanted to take the time to offer a huge thank you to our Producer alamak for doing a lot of work behind the scenes in cleaning up/merging code in order to get the development ready to go. It turns out that in hindsight that cleaning up 16+ years of code tends to take a lot of time and effort.

We would also like to take the time to welcome the two new moderators we have added to the staff roster: Snowy and Manulis as well as a new FLS Moonlight. Please make them feel welcomed by saying hello.

Torrent Rules Updates

2000 and Late

We've been purging dead XviD/AVI content in applicable situations over the last few years. This means that a lot of dinosaur format encodes were removed from the site to make way for modern H.264 encodes. Taking this a step further, in the coming month we are going to start systemically removing these from the site in cases where a H.264 encode is easily accessible and available.

Please note that as usual in keeping with the PTP spirit of having the largest archive possible, you may still upload new XviD/AVI files if it is the only format available. This includes different cuts of the same movie.

Dolby Vision Adoption

We initiated allowing the Dolby Vision format two years ago. Up until now, we have prevented pre-existing HDR10 Blu-ray remuxes and WEB-DLs from being trumped by releases that added Dolby Vision, in the interest of preserving retention and bonus point earnings.

The time has come now to embrace Dolby Vision at a higher scale. To this effect, we are now allowing trumping all Blu-ray remuxes and WEB-DLs that contain only HDR10 with ones that contain both Dolby Vision and HDR10. And yes, this includes replacing all MP4 Blu-ray remuxes with MKV ones.

Announce Channel Changes

We have updated the announce channel to much more dense and information packed announce format, to better accommodate for automation. You can see the new format in the new #ptp-announce wiki. You can also check out the thread where the development occurred by clicking here.

Autobrr has made some considerable changes to accommodate our new format and we'd like to extend our sincere thanks to their dev team for working with us on this project. Autobrr is recommended for rapidly getting new releases as well as freeleech. For details please see here and also here.

Many users' are using various types of software, like Radarr, which is aggressively polling the site in an overwhelming manor. With many users having thousands of polling requests per hour searching for new releases 24/7. This behavior is having a considerable impact on our infrastructure and everyone using these tools is responsible for making sure they keep request polling to a sensible level. Polling of this nature really shouldn't occur more than once per hour on a routine automated basis. If you must have releases faster, please setup autobrr on IRC by which you can get the release within the same second of upload. Staff will continue to revoke privileges for abusively frequent polling intervals.

Related to the polling client is poor usage of freeleech scraping. Due to the level of abuse, we've removed freetorrent searches entirely for User and Member classes and put it behind the Power User and above class (which currently requires one personally uploaded torrent). Freeleech pumping and dumping is not an approved method for boosting ratio. Activity intended solely for padding ratio is harmful and may put your account in jeopardy if done excessively. Our bonus system is deliberately extremely generous to the point where churning freeleech has never been really necessary, anyway.

For those of you who prefer to watch the announce channel in a form easily readable by humans, we now have #ptp-tickertape for all your needs. This format is considered unstable and not intended to be parsed. It also does not contain download links or keys.

Security, Security, Security

SSL Only

Going forward, we will be moving in the direction of a more security-minded approach regarding the tracker. This means that we are going to be going SSL-only in the future, with the non-SSL HTTP-only tracker permanently retired. This follows us implementing SSL-only IRC earlier this year. The anticipated phase-out for the plaintext tracker is going to be on June 25, 2025 (6 months from the time of this post going up). This also means that torrent clients that do not support HTTPS will be have to be removed from the client whitelist.

Invite Forums Split

One of the biggest complaints we've had about the Invites forums is the lack of any pagination or ability to separate unofficial from official invites. With a tracker which offers so many recruitment threads elsewhere as a site, we were unfortunately running into a problem where the usability of the two parts of the Invites forums were mildly annoying to use. To remedy this, we've separated the Invites subforum into Official Invites and Unofficial Invites. As always, these forums are linked to your invite privileges and if you can't see them and are unsure why, you should please open a Staff PM.

Invite Rules Refreshed

On the subject of invite privileges, we've started to tighten the screws on some invite-related issues we've been experiencing on the site. Namely, those using invite-centric forums to trade and buy invites, as well as those performing giveaways (GAs) of PTP invites. As such, the invite rules have been updated to 2024 standards with regards to places you may not offer our invites, as well as some other bits added for clarity's sake. Read the invite rules here.

To note a specific change: you may not invite "internet friends" you have only conversed with in the public eye (such as Discord servers, Telegram channels, Twitter, Reddit, and QQ groups). Doing so will get you and your invite tree banned.

If you have ever used an invite-centric site, given away/traded invites for PTP or any other reputable private trackers, or even bought an invite; now is your opportunity to come forward for the consideration of amnesty depending on how serious the offense is. Conversely, those who do not come forward now and who are caught later on will be judged much more harshly, which will likely lead to you permanently losing your account. To come forward, send a staff PM.

Password Changes

Recently we have noticed a sharp uptick in people reusing passwords and having out-of-date/not recently updated passwords, which is leading to an increase in bad actors gaining access to PTP accounts. We are strongly requesting that you replace your password with something secure and unique to PTP if you have not updated your password in over a year.

VPNs & You

Roughly five months ago we changed our policy to allow usage of VPNs/proxies for anyone using 2FA. However, lately we've run into a new problem: many people are still browsing via VPNs without enabling 2FA, which is no longer allowed. To fix this problem we have started warning people who don't follow this policy. If you have used a VPN without 2FA up to this point, all will be forgiven if you turn on 2FA and leave it on.

You should still notify us about travel or moving out of country, even if you have 2FA on.

A Grab Bag

Lastly, here are a few things which we have to announce that do not really fit anywhere else:

1. The inactivity requirements have been updated to be much relaxed: the new guideline only require a single sign-in per 365 days. People get busy IRL, it happens. We hope that these new rules will cut down on the time spent re-enabling users who were disabled due to inactivity.
2. The site welcome message has been updated. This was modified to include more accurate information that a new user actually should read, including our VPN rules and so forth. This was last updated in 2016.
3. The starting upload has been changed to 150 GB with 150k BP and the required ratio rules have been updated. 4K discs be large in size, yo, and the previously existing 15 GB of starting upload no longer reflects the current state of the average size of a torrent in the year of our lord, 2024. All existing users have been retroactively credited with the 150 GB and a 150k BP boost as a make good.
4. The minimum donation has been raised to $20. It was previously $10. This is to account for raising server costs, inflation, and to account for fluctuations in Monero value.
5. As part of our wiki overhaul project, we've updated the IP Guidelines/Rules and more clearly stated our Debrid Rules. Debrid services expose your passkeys to third parties and can and have been used to compromise accounts.
6. Re-iterating an existing rule, seeding and browsing via Tor is not allowed. Click here & and here for more details.