3-4 years ago h33t was using IP blocklists to protect sharers using the h33t tracker. the idea was you had peer guardian on your own computer and the tracker also ran a blocklist then known evil IPs could not track your sharing unless they connected using DHT. so h33t disabled the DHT flag in torrents, but this is no longer the case. following subsequent guidance from thepiratebay crew new learning, the global community moved as one to adopt DHT and h33t dropped the idea/practise of a ring-fenced tracker

today h33t recommends DHT is enabled

haters will hate, Sketch, that’s what you and your cronies are known for. we know who you are

I’m not trying to single anyone out for being responsible for the problem: lack of understanding of how to write a tracker-list properly is widespread across all the open trackers and not limited to any one site or any small number of uploaders.

Just to clarify, I’m not clear on who’s uploading what-exactly to where-exactly (I’m not a big user of EZTV, so it’s absolutely none of my business), but given your good reputation, I presume you’re right about someone else being responsible.

The torrent “Beaver Falls S01E02 720p HDTV x264-BiA” is on your home page at the time of writing (12 August 2011). Comparing the tracker-list you’ve provided here to the tracker-lists in each of the different .torrent-files you’ve linked to shows some interesting variations.

-----------------------------
• The first Zoink link and BT-Chat both have .torrent-files with correct, properly-written tracker-lists, exactly as you've specified in your reply:
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80
udp://tracker.istole.it:80
udp://tracker.ccc.de:80
udp://sawtooth.zapto.org:7070
-----------------------------
• TPB has this:
http://tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80
udp://tracker.istole.it:80
udp://tracker.ccc.de:80
http://tracker.hexagon.cc:2710/announce
-----------------------------
• KAT has this:
udp://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce
http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
http://tracker.publicbt.com/announce
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
http://tracker.publicbt.com/announce
udp://tracker.ccc.de:80/announce
http://tracker.ccc.de/announce
-----------------------------
• Torrage has this:
udp://tracker.ccc.de:80/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
http://tracker.publicbt.com/announce
udp://tracker.ccc.de:80/announce
http://tracker.ccc.de/announce
-----------------------------
• The second Zoink link has this:
udp://tracker.ccc.se:80
http://tracker.ccc.de/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80
http://tracker.publicbt.com/announce
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80
http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
http://tracker.publicbt.com/announce
http://tracker.ccc.de/announce
-----------------------------
• Finally, the magnet-link has this (which rather defeats the point of being a magnet link, or so it seems to me):
http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce
-----------------------------

All the entries are untiered in all of the lists, so – as I understand it – those multiple entries are certainly overloading the trackers.

All of the links conveying these links are listed on your home page and no one of them is emphasised as being the “correct” or “official” link, so there’s no obvious way for casual users to know they should prefer one over the others.

I don’t know who’s responsible for the more bizarre tracker-lists or where the people involved are operating – as I’ve said, I don’t believe it’s any of my business (and especially not on an open forum like TF) – but somebody’s writing the things and there must surely be some way to let them know they’re doing it a bit wrong.

I appreciate that EZTV isn’t responsible for the behaviour of uploaders on other sites and that you are busy people, but if this is something that can be be fixed with just a little communication (as I assume it can be), then it’s surely worth a try.

Thanks very much for your time, EZTV. All comment is meant to be constructive – I sincerely hope nobody take anything personally.
Have a good one. :)
– DG100

PS: If anyone’s interested in doing it, would it be possible for someone to write a good guide to writing tracker-lists and put it up here on TF? It might help a great many uploaders. I’d do it myself, but I’m not confident about everything I think I know (and I haven’t found out some things, such as whether or not (and which) port numbers should always be specified, or whether an entry should always have “/announce” at the end or not).

This is the list of trackers we use:

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80
udp://tracker.istole.it:80
udp://tracker.ccc.de:80
udp://sawtooth.zapto.org:7070

So I am unsure where you getting this whole “numerous entries” unless someone else is reuploading our stuff and filling it with crap.

Even on brand-new torrents, typical tracker lists from places like TPB, EZTV, etc, tend to be full of numerous errors – and as a result, some of the more popular torrents are effectively DDoSing the open trackers.

Some common errors [disclaimer: I'm not an expert, so I might have some of this wrong, but these should be mostly correct]:

• Listing HTTP and UDP tracker entries as separate entries instead of tiering them properly is a bad thing. On paper, this may seem like a good idea: hitting both simultaneously means that so long as one is working, the torrent should start downloading a little quicker. In practise, all that’s happening is that we all end up with unresponsive, overloaded trackers that no-one can connect to – and when all the open trackers in your list go down (something that’s happened more than once already), no-one can download or seed back anything without going to DHT (it’s problematic for some of us – and having all our eggs in one basket doesn’t seem very clever to me);

• Multiple entries for the same tracker – and I’m thinking specifically of the torrents reupped to EZTV that have tracker.publicbt.com listed four times over (and if you happen to be one of the original uploaders, thank you very much for the upload, but by Jesus, God and all the angels in heaven, why in the name of fuck are you doing that!? Are you deliberately trying to shut down the open trackers?);

• An error that’s not really on-topic (but still worthy of mention since they waste every users’ bandwidth) is including trackers that (as far as I know) have been dead for years, with no likelihood of returning, such as tracker.piratebay.org (yes, there’s still someone using it) and dennis.stalker (also worth a mention is tracker.ccc.de – IIRC, it was announced on here as an open tracker for everyone to use replacing dennis.stalker, but is it actually running at all? I don’t recall ever seeing it work from anywhere);

• Finally, it would be helpful if end-users could move away from the more badly-behaved clients that cause problems (as surprising as it may seem, there are good reasons why so many are banned from private trackers).

Outside of this, it would be extremely helpful if torrent-sites themselves could do a bit more to educate their uploaders, or even automatically strip and replace tracker lists, as they’re ULed by users – there are just too many problematic torrents out there.

I would also be pleased if some BT client developers could stop assuming everyone’s going to abandon trackers (highly unlikely for the moment) and resume development of better tracker-management features. Automated dupe-removal, tier-restructuring and dead-tracker-blocking would be an excellent start.

As I said at the start, none of this should be taken personally by anyone (all well-intentioned uploaders, sites and devs have my thanks) – this is just stuff that needs fixing. :)