BitTorrent Tracker Software “Gazelle” Debuts on What.cd
Written by Ben Jones on April 22, 2008After a sneak peak and trial run last month, the what.cd team has finally made a semi-public release of the Gazelle tracker and site software, by doing its first large scale roll-out on its own site.
Gazelle, as we reported back in November, is an attempt by the group to replace the aging and buggy TBsource. It is intended as a fast, flexible system, that reduces load on servers and databases, whilst increasing features.
Over the weekend, what.cd was upgraded, so that all of its roughly 43,000 members could try it. Whilst there were initial bugs, including a problem with IRC channel password keys, everything seems to be running smoothly now.
More of a problem was a DDOS the site experienced when it had just gone live to its members. The attack which lasted over 4 hours and pulled 100Mb/sec, frustrated a number of the site’s users.
Also a source of frustration for many was a misunderstanding over a ‘freeleech’ offer. Done as a stress test, it was canceled after 6 hours , the announcement about it said it could last 24.
Many users who grabbed stuff they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise in an attempt to increase their ratio, started downloads and still had them going when it was stopped, which lead to some friction between staff and users. As always, the golden rule is to never download something you don’t want in an attempt to boost ratio.
However, Gazelle is not just for music trackers. Another site, Ntorrents, will be changing over to it shortly, according to an administrator there. This will be as much of a test in many ways for Gazelle as this weekend’s launch on what.cd was. This time though, it will be testing its viability beyond music trackers.
The developers have not yet announced a release date beyond ‘when all the major bugs are fixed’. Stay tuned for more.
Previously: BitTorrent Throttling ISPs Exposed by Azureus
Next: Anti-Piracy Blunder Shuts Down BitTorrent Tracker
86 Responses
It’s pretty good alright. Be good to see on a few more sites.
private trackers suck ass
what.cd has become really easy for finding good music now :) TPB is also gonna install Gazelle XD
yea this is good news, once the bugs are out. this will be great news for other sites, as it will be cheaper to run! welldone what.cd staff and welldone for making it public!
welldone is correct dave and its well deserved HOWEVER i have heard that the system has already been exploited and yes private trackes really do suck ass.
ps you cant spell slaughter without laughter
has TF got its own IRC channel?
i would defo like that…..
real-time twitter-based pre feed:
http://twitter.com/pre_feed
getting on for 10K entries so far….
What is just a shitty site, it is full of transcodes, mislabeled torrents and hit n runners. Now with gazelle, it’s still just a shitty site with a even shittier design.
[quote comment="355378"]What is just a shitty site, it is full of transcodes, mislabeled torrents and hit n runners. Now with gazelle, it’s still just a shitty site with a even shittier design.[/quote]
Do you have something better? If not, STFU as you are just showing what an idiot you are. You must have a grudge or are just jealous ;)
[quote comment="355134"]private trackers suck ass[/quote]
That’s funny LMAO :) Strange that of the 2 private trackers I belong to, the quality is better than any of the other public trackers available and the reliability far exceeds those of public trackers. Do I sense frustration from someone who is just pissed off that they are not a member? All it takes is sharing back what you download to be a member of a private site as I have never paid a dime to either of the private trackers I belong to. If you can’t share back, you shouldn’t be torrenting.
Does a DDOS really increase page generation time?
gazelle it excellent.
here’s some of the nice features that you haven’t mentioned:
- you can use your own CSS without the need for extra greasemonkey scripts/plugins/workarounds.
- the amazing wiki style artist pages, which include all their releases and formats on one page (see http://i26.tinypic.com/28iyijd.png for an example)
- the controversial new request system, whereby you pay in upload ratio to place a request, but at the same time, if you fill a request you get a “bounty” of ratio as a prize and incentive for filling them.
gazelle has fuelled more downloading on the site (which was a problem before - too many seeders!) and just before anyone else comments and says “lolz it doesn’t werk there are l0adz of bugs” remember it is in beta stage and is still being tested.
Exactly that is the problem com. You don’t release testing software to users without giving them a choice.
they have a choice alright. there are plenty of other sites that use TBDev if they want to continue using that. not least waffles.
I’d like to trade a invites, All4Nothin invite for a what.cd invite, or if someone would like to be generous…
SiD.Remote@gmail.com
[quote comment="355632"]I’d like to trade a invites, All4Nothin invite for a what.cd invite, or if someone would like to be generous…
SiD.Remote@gmail.com[/quote]
to get invited to what.cd go to their IRC. it’s easy enough.
[quote comment="355642"][quote comment="355632"]I’d like to trade a invites, All4Nothin invite for a what.cd invite, or if someone would like to be generous…
SiD.Remote@gmail.com[/quote]
to get invited to what.cd go to their IRC. it’s easy enough.[/quote]
irc://irc.what.cd/#What.CD-invites
Go there and maybe you’ll get lucky. :)
Hey I will trade a invite to Demonoid or Scene Machine for a invite to what.cd. If anyone is interested e-mail me whatcd.invite@yahoo.com
The freeleech was actually left on for the full 24 hours. They just announced it was over after 6. Nobody actually suffered any ratio harm over it people just thought other people might have.
What.cd really SUCKS! Garbage of torrents and ban users who was banned on waffles (with his miracle system (?)), wtf?!. Don’t recommend it. :/
what.cd <3333
[quote comment="355807"]What.cd really SUCKS! Garbage of torrents and ban users who was banned on waffles (with his miracle system (?)), wtf?!. Don’t recommend it. :/[/quote]
hhha yea. that was the funniest shit. it was failing so bad they were banning users for talking about it. censorship on a torrent site ftw!
[quote comment="355792"]The freeleech was actually left on for the full 24 hours. They just announced it was over after 6. Nobody actually suffered any ratio harm over it people just thought other people might have.[/quote]
can you speak for all 43k users? did they all tell you? did they all post?
[quote comment="355842"][quote comment="355792"]The freeleech was actually left on for the full 24 hours. They just announced it was over after 6. Nobody actually suffered any ratio harm over it people just thought other people might have.[/quote]
can you speak for all 43k users? did they all tell you? did they all post?[/quote]
Is it possible that maybe he has insider information?
Any idea to when the source will be public? Gazelle was going to be open source right? projectgazelle.org is still only in a half usable state :(
anyone else having problems accessing what.cd? i can’t get in from my home pc. tried flushing dns and all kinds of bull. wont work?
please somebody!
[quote comment="355930"][quote comment="355842"][quote comment="355792"]The freeleech was actually left on for the full 24 hours. They just announced it was over after 6. Nobody actually suffered any ratio harm over it people just thought other people might have.[/quote]
can you speak for all 43k users? did they all tell you? did they all post?[/quote]
Is it possible that maybe he has insider information?[/quote]
i didnt know insiders can poll 43k users on what happened to every single one of them. i heard peoples ratios got fucked. and i have read that people up/down stats are weird and STILL not adding up correctly or counting at all
Well as staff I can say for certain that freeleech stayed on for over 14hours after we announced it was ending. We needed to reduce load to fix issues, so announcing it was over without actually ending it saved any ratios of users that queued up and went afk. It is very likely that some users upload stats also did not report correctly, this is true with any site when the tracker goes offline. They may tell you leave your clients open and your stats will report correctly when the tracker is up but A: this is not always the case and B: most users fuck around and interrupt it even if it always did announce correctly after downtime.
-PLUR
1. no comments
2. no categories (icons are the best way to browse quickly)
3. required 50mb+ upload tax for any requests
4. did i mention NO COMMENTS?
5. no report button
6. did i mention no categories? the browse page is just an en entire page of huge + signs and very tiny artist/album text.
they shot themselves in the foot by taking away these basic functions of a bit torrent tracker.
gazelle isn’t open source, it was just going to be free to download. i’m betting its sloppy code written by a 17 year old kid for a few hours every weekend.
Please don’t Digg this
man2: All been fixed. Torrent comments work fine.
The request tax is an excellent idea IMO.
[quote comment="355251"]welldone is correct dave and its well deserved HOWEVER i have heard that the system has already been exploited and yes private trackes really do suck ass.
ps you cant spell slaughter without laughter
has TF got its own IRC channel?
i would defo like that…..[/quote]
we’ve got a quasi-official site at #torrentfreak on efnet
[quote=man2]
1. no comments
2. no categories (icons are the best way to browse quickly)
3. required 50mb+ upload tax for any requests
4. did i mention NO COMMENTS?
5. no report button
6. did i mention no categories? the browse page is just an en entire page of huge + signs and very tiny artist/album text.
they shot themselves in the foot by taking away these basic functions of a bit torrent tracker.
gazelle isn’t open source, it was just going to be free to download. i’m betting its sloppy code written by a 17 year old kid for a few hours every weekend.
[/quote]
I agree in a sense, I am the owner and developer of a private underground music site and when I see what you posted I can’t imagine doing that to the users of my site.
Also to the dude that said with this source it can be run on any server.. [b]WRONG[/b]. The only reason this is so fast is because they use the program memcached which can store information directly to the servers (or other servers) memory.
This makes important high stressed queries the ability to be cached for a certain time. Most sites that use or used (OiNK) this program often have another server for storing the cache info from the main one.
Therefor you now need 2 servers in order to keep a low load time, which in cost is pretty expensive. I’m pretty sure the devs for What.CD have coded the option to disable it… then the load times increase ten fold, because of the high stressed queries.
Rant end.
Well, when I heard they announced Gazelle I doubted very much. Now it seems like projects is moving forward.
However, such complex project is not easy to implement right. Let’s hope devs are experienced in building such systems and wish them good luck.
[quote comment="356035"]1. no comments
2. no categories (icons are the best way to browse quickly)
3. required 50mb+ upload tax for any requests
4. did i mention NO COMMENTS?
5. no report button
6. did i mention no categories? the browse page is just an en entire page of huge + signs and very tiny artist/album text.
[/quote]
1) Fixed.
2) Replaced by tags (which works better now that torrents can be filed under multiple genres). They can be searched for or browsed from torrents.php.
3) Many people believe just the opposite.
4) Did I mention FIXED?
5) Uh, yea there is.
6) Waffles runs this antiquated classification system, I’m sure you can find an invite.
Could I please get an invite to what.cd or waffles.fm?
I would like to try a private tracker.
My email is mrjoltz@gmail.com
Thank you to anybody that sends me one.
[quote comment="356132"]Could I please get an invite to what.cd or waffles.fm?
I would like to try a private tracker.
My email is mrjoltz@gmail.com
Thank you to anybody that sends me one.[/quote]
it won’t happen
[quote comment="355578"]Does a DDOS really increase page generation time?[/quote]
Yes because the server is being hammered with requests which drives up the CPU usage and bandwidth used.
[quote comment="356035"]1. no comments
2. no categories (icons are the best way to browse quickly)
3. required 50mb+ upload tax for any requests
4. did i mention NO COMMENTS?
5. no report button
6. did i mention no categories? the browse page is just an en entire page of huge + signs and very tiny artist/album text.
they shot themselves in the foot by taking away these basic functions of a bit torrent tracker.
gazelle isn’t open source, it was just going to be free to download. i’m betting its sloppy code written by a 17 year old kid for a few hours every weekend.[/quote]
correction. 16. A9 one of their lead coders is 16
wow ppl, if you don’t like what.cd you are probably not in it. The site has been up for little under 6 months of course it is not oink but it by no means sucks. If you don;t like it don’t use it it is that simple.
anyone got a What.cd invite?
willing to trade (i have many sites)
Damn… I started programming around 14, I can’t even have imagined myself putting out software 2 years after that. Now I’m 21 and still haven’t, because I know everything I work on can be improved so much….
I don’t expect gazelle to be released anytime soon, for the sole reason that they aren’t even near cleaning up their code for a stable release.
[quote comment="355525"][quote comment="355378"]What is just a shitty site, it is full of transcodes, mislabeled torrents and hit n runners. Now with gazelle, it’s still just a shitty site with a even shittier design.[/quote]
Do you have something better?[/quote]
Waffles.
From what ive heard fromnon ‘OMG WHAT IS AMAZING BECAUSE ITS PRIVATE’ loyalists it doesnt sound as good as they were originally boasting. I can’t personally comment because i deleted my what.cd account a month or two ago.
I didnt enjoy using the site, i had to in essence ‘hold off’ on downloading things jsut to get my ratio up, even then i had to download every single free leech thing they upped and generally ratio whore to have an acceptable ratio because BARELY ANYONE WILL DOWNLOAD ANYTHING THERE.
[quote comment="355968"][quote comment="355930"][quote comment="355842"][quote comment="355792"]The freeleech was actually left on for the full 24 hours. They just announced it was over after 6. Nobody actually suffered any ratio harm over it people just thought other people might have.[/quote]
can you speak for all 43k users? did they all tell you? did they all post?[/quote]
Is it possible that maybe he has insider information?[/quote]
i didnt know insiders can poll 43k users on what happened to every single one of them. i heard peoples ratios got fucked. and i have read that people up/down stats are weird and STILL not adding up correctly or counting at all[/quote]
lol, I guess site admins have no access to the data stored in their databases huh.
whoever said you need 2 servers you are wrong. we are running on one server right now. EVERYTHING
Tracker IRC Website etc etc We have 2 servers 1 is still boxed waiting to be shipped.
Unless you have facts don’t make statements that you cannot verify.
[quote comment="356154"][quote comment="355578"]Does a DDOS really increase page generation time?[/quote]
Yes because the server is being hammered with requests which drives up the CPU usage and bandwidth used.[/quote]
This page was created in 1.42647 second(s)
his page was created in 2.06319 second(s)
This page was created in 1.68837 second(s)
awesome
[quote]As always, the golden rule is to never download something you don’t want in an attempt to boost ratio.[/quote]
Golden rule my ass, sometimes that’s the only way to get a decent ratio when you’re starting out at a new site.
I got canned for making a negative comment in the waffles thread on gazelle and i have to agree its a complete bullshit reason. I had a fair amount of rare music to upload and i tried to - but uploading was not working i think this was a valid complaint.
But yeah a lot of people that made any kind of negative comment were banned from what.cd by whatman because they weren’t ‘constructive’ what kind of pretentious reason to ban someone is this WHEN THEY MADE THE COMMENT ON ANOTHER SITE.
So good luck to what.cd but if its mods and such are that fascist they’ll never ever be oink sorry.
yea its terable
so i hacked the gazelle forums today and here is a post from their private staff forums. i may post another. this is only to show you that its not secure.
http://pastebin.ca/993991
[quote comment="356401"][quote]As always, the golden rule is to never download something you don’t want in an attempt to boost ratio.[/quote]
Golden rule my ass, sometimes that’s the only way to get a decent ratio when you’re starting out at a new site.[/quote]
Or you could actually contribute something new and useful to the community instead of trying to cheat the system by being slick.
[quote comment="355930"][quote comment="355842"][quote comment="355792"]The freeleech was actually left on for the full 24 hours. They just announced it was over after 6. Nobody actually suffered any ratio harm over it people just thought other people might have.[/quote]
can you speak for all 43k users? did they all tell you? did they all post?[/quote]
Is it possible that maybe he has insider information?[/quote]
I am staff and confirm this :) Do you think we’d not thought these things through?
[quote comment="356356"]whoever said you need 2 servers you are wrong. we are running on one server right now. EVERYTHING
Tracker IRC Website etc etc We have 2 servers 1 is still boxed waiting to be shipped.
Unless you have facts don’t make statements that you cannot verify.[/quote]
With what specs may I ask? I don’t think it’s very affordable for many bittorrent trackers. Why not comment on the other things I wrote?
I’m sorry, but seriously? A group of people spend a bunch of time working on making sharing music/whatever easier and they get ripped on? I know its the internet and all, but…A site where I can find a ton of music and be reasonably sure its not a transcode AND the site’s staff are trying out new ways of organizing it? Yeah that place sucks balls…
This was a terrible story.
It didn’t highlight any of the greatness that is Gazelle, and it was just lazy and pessimistic in tone.
what.cd forums hacked. here is a post from the private forums.
http://pastebin.ca/993991
[quote comment="356791"]what.cd forums hacked. here is a post from the private forums.
http://pastebin.ca/993991/quote
That’s not working
Love it when this site talks about PRIVATE sites. Nothing better to keep a site like this under the radar by posting about it….
Sometimes this site does more damage than good to torrenting.
If anyone can send me an invite to what.cd or waffles.fm I would appreciate it diggdig21@gmail.com
It’s looks really awesome. Long live What.cd!
What.cd is absolutely horrible since they “upgraded” to Gazelle.
Searching and Browsing are difficult now, unless you are only looking for one single item and you know the exact title, Gazelle is fucking worthless. There is no way to discover new music with Gazelle and navigating through it requires too much clicking as its so counter-intuitive. Im switching to Waffles.fm as my primary music tracker now, even though their horribly drawn category icons and shit waffle logo annoy the fuck out of me.
I agree, this gazelee is a piece of shit. They’ve ruined a formerly awesome site.
*gazelle*. Whatever the fuck it’s called, it sucks. Extremely difficult now to search for flacs & all my bookmarks are gone.
Gazelle and What.CD are really sucking now since they made the change. Not only is it harder to look for music but their fanboys and mods are banning and silencing anyone who openly criticizes that piece of shit!
[quote comment="358242"]*gazelle*. Whatever the fuck it’s called, it sucks. Extremely difficult now to search for flacs & all my bookmarks are gone.[/quote]
Ya, cause it’s real hard to go into advanced search and pick “lossless” for bitrate.
MORON
[quote comment="358327"][quote comment="358242"]Ya, cause it’s real hard to go into advanced search and pick “lossless” for bitrate.
MORON[/quote]
You need to upload 20gb and become a power user to use this feature. Currenly theyre allowing anyone to use advanced search to calm everyone down, but theyre gonna change it back in a month. Gazelle and What.cd suck hardcore!
[quote comment="358484"]
You need to upload 20gb and become a power user to use this feature. Currenly theyre allowing anyone to use advanced search to calm everyone down, but theyre gonna change it back in a month. Gazelle and What.cd suck hardcore![/quote]
So, let’s see here. You don’t even know how many gigs it takes to get to PU, but yet you know that the search is gonna change in a month?
Sound like bullshit to me.
Sour grapes, perhaps?
[quote comment="358484"][quote comment="358327"][quote comment="358242"]Ya, cause it’s real hard to go into advanced search and pick “lossless” for bitrate.
MORON[/quote]
You need to upload 20gb and become a power user to use this feature. Currenly theyre allowing anyone to use advanced search to calm everyone down, but theyre gonna change it back in a month. Gazelle and What.cd suck hardcore![/quote]
Umm, no they’re not?
Don’t be ridiculous, and don’t post made up stories
[quote comment="358595"][quote comment="358484"]
You need to upload 20gb and become a power user to use this feature. Currenly theyre allowing anyone to use advanced search to calm everyone down, but theyre gonna change it back in a month. Gazelle and What.cd suck hardcore![/quote]
So, let’s see here. You don’t even know how many gigs it takes to get to PU, but yet you know that the search is gonna change in a month?
Sound like bullshit to me.
Sour grapes, perhaps?[/quote]
Correction, i was mistaken about 20 gigs upload, i checked the FAQ and its actually 25 gigs uploaded!
Anyways my post still stands as truth, advanced search is only available to power users and its planned like that all along, but they temporarily changed that to calm down the users who were angry… but mark my words, theyre reverting back to power users only next month.
ok nevermind, apparently What.cd does plan to make advanced search availble to ONLY power users next month. This is truly sad.
So the same people that got pissy will get pissy again.
[quote comment="358692"]ok nevermind, apparently What.cd does plan to make advanced search availble to ONLY power users next month. This is truly sad.[/quote]
absolutely untrue
i take that back, its true :(
What.cd sucks… Like waffles. OiNK was a god. Now is a shit!
Gazelle is so noobish as same like site what.cd and waffles. we want oink back. Don’t want this piece of shit torrent trackers…
ummm…yeah.
Gazelle’s working like a champ now. I think anyway.
And guys, don’t be mad just cause your shite attitudes prevent you from getting an invite to a community-based private tracker. Just realize that we don’t want you there. ;)
[quote comment="359270"]ummm…yeah.
Gazelle’s working like a champ now. I think anyway.
And guys, don’t be mad just cause your shite attitudes prevent you from getting an invite to a community-based private tracker. Just realize that we don’t want you there. ;)[/quote]
Im a member at What.cd, with a decent ratio and 3 invites to give away, but lets be real… What.cd and Gazelle really suck hardcore now. Gazelle is very counter-intuitive to navigate through, its painfully obvious that whoever designed it is simply some teenage coder and not a real designer.
I don’t know how anyone can call this an upgrade. The new browse page is a bloated fucking mess and requires endless clicking to figure out what anything is. I just want a clean, non-cluttered, easy to read listing like on nearly every other good tracker. And what.cd staff are basically telling people to take it or leave, so I guess I’ll hit delacct and use waffles now.
Love the new site design. Anyone saying it’s too difficult to navigate probably needs to better learn how to use the interweb anyways.
http://musicforhumans1.blogspot.com/
before anyone jumps down my throat for saying i’m just sore because i don’t have an invite i’m already on ‘what’ and my ratio is killer.
what.cd is a terrible community. The mods/staff are jerks and there is little to no room for open discussion. It’s also as others have noted painfully pretentious in a way that makes pitchforkmedia seem like your local top 40 radio station. I realize people beg and hunt for invites but I assure anyone that it’s simply not worth it.
[quote comment="355842"][quote comment="355792"]The freeleech was actually left on for the full 24 hours. They just announced it was over after 6. Nobody actually suffered any ratio harm over it people just thought other people might have.[/quote]
can you speak for all 43k users? did they all tell you? did they all post?[/quote]
As qMark said, even though it was announced that freeleech was over after 6 hours, it was left on for around 14 hours afterwards. I had about 50 torrents that barely started when it was annouced FL was over, and didn’t have any ratio problems. Now, if someone downloaded the Rosetta Stone mega pack and the 11 gigs of IDoser files, then sure, they may have a lower ratio if it didn’t finish in 14 hours.
[quote comment="356035"]1. no comments
2. no categories (icons are the best way to browse quickly)
3. required 50mb+ upload tax for any requests
4. did i mention NO COMMENTS?
5. no report button
6. did i mention no categories? the browse page is just an en entire page of huge + signs and very tiny artist/album text.
they shot themselves in the foot by taking away these basic functions of a bit torrent tracker.
gazelle isn’t open source, it was just going to be free to download. i’m betting its sloppy code written by a 17 year old kid for a few hours every weekend.[/quote]
1. Check again
2. If by categories you mean Music, Apps, E-Books, etc., check again. If you mean genres, they were replaced by tags, which allows multiple genres to be selected. This eliminates the hassle of trying to decide if a torrent is Trance/Dance/Electronic/etc.
3. I don’t make requests much, but explain how this *wouldn’t* help get your request filled faster. If a request filler has a rare album that is only 120MB when ripped, it’s not much of an incentive without a bounty.
4. Did I mention CHECK AGAIN?
5. In no way could it be that “RP” button that links to reports.php
6. See #3.
–
To those all asking for invites: I have 8 available. No, you can not have any. In addition, invite trading gets you banned, so don’t bother saying “I have xxx if you give me a What invite”. Those who want invites can try their luck at #what.cd-invites on irc.what.cd. Be prepared to take an interview where you will be asked various questions about music, transcodes, etc.
Just so you guys know Ntorrent.net currently have open registration!
So if your interesting in anything nintendo you should check it out
I got an invitation on what.cd and after I gave a donation they disabled my account. The website looks nice and have a lot of music I would like to get (I couldn’t even have time to browse a little) Try to find a way to contact them but they don’t even give that info. Sorry but a site like that is not worth my support specially after they took my donation.
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