x264 news

1) The good news is, we're back online! again!!1!

2) The bad news is, if you want us to stay online Donate now please! Zero donations this last month, due to being crippled off the internet I'm sure, but the coffers are running pretty low unfortunately. We have enough right now for another month at most, and no more rainy day fund. So if any of you get some nice tax returns, please think of us. We hate to have to ask for such right on the heels of a multi-week downtime, but we have no choice unfortunately.

3) The mixed news is the tracker and other things will be improving, but it will take a bit to get older torrent history updated as well as profile / torrent details display updated (big backend changes). More details within the full story below.

4) Only thing we really lost are some seeders. We'd like to get the seeder count back up to 40k+, and we'd also like to give you guys a little thank you for your patience. We will be turning on Site Wide 2x Upload sometime in the next week after we're sure the site is ready for it. So get seeding and let your friends know we're back!

The Full Unabridged Story: So, the story of the lost month of January 2012 goes like this. THE MAYANS WERE RIGHT!! Well, almost. Our host was moving to a new and improved data center, physically moving. There were some complications along the way with that which delayed setup time at the new location. There were some unforeseen slow downs during setup and almost a fire at the data center when a power box exploded. Several servers ended up having mechanical problems, ours among them. A hard drive was failing, we replaced both drives with brand new ones. One nic card (network interface card (the hole for gettin' on the interwebs)) was already dead, the second internal nic card got burned out, and a third replacement pci nic card ended up frying as well just a day later when we were finally online again. Trust me, you aren't as upset as we were about that. F**king crushing. Anyways, the server obviously wouldn't come back online with with no network access. It was determined that there must be something wrong with the motherboard as its dropping hardware like flies. So a whole new server was purchased and we are setting up one more time.

On the tracker side of news, we currently run xbtt which some of you may have noticed if you have looked at torrent announces and see the unusual usage of port 2710. Long story short, xbt is no longer working in the site's best interests. We are going to use this time as a catalyst to switch the site back to a php tracker which will be much more usable, fixable, toolable, bug-fixable, everythingable backend for us, and as a result better for you. We're beginning work on this project now, and plan to set up a redirect so that you shouldn't have to re-download all of your .torrents. You should be able to just keep seeding and have everything work once the everything is in place. If anything on that front changes, obviously we will let you know.

Because the backend for all of this involves a new and radically different structure for the database regarding torrent data, once we switch over to the php tracker it will be a while before you can see your past torrent history in your profile and such. We will work on keeping the peers table in torrent details / browse functioning first, work over to profile data and anything else that mentions torrent activity (top10, umm other stuff, etc lol). We are going to do everything possible to make the transition painless for you guys. The main pain will hopefully only be temporary lack of data display. Our biggest goal is to make sure that no torrents are lost and that old torrent files will still function perfectly fine. Your total stats like upload and download will not be lost. The individual torrents stats however is the type of thing that might take a while to restore.

The moral of this story.. Its been rough, but the changes that came from all this will actually be better in the long run.


Along the lines of improving the site and tracker, we are taking applications for coding volunteers to help out with projects, fixing bugs, and getting on some of the suggestions from the forums. So if you know php, mysql, css, regex, etc. and would like to help out, please let us know. This also seems like a good time to mention that images might need to be created or updated. Not sure if/how much it will actually come up, but it couldn't hurt to take note of the