What.cd News: Cleaning Up Public Torrents

Over five years ago, we made it impossible for users to upload non-privately flagged torrents on What.CD. Since then, most residual public torrents have been downloaded and trumped. As of the time of this writing, only 947 torrents lacking the private flag remain. With your help, we can drop that number to 0.

We more recently encouraged the trumping of remaining public torrents by notifying their uploaders, and by listing them in one location. The Public Torrents list is maintained on What.CD's Pursuit of Perfection page (a.k.a. better.php). This list displays a randomized sample taken from the overall group of non-privately flagged torrents each time it's refreshed.

We're now giving every torrent on the aforementioned list Neutral Leech Status in order to speed up the trumping of the remaining public torrents. If you're unfamiliar with Neutral Leech, it works by preventing both the data you download and the data you upload from affecting your ratio. After being downloaded (for "free"), these older, public torrents can be trumped by shiny, new ones. The trumping torrents will not be Neutral Leech, and uploaders will receive normal upload credit for their replacement torrents.

This is a great opportunity to help remove the stain of a bygone era, and brighten What.CD's increasingly immaculate luster. To the die-hard neat freaks out there: we encourage you to check out the other lists on Pursuit of Perfection as well, as better.php offers a great way to improve the site while improving your stats.

All that said, please keep the following information in mind before downloading and trumping:

It is your responsibility to check for any issues in the content you upload. If you download one of these torrents and trump it, you will incur penalties for rule violations in the original content that have gone unnoticed. For example, it is your responsibility to ensure that any bad tags or file names are corrected, that the torrent isn't an unacceptable transcode, and that all other upload rules are being met.

When you're ready to trump, please report the torrent you're trumping with 'Private Flag Trump' as the reason.