I have seen the coing from both sides. Ive admined on a public tracker, and I have moderated on a private tracker. Private trackers are not “elitist” they will generally accept anyone who is prepared to pull their weight. Any tracker who kicks out someone for having a good ratio in my opinion deserves what they get. Sure there is an element of difficulty to enter them, as they want to control numbers, and whether invites is an ideal mechanism is debatable.

With regard to donations, I personally dont like the fact that it is done. I also dont like ads that much either. The day that adverts were added to the public tracker I helped nurture was a horrible day for me. And the same goes for any private site.

Now I dont mind putting money into services that i use, for maintenance costs etc, I have put a lot of my own hard earned cash into things. However there is a limitation. Server costs are very expensive. The fact that you can stand here and imply that admins can afford it only implies that you have never tried to run a tracker and have no idea of the resources required. Eztv torrents (i dont have anything to do with their admin but im citing them as an example) can quite easilly generate 8-9mbps of traffic on ONE torrent. The associated server requirements for databases and alike are significant. My point? It costs money – lots of it. Yes you can get cheap servers which have little DDoS mitigation and perhaps 1TB/month transfer for around $150. However a busy site will soon go over those requirements, and no person would tollerate persistant time outs. So, you upgrade, you buy more bandwidth. All costs money. If you don’t believe that the costs could run so high, look into it for yourself.

For most people, $150 per month is a lot of money to take on and when you get your ideas that most sites are going to have to plough in several times (possibly 10 times) that amount to get a reliable service, you can quickly see that unless you are the CEO of Microsoft inc, you aren’t going to be able to source it. Even Ads wont cut it. (click through on most ads is only a couple of cents, you do the math).

So where does the excess come from? Thin air? perhaps someone has a money tree? Donations are the only plausable solution. On sites which are not subscription based, I don’t think it is unreasonable to reward people who donate, seeing as without it, the site wouldn’t exist.

Now in the case of Loke, I agree that was tragic. The fact that an admin would deem it appropriate to walk off with those sorts of funds is terrible, and brings a bad name on all sharers. However to suggest that all admins would do the same is callous and shows an inappropriate grasp of the situation. Most of the sites you have mentioned in your article never demand payment. It isn’t a prerequisite, and I would hope it never becomes so. IF it WERE, then I would support your point, but the Apache foundation asks for donations for Open Source technology. As do SourceForge for their requirements. You posted a topic on a public forum that also asks for money through donations through a recurring function. Sure you have posted previously that you have no problem with public trackers asking for donations. My point is why the distinction? You dont know their admins any more than you know the private ones. Who is to say that the admins at TPB are more trustworthy than the ones at TB or ST or any of the other sites that ask for money? your post stinks of lechery. I am forced to wonder if you have in fact been booted from one…

Private sites are safer than public trackers FACT, if people want to pay to web sites that they download that’s there choice but don’t go asking for anti-piracy groups to shutdown them down.

You say use public trackers and free sharing but there are so many leechers out there that rules must be put forward if there wasn’t private sites the would just be 70% leechers and the bittorrent trackers would be ruined becuase of people using cheating methods in order to get 1st proty on downloads.

Let people do what they like, if they make a mistake (I.E give money) that’s there problem not yours and don’t promote the RIAA and MPAA to shutdown web sites so we can be forced to go on public trackers to be raped by IP tracking anti-piracy bots.

gary kept giving BS about new servers and that he was buying new ones for all the members to enjoy which never happened, and on several occasions there were upgrades which never happened and all the technical jargon that he claimed he was doing was either done already and just twisted to sound good, or was done by several staff members.

in the end of it all a few staff quite over the fact that gary was still doing some major BS and never would admit to what was happening, then the ones that actually were still doing hard coding for him he simply got ri of.

im a member of WB and i cant see anything wrong with it and have been a member for just over 84 weeks. i have not once paid any donation or speed adjustment to them and they have never pestered me.

They have banned Az and As I was only trying to move my torrents from Az ot another client I got banned.

Please.

Thanks in advance

The fact is if you received a message from me bout cheating, I made damn sure it was right,if you werent cheating, you wouldnt gotten a message from me. Whoever you are Mr Brave anoymous person grow some balls and stop whining like a little girl.

quit bitchin and moaning.. if you don’t like it, don’t pay your $1 and try to win….