How Not to Admin a Tracker

I'm assuming most of the audience that is actually moving in the tracker direction is running or planning to run a small operation, for the time being at least. That means spamming all over the place for your site, and that means your previous identity (with all its slip-ups) is irrevocably connected with your site.

Chances are, when you first got involved in the P2P community, you were scared shitless. If you weren't, you should've been. If you were paranoid, you should have made a new account unrelated to any other you might have online. If you didn't, go do that now. Otherwise you're opening yourself up to a whole world of hurt. After a while, you start to relax, to become blasé about the whole copyright issue, and you start to get sloppy again.

Now take this unconcerned you and put it in charge of a BitTorrent tracker. You're probably a little concerned, but that goes away fast. It's just a small operation, after all. It can't hurt.

The problem is that small operations have a way of becoming big operations, and your behavior has a way of sticking around. Even if you've been careful to delete posts as you grow, the curse/blessing that is archive.org will remember your transgressions. All of a sudden, you're at the head of a booming site, and oh shit, what have you done? You go to cover your tracks, but it's too late, of course.

Chances are that if you're headed down this road, you're not far along. You can still change now. Don't make these silly mistakes. If you're going to be involved in your own community, which I recommend, create a new username for it. Don't let hubris enter into the equation. It's tempting to join other torrent sites and go "look at my awesomeness!". Don't. Your admin username should be used only in the context of your own site, and in your dealings with other sites. It's tainted in a different way, and it's dangerous to mix things together.

As well, it's helpful to have an alter ego. Create somebody that is plausibly of the same character as you, but comes from a dramatically different background. Trust me, it's a good idea. You're role-playing, and you should never drop that identity, even with your closest online friends.

Of course, this is the product of much painful experience. Do as I say, not as I do. Accessible as I want the prospect to be, it can be dangerous work, and you have to take it seriously, no matter the size of your site.

Retrospective 2: Promotion

Promoting any new site is a major issue. Word-of-mouth on the internet is not to be underestimated, but it won't do much for a site with no unique features—see yesterday's entry for a bit of discussion of that one. Even on an unusual site, word-of-mouth won't get things going very fast from the beginning, and you end up in the vicious cycle of having no material, making it difficult to pull in new members to add new material. Some people have ridiculously large collections of material gathered from various sources, such as audiobooks or movies. I know of people whose porn collections are measured in terabytes, but I prefer not to know them personally. Regardless, if you can upload your own collection piece by piece, you may be able to make your tracker appear much larger than it actually is, and use your unique material to pull people in.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do by way of promotion in the early days aside from shameless spamming. A point related to my earlier mention of the usefulness of connections: I am active enough on some high-profile communities that I could get away with throwing links into my signature and posting a few spam threads. Don't try this as a new member, and certainly don't try to join communities exclusively for the purpose of posting spam messages. It will only generate ill will towards you and your site. If you don't have a place to do this, it may be a good idea to hold off on your plans until you do. It's important.

Dump sites are great promotional methods. Sites such as MiniNova and Demonoid allow you to upload torrents tracked elsewhere, so configure your new tracker to accept unregistered IP addresses (temporarily if you intend to go private) and upload your torrents to a bunch of dump sites like that. In the torrents' descriptions, include a comment such as "find more great torrents like this at www.example.com". You can even throw a text file inside the torrent to the same effect. You'd be amazed by how well it works.

I'll leave you today with a couple of graphs showing the rate of growth of the site. As you can see, it pretty quickly surpasses the size of an average private tracker, so the processes involved may start to diverge a bit as we progress and as I start to deal with a larger and larger tracker.