X264 Birthday

Another Torrent Birthday

X264 Happy Birthday

We’re turning 6 years old this weekend, and we’re also announcing some big changes that we’re sure all our members will love. Tomorrow, the 15th, we’ll be starting off our birthday celebrations with Free Leech on all Exclusives. New Exclusives will be marked free manually by staff, not automatically as it has been done during past birthdays. This is to prevent any abuse of the Exclusive system during this Free Leech. This of course is just the beginning, so please pace yourself and remember not to hit and run on anything. Those who have been members during past birthdays know that the celebration can last up to 3 weeks.

Again, we’ll be starting the celebrations on the 15th. We felt you guys might appreciate a bit of warning this year, especially new members who don’t know we have a yearly Free Leech Fest around this time. Members will know when it begins when they see a red notice about the Free Leech pop up on every page. We will also update this News post and will continue to update it with any changes, so please check back regularly. You can also join in on the celebration here in the forums!
Now for those big changes…

One of them is our decision that after the birthday we will be leaving all our Internal Encodes as Free Leech. Any new Internal Encodes will be marked free by staff. This means that over half of the site will essentially be ratio-free, and this ratio will only grow in time as more Internal Encodes are uploaded. Now, please remember that “Exclusive” does not always equal “Internal”. Most of the 3100+ Exclusives will be free (90% or greater), but some are just too old or bad in quality to make free (or otherwise don’t meet Internal quality), and need to be replaced with better encodes. This brings us to the next big change…

We’re opening up applications to anyone that wants to be an Internal Encoder. We hope this gives some of our members further incentive to learn to encode. As an Internal Encoder, any encode you do will be made Free. Our Encoding Guides have been recently updated and are ready and waiting for anyone willing to read and follow them. You can often obtain real-time encoding help in our IRC Encoding Help channel. There is also the Encoding forum. For those who are interested in the prospect of becoming an Internal Encoder, please check out this topic here.

One last item to inform our members of is that we’ve been lacking on donations for a few months now and could use a little help in that area. The generosity of our members to help keep our site running has never been an issue here, and we truly hate to ask this of our membership. We even had to shut down donations for a bit after the holiday season of 2009, as our users were being too generous too fast and we grew paranoid about having too much money sitting in the sites account. Long story short; we’re quite lucky due to our awesome userbase that we’ve been good on donations up until now, even through this worldwide economic downturn that has caused other private trackers to shutdown. So again, we could use a little help on donations to keep us going strong for another 6 years.