Unicode Recycling Symbols? ♺ = U+267A
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I notice that some torrents now bear the character U+267A (which shows up as a default "box" character in my browser) as a kind of marker. At first, I thought this was a marker for "freeleech" torrents, but now I see torrents which are not freeleech, but bear the ♺ character, as well as torrents which are, indeed, "freeleech," but which lack the ♺ character.
I looked it up at the Unicode Consortium, and found that it's the generalized "recyclable material" symbol, so I imagine this means something like the file is an allowed duplicate by virtue of being an improvement or better encoding or arrangement or something . . . but maybe one of the administrators can explain what this signifies, as I'm probably not the only man who is puzzled by it.
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I no longer work on the Torrent Side of the Site but have recently helped some members with issues posted in the Forums by Promoting some of their uploads that were not successful on initial upload for various reasons. It seems this symbol showed up on these promoted torrents at the time. I suspect these symbols have various reasons for being there. But as I said , one of the Torrent Guru's will have a much better answer for you soon.
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It is indeed 'recycling' of sorts.
You should notice all those torrents with that symbol say 'Original Post' with a date. And it is the staff's way of promoting some older torrents to the top of the tree again
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Yes, exactly. Since about mid December 2012 that symbol was put manually to the torrent title when promoting a torrent by changing it's date/time together with "Original upload: YYYY-MM-DD |" for the original date at the beginning of the description.
Since end May, when a moderator promotes a torrent, putting the symbol and original date is automated. For torrents which were already promoted before mid December 2012, this will create two date entries. Torrents which got already a recycle symbol won't get another original date entry added.
The indications of original date were done manually and over the years and different moderators, various forms of indicating a promoted torrent and it's original date (and time) were used.
Our current staffing doesn't allow to go through the torrent list to harmonize this manually, but if we see newly promoted torrents with old manual entries, they are edited to the new format.
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Great explanation, I was wondering about that symbol myself
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Is there any way for users to recycle torrents or is this a process reserved for mods and/or admins?
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Currently there is no way for members, except torrent staff, to promote (recycle) torrents.
There is since my earlier post added to the site's system an "auto recycler". It promotes old torrents, following a complex algorithm with a random component at a limited pace.
Staff uses the promotion for various reasons, e.g. an original with only 1 or 2 seeds in a duplicate report, testing if really dead before deleting, helping members to get it downloaded, helping members with ratio (torrents only seed by them), etc… but as there were complaints about too many promoted in the list, these cases are limited.
