@zullu Yes, the tracker seems to be non-responsive for me too.

i've noticed a significant uptick in new torrents that are just repackaged forms of previous torrents with a barely coherent theme with flimsy titles like "EU fan sites", "muscle fuck scenes", etc.

there don't seem to be any clear rules to prevent such "collections" from cluttering up the list of torrents, or the enforcement seems pretty lax.

if nothing is done to prevent this type of abuse, it will become harder and harder to find properly indexed content.

@turlough I've been experiencing similar issues since the last 3-4 days. I'm using qBittorrent via VPN so it's unlikely that your setup is at fault. It's more likely that there has been a configuration change in the DoS protection for the tracker preventing so many of us from connecting. It's hard to imagine an actual DoS attack lasting so long (although I don't know this for sure).

@MrMazda Have server-side changes been looked at so far (the entire stack from the DDoS protection to the actual tracker service)? To my mind, there has been sufficient evidence to indicate that none of the affected users have changed anything in their client.

I'm down to seeding barely 100 torrents down from approximately 16,000, and I'm seeing a steady uptick in the number of reseed requests since the start of the outage. If a fix is not found soon, I plan to stop seeding entirely for the time being.

@vashkevron From what I can tell, it appears to be overeager DoS protection. For instance, if I switch between different VPN servers, things suddenly start working again for the first few minutes before dying back down.

It is good that the issue has been acknowledged finally.

Besides the immediate fix, it would be very useful if the admins could come up with one or more steps to more conclusively determine that the server/tracker is at fault in the future. Anything that avoids the unnecessary tug-of-war that transpired over the last 2 weeks as we tried to convince folks that there is a problem with the tracker and not with individual user clients.

Regrettably, some users ended up resetting their passkeys in the false hopes of a quick fix - another thing that could have been avoided by a quicker acknowledgement of the issue than the 10 days it took here.

Would it be possible to take action against this trolling uploader? They don't seem to have stopped. Within the last month, they have created 20+ new torrents with the obscure "big white boy" moniker.

@spiffyweasel-0 Also, nothing has changed in my client+VPN setup for the last ~3 months so it's unlikely to be an issue we (the users) can fix.

@DirtyNick same here, nothing has been resolved yet. Since you reset your passkey, you'll need to redownload every torrent to start seeding again.

perhaps these are just blatant attempts at baiting other users into downloading humungous torrents to boost their seeding ratios.

@ianfontinell-0 said in naked advertisement spam in torrents:

@spiffyweasel-0 it's definitely not endorsed but on the same not it's not against the rules so, in a sense you're right, everyone can create their own site and advertise it in torrent descriptions.

if you have enough free time and money i suggest you try it so that we will know for real how effective this approach is, but i suspect that it's not great.

another thing is, it'd be hard to check metrics to see who is visiting your links coming from GT because the site removes referers from the URLs, it will look like the person has typed the URL manually instead of clicking an ad.

right, which is why i suspect this is not just some affiliate (since the referer stripping would prevent click tracking as you said) but the actual owner of that site who earns money by running ads on the site itself.

for some time now, there's been this one uploader who regularly posts content typically farmed from other existing torrents, or other low-quality online sources. the signature features of their torrents are:

• a generic title a la "hot latino fucked by bbc", designed to cast a wide net and maximize the number of clicks, and
• a trivial description that contains little more that multiple arbitrary links to an external streaming site, "gaysdream.com".

presumably, this is a struggling promoter trying to drum up traffic for this particular streaming site - kudos for their grind.

is this sort of torrent posting actually endorsed by the moderators though? if so, there's nothing stopping more people from creating their own sites and spamming advertisement links inside recycled clickbaity torrents.

(sorry for the pun in the title btw, couldn't resist

@ianfontinell-0 thanks, clearing the cache didn't work but ctrl-shift-R did the trick.

@spiffyweasel-0 said in Is there something wrong with the layout?:

...and it looks like i can't even submit a helpdesk ticket about it. the messed-up layout disables the "Help me!" button on the ticket filing page making it unclickable.

@MrMazda any suggestions on how i could surface this issue to the relevant folks?

...and it looks like i can't even submit a helpdesk ticket about it. the messed-up layout disables the "Help me!" button on the ticket filing page making it unclickable.

@Unknownforce yes, the layout has been messed up since sometime midday yesterday PST. there are a bunch of JavaScript errors when you load any site page.

@bigdmck thanks!

@frostycab your suggestion about giving feedback on user reports is excellent. you should probably create a separate discussion topic for it here so it gets more attention.

@frostycab maybe we can use a carrot instead of a stick to solve the problem?

well-curated collections can get some special "featured" tag to indicate that they're worth downloading. that could make the site easier to navigate as well, by allowing users to search by the tag and bypass all the spam.

there's precedent for doing this in other open collaborative contexts. for instance, wikipedia.org as well as pbc.xxx have "featured articles", indicated by a star on the top right of the page.

in any case, we can talk all we want but real action will require site admin input. i had reached out to them earlier asking if they are open to accepting new code maintainers or contributors but never heard anything back. maybe it will take another upstart competitor to show up for gaytor.rent to finally up its game.