Donations

In light of yesterday's post, I'm going to spend the next few days addressing questions as they come up. Today's question is regarding encouraging donations.

In my experience, people are generally pretty decent sorts and will do what they can to support their favorite site, and I'm assuming that's you. I'm not into pushy salesmanship, and I don't think it's necessary. It is annoying and compromises the tone of your site, but more importantly, it crosses a rather important legal line between facilitating the sharing of copyrighted material and outright selling it. Where you want to stand on that question is entirely your own choice, but I like to stay on the light side.

However, I'm not opposed to the idea of buying ratio, as long as your site doesn't make it necessary for users to do so. Ratio represents a contribution to the site, and there are all kinds of ways to contribute. Some sites also provide ratio bonuses for long-term seeders, and I think there is very much the same thing going on here. If you've contributed, I have no problem with recognizing you for it.

I have a slightly less sunny image of donor/ratio perks, though. Any features that you provide to VIPs are features that you are denying to other users, which in turn prevents your site from being as usable as possible to as many people as possible - kinda the point in my view. Providing recognition is fantastic, but adding concrete features is a little more questionable. VIP-only forum boards will fracture your community, since the VIPs will tend to hang out with their kin and other users will never really be pulled into the fold.

In terms of recognition, I suggest simply giving users more control over their own profiles and the way they are presented to others. I know some sites allow avatars only to power users. However, since I only ever notice peoples' avatars rather than their usernames, I want to encourage as many people to have avatars as possible. You could allow people to customize the way their username is displayed, add more info to their profiles, maybe add custom stylesheets. None of these things have any practical use, but they provide a degree of social status as a reward, and that is enough. Of course, the ubiquitous donor star is a must.

I suggest placing a clear donate button on every page, but nowhere obtrusive. In keeping with my previous point regarding selling copyrighted material, I would keep it away from torrent description pages. Make it clear to your users that donations are always appreciated but never expected. A simple button in the header or footer ought to be plenty. I like Demonoid's approach of using an animated GIF that flashes briefly and subtly every couple of seconds. It draws attention without being too distracting.

Demonoid also has a neat donation system. I'm not sure I should be detailing it here, but you should be able to get some idea by making a donation yourself, or going through the process up to the point where you're asked to key in your PayPal account. Basically, donated money is received not through Demonoid but through a third party site, so PayPal can have no complaint. Very clever.

TorrentFries, inc.

In the past, I've made a point of steering clear of the legal nuances of tracker-running. The law varies dramatically from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and more importantly, I know jack shit about legal matters. However, I just thought I'd throw you a tidbit gleaned from one of my lawyer friends: the beauty of a capitalist society.

Basically, in the US, Canada, and the UK, corporations can only be sued for the assets of that corporation. This applies even if that corporation is just you and the assets are zilch. So long as you make it clear that you are always acting on behalf of the corporation, you're out of any legal troubles scott free.

Obviously, the practical implications are a bit more complicated, but that's my understanding, anyway. I invited him to write a guest entry for us, so if he takes me up on that, you'll get to hear a bit more. In the meantime, please take my "legal advice" with all the salt in the Dead Sea.

Back to the Basics

I realize that our focus has of late moved from tracker-specific discussion to more-general stuff that applies to any site or server and can be found in a bazillion places online. Since this blog is unique because it does chronicle the operation of a BitTorrent tracker, I'm going to get back to the meat of the thing for a bit. OnionRings plans to continue with his Linux series, but is sadly indisposed this evening.

In some senses I will cover some of the same material as our second-ever blog entry, but with a different focus. While that entry gave a quick overview of why and how to set up a tracker, I'm going to look a little more closely at the technical and logistical aspects of bringing a tracker online.

First off, what do you personally need to bring to the table? (You're probably the only one at the metaphorical table at this point, but the bringing should commence now.) Beyond anything else, you need to understand the BitTorrent protocol, and understand your tracker of choice. We'll talk a bit about choosing trackers shortly. If you plan on running a PHP/MySQL tracker, you'd better have at least a working knowledge of PHP and MySQL. From the get-go, you'll need to be able to peer into the inner workings of your site and see what makes it tick. You don't just need an understanding of the protocol, but of your own tracker. Trust me, admin panels are nice, but some things just require you to get down and dirty. However complete your chosen script may look at first glance, there will quickly come a time when you or your users bemoan the lack or poor design of some feature or another, and you will be forced to go in and remedy the situation. As the tracker grows and moves to its first dedicated server, it will also become important to know your way around Linux to some extent.

Secondly, you need a hook to pull people in. The most obvious aspect is to provide something that others can't. A unique idea is neat, but it's entirely possible to carve out a niche in a "market" that is well-developed but not saturated. For example, if you have terabytes of obscure movies that you have spent years collecting, starting a movie tracker to share these can be an excellent starting point. Of course, you will need to keep all the uploaded torrents active, even though you will be getting very few peers at first. For this purpose, you may want to consider renting a seedbox. The added cost may be hard for a brand new tracker admin to swallow, but your ability to saturate the connections of your first members will do a lot to encourage them to stick around and maybe even contribute some stuff of their own. As well, a unique design may sound frivolous, but it will lend your site credibility and a sense of longevity. I've covered some methods of early promotion in the post I mentioned above, so I won't rehash them here.

I hate to be defeatist, but if you can't meet these requirements, you should think twice about starting a tracker. Of course, the lovely thing about being a human is the capacity to learn, but you should get going on that learning well before you even consider getting into tracker territory. While I'm trying to demystify the role of the tracker administrator, it's certainly a job that not everyone has the skill and disposition to fill with any great success.

Moving on to more technical requirements, you will also need to choose a tracker. That's a given. The three most popular trackers under active development are TBdev, TorrentTrader, and the new Project Gazelle, although there are a ton of other options out there, so you shouldn't feel constrained to choosing one of these three. Shop around a bit. Detailed comparison of these and other trackers is well outside the scope of this entry, and perhaps even of this blog, but this should point you in the right direction. At the end of the day, it's up to you to select the tracker that best suits your particular tastes and needs. As a side note: for the love of God, don't use TorrentTrader Classic.

So, why not just boot Azureus or µTorrent or one of these handy ubiquitous little torrent clients that happen to include the ability to operate as standalone trackers? Hopefully this isn't a question you were asking yourself, but I'll answer it anyway. First, this isn't the purpose they were designed for. Just because they can run a tracker doesn't mean they should. They're not optimized for the purpose, they don't include features that are necessary for the smooth operation of a tracker (they're inherently open to anyone that wants to use them), and they include a ton of features and bloat that will just bog down your server. What's more, part of the sort of tracker we're discussing here is the index, or frontend. This is the bit where torrents are uploaded, downloaded, where users interact with one another, all that sort of stuff. The tracker itself is ridiculously simple in operation, as we will see in my eventual piece-by-piece breakdown of what it takes to build one from scratch. The important business is the complex frontend, and BitTorrent clients' wannabe trackers just can't provide this.

So, once you've selected the script that best fits your needs, it's time to choose a host. I've had some requests to list a number of torrent-friendly hosts, but that's not something I'm going to do for a number of reasons. The most important reason here is that I don't want to endorse a host that turns out to be unsafe, or to lull readers into a false sense of security. You may have noticed that even (especially) the biggest trackers tend to move around a lot. The world of web hosts is intrinsically volatile, so to proclaim that one host is perfectly safe, even if presently true, is to ignore the fact that this may not continue to be the case in the future. LeaseWeb was once a safe haven for trackers, but after losing a lengthy court battle on behalf of Demonoid and other trackers, all the will to fight has gone out of them. Nowadays, if a copyright holder says "boo", they'll turn around and shut you down.

So simply accept that no place is perfectly safe, and operate under the assumption that you could be taken down tomorrow – you could be. A good strategy to find places that are safer is to run whois lookups on established trackers' IP addresses. Presumably, if they are able to operate on a particular host, that host must be somewhat resistant to legal threats. The only problem is that many larger trackers own their own servers which they operate via colocation in the host's datacenter, while you are likely unable to afford more than a rented dedicated server (an important distinction to make). Not all hosts supply both options, and not all do so for reasonable rates. In addition to colocated and dedicated servers, I've talked about shared and virtual hosting in that previous article, so I'm not going to rehash that here.

This should be all you need to get you off the ground. Again, I'm not going into exacting detail on some of the technical points because I'm assuming that you will be able to handle the fiddly bits of your own accord. If you can't, like I mentioned, you probably shouldn't be running a tracker.

If there are any points on the subject (or any other, really) that you would like us to cover, leave a comment on this post and we'll do our best to touch on them in future posts.

Terminal Case

I was going to continue OnionRings' series on Linux configuration, but I don't have access to a clean Ubuntu install at the moment (or any other kind, actually), so I'll leave that topic for now. Instead, I'll rant a little about the future of the MAFIAA, and the RIAA in particular.

The popular opinion among pirates is that downloading music hurts no one. I've heard a variety of justifications for this, but the most popular opinion is that the free publicity (which presumably leads to album sales) counteracts lost sales. I'm no expert, but you're sure as fucking hell less of an expert than I am. What I will say is that, if this is true, it's true only for small bands and independent labels. The big boys can afford to buy as much publicity as they want. So they're right, it is hurting their sales. It's not hurting their sales by the number of copies downloaded times the full sticker price of the album, but it's hurting them nonetheless.

Don't mistake this for a bad thing. The big labels would have you believe that without them, there would be no music. Listen, bud. There was music before you came along, and there will be music long after you are laid to rest. What we will see the death of is McMusicians, singers and bands that everyone has heard of and that the most gullible of us consider to be the epitome of good music. You know who I'm talking about.

What will be left without the big labels? Musicians that aren't in the business of making millions of dollars. Record labels that are employed by the musicians, not the other way around. A world where the music industry is easier to break into because people are more open-minded about music they haven't heard on the radio at least 15 times. A world without the fat, corrupt husk that pretends to serve the needs of musicians and music-lovers alike.

The best bit of all: you can live in that world today. Listen to internet radio and find new bands. Go anywhere with live music, be it a concert, bar, club, coffee shop, or street corner. Buy independent records from independent record stores. Learn to play an instrument yourself! The labels aren't afraid of downloaders. They're afraid we'll realize that we don't need them. Downloading music won't hurt them as much as the realization that you never need to buy anything from them, ever again.

Naturally, all of the sentiments above can be directly applied to the film industry as well. Notice how movies are all shit these days? Try independent cinema. Trust me, there are still movies being made that don't suck.

Okay, that's all for now. I'll see you on Monday, or better yet, OnionRings will. I'll see if I can make him do an article next time.

A brief update: apologies to anyone that was expecting this to be a pun and for me to cover command-line stuff. I think OnionRings is indeed planning to get his series going again for Monday, and I'll try to get a little further ahead on my posting as well.

Write Your Own Disclaimer (in your spare time)

By popular demand, I give you: do-it-yourself disclaimers.

Okay, first I'd like to offer a disclaimer about this post. I'm not a lawyer, and I haven't consulted with one in writing mine. I'm planning to have a lawyer member look over/rewrite our own disclaimer. Well, a member that is ostensibly a lawyer—see my previous comments on judging online character.

Anyway, there are a number of important points to cover. I know Demonoid has 34 pages of text in their disclaimer, which apparently contains some amusing points for those with the attention span to read through it. I guess they figure the length is a deterrent to people actually reading it, but lawyers are renown for their long attention spans. I think it's more important to make your point in a concise manner that your friends can understand as well as your enemies.

Basically, you need to address the following points:

No "uploaded"/copyrighted material is stored on this server. It's not. Only metainfo files (.torrent) are stored on the server, and they only contain SHA1 hashes which describe the material. All material is located on individual users' computers, so you're perfectly safe in making this argument.

Given that part of the disclaimer, for the love of god don't use your server as a seedbox. That'll just increase your culpability in this sort of thing and will make the bit about copyrighted material a total lie. What's more, running it as a seedbox can have all manner of detrimental effects on your server's performance, not just in terms of bandwidth but also drive speed. I know you probably have a 10 or 100 Mbps line with very low utilization, but resist the temptation.

The site cannot be held accountable for the behavior of its users. It is merely offers an indexing service. It's true. You can make the analogy to Google potentially indexing child pornography sites, but that's a little extreme. The point is that you merely provide a service.

It is the responsibility of the users to ensure that they hold the copyright or attain proper permission prior to uploading material. You may want to hide this statement a little, since some members will inevitably take it to heart. I've definitely had some concerned posts to that effect, to which I've given some rather tongue-in-cheek responses. Obviously, the idea is to turn one big fish into a whole lot of little fishies, reducing your own culpability without greatly affecting the masses.

Finally, you will comply with any and all formal copyright notices sent from the proper jurisdiction (where your host is located, since they shouldn't know where you are personally located). Obviously, you're not hosted in the US... are you? The idea is to make a hell of a lot of work for anyone that would attack you, encouraging them to go after other sites. You also need to provide a clear email address for copyright complaints. Better that they go whining to you than to your web host, which will always have contact information prominently displayed and will (with some exceptions) likely take you offline if a copyright owner says "boo".

It's doubtful that this will do a whole lot of good, but you never know. Once I get some better legal advice, I'll make another post correcting any glaring mistakes...

Retrospective 4: Dedicated Hosting

In April, our host began complaining about the load of the burgeoning site, so we started shopping around for dedicated servers. Ketchup ended up finding a server for €60/month ($80 US at the time) with EasySpeedy, a Danish web host. I asked them in advance how they felt about running a BitTorrent tracker, and they responded with the attitude I mentioned in Tuesday's post: "if we don't hear about it, it's fine". And it was. We were hosted there for over a year before we outgrew that server and had to look elsewhere, and no copyright holder contacted them in that time.

There are a couple of notable things about this move. First, it was the first time I'd used Linux to any great extent, and certainly my first experience with server administration. I had enough experience with UNIX on Mac OS X to know how to navigate directory structures and edit files, but that's about it. I selected Ubuntu to install on the server because I'd heard it was the friendliest, and that certainly did help me a lot. I'm still amazed that I was able to keep the site running with such limited experience, basically working off what tutorials I could find with Google. In fact, I'm still learning, so later posts (particularly once OnionRings comes onto the scene) ought to have some useful info on that front.

Naturally, the second point is the financial. Sorry for the short posts lately, but I had to break what was originally a ridiculously long post down a bit. So, on Monday, we'll talk money.

Retrospective 1: Conception

Since starting TorrentFries, I've had a number of people ask me how to start a successful tracker. The first question I ask is always "What sort of material do you want on the site?" Only one person gave me a response other than "everything". Incidentally, I'm now involved in some small way in the development of that other person's tracker. The two aren't directly related (I'm not a sword for hire), but they're not entirely unrelated either.

Listen, I'll let you in on a secret. There are tons of "everything" trackers out there. Come up with something unique to pull people in.

Personally, I believe in unconventional activism. In this case, deep-fried goods are too expensive, so I thought a BitTorrent tracker might get people talking about the problem. Since nobody else had one going, I set out to create one of my own.

The first step in the process was to find a host and a tracker. In this situation, personal connections are nice. I was lucky enough to know a guy that ran a shared web host, so I was able to get things running for $5/month, plus the cost of registering a domain name ($12/year). However, any shared host worth their salt should figure out that someone is running a tracker pretty quickly, so don't count on slipping that under the radar. Instead, you might consider a VPS, which allows you to rent part of a server, rather than having to pay for the whole thing. You should have plenty of control over your server, and get more leeway in terms of traffic. A basic VPS will cost you around $40/month.

However, be aware that there's no way you can buy security for any price you can afford at this point. The best you can hope for is a web host that will look the other way until they hear from a copyright holder. Most dedicated and VPS hosts I've encountered will do this; in fact, some hosts have told me this directly. What you can do is maintain daily off-site backups and have a backup host lined up in advance in case of the worst. We'll talk about contingency planning a bit later on.

Choosing the software involves a fair bit of research. I was pretty lazy on that point, and have been paying for it ever since. The only two trackers I checked out were TBdev and TorrentTrader Classic. TBdev is used by a lot of big-name private trackers such as Torrent-Damage, TorrentLeech, the late OiNK, LearnBits, BitMe, BlackCats, BrokenStones and so forth. However, the administration functions are almost non-existent, and the amount of customization available in TorrentTrader appealed to me. I didn't want to spend much time digging around in the code to get everything to work properly.

I've got a fair bit of experience with graphic and web design, so I took it as given that I'd build a new theme from the ground up. The product was in retrospect not that impressive, but it was certainly usable and unquestionably better than what I'd started with.

Finally, before going live, I asked a friend to take a look at the site. I expected him to spend perhaps 5 minutes and respond with a "looks good", but he ended up giving me a two-page essay including everything down to copy-editing in the FAQ. It was great help, and I was able to refine a lot of features that way.

Tomorrow: details on how to pull members in.