Before The Pirate Bay, Torrentz and isoHunt started linking to torrent files, Suprnova was already serving to the masses. Like many sites in the early days of BitTorrent, the site began with a very primitive setup. It was hosted on a Linux box at the the home of its founder Andrej Preston, a Slovenian teenager better known as Sloncek.

In the months that followed Suprnova grew out to become the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, with over a million visitors a day. But it didn’t last. Along with huge popularity came the legal threats, and these eventually made Andrej decide to close the site in December 2004. As time went by other sites quickly filled the gap left behind by Suprnova.

That wasn’t the end of the site though. In 2007, Suprnova returned to the BitTorrent stage, resurrected by the folks behind The Pirate Bay. Unfortunately, the site never even came close to its former glory, with just a few thousands visitors passing by each month.

For the former owner of the site, the decay of his baby was hard to watch.

“The Pirate Bay got huge press and they made a big statement on piracy (and how there is no stopping them) which benefited them a lot. Unfortunately, when the media attention passed, they completely forgot about the site and left it dead for years,” Sloncek told TorrentFreak today.

Because the site wasn’t of much use to anyone, Sloncek contacted the Pirate Bay crew a few months ago, hoping that they would return the domain that he once donated to them.

“A few months ago I tried to get the domain back, since I do feel like it is still a part of me. Even though it is just a domain name it has a lot of sentimental value. Thankfully, the Pirate Bay crew were kind enough to return the domain. On Monday, Suprnova.org was finally transferred back to me, and I have to admit, it feels good to have it back.”

Although he does sound a bit disgruntled, Sloncek says that there’s no bad blood between him and the Pirate Bay crew.

“I don’t want it to sound like I am mad at The Pirate Bay or anybody involved, I think that they tried to make a statement and they did. I just wished they actually did more with the domain or had returned it sooner,” Sloncek explains.

“All in all, I’m happy to have it back. My plan is not to turn it into a torrent site, but more of a online video portal. I guess I will go into more details later on, once I understand exactly what I want it to become. The thought of having it back is still very fresh and exciting,” he adds.

This new project suits the 2010 Sloncek better as he’s currently in San Francisco and attending the Academy of Art University where he focuses on TV and online video production. Although Sloncek is no longer actively involved, he didn’t cut his roots to the BitTorrent scene completely. He’s currently directing TorrentFreak TV in his spare time, which might be featured on the new Suprnova later this year.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Suprnova was founded by Andrej Preston, a Slovenian teenager better known as Sloncek, who started the site as a fun project to show off to some friends on IRC. The site started off with a very primitive setup, hosted on a Linux box at Sloncek’s home.

In the weeks that followed, word of the “Universal BitTorrent Source” spread like wildfire. It was no surprise that the traffic generated by Suprnova quickly maxed out the meager 16kb/s upload capacity Sloncek had at home.

The increased popularity of Suprnova came around the same time as other torrent sites like donkax.com, bytemonsoon.com and torrentse.cx, decided to quit. These sites were more or less forced to go offline, either due to bandwidth constraints or cease and desist letters. But Suprnova made it very clear that it wasn’t going anywhere.

Suprnova continued to grow, and Sloncek spent most of the time looking for mirrors to guarantee that the site stayed up. At its peak it indexed almost 60,000 torrents and served around 1.5 million visitors per day. Suprnova had a very active community, and its forum was among the biggest on the Internet.

In November 2004, Suprnova’s ISP told Sloncek that the servers had been taken into custody by the Slovenian police. The raid was initiated by the French anti-piracy lobby RetSpan. The police never contacted Sloncek about this personally, but it was a sign that things were about to change.

Around the same time, Reuters wrote about Sloncek and his rapidly growing site in one of their articles, which soon after spread out to the Slovenian press.

This was the turning point for Sloncek. He later said: “So I ended up reading about myself in Slovenian newspapers. And right about that time, I had a feeling something was wrong. I do not really know what the feeling was or where it was coming from, but I decided it was time to take Suprnova.org offline.”

Sloncek eventually pulled the plug on December 19, 2004, which marked the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one.

The fall of Suprnova resulted in an avalanche of new sites that aimed to fill the gap. Among these new sites was Mininova, which despite its name outgrew Suprnova within a year, establishing itself as one of the leading torrent sites for nearly five years.

In 2007, Suprnova returned to the BitTorrent stage, resurrected by the folks behind The Pirate Bay. The site never even came close to what it was though, and as of today it is just serving a few torrents a day to some lost souls.

Sloncek himself moved on with his life. He moved to San Francisco in 2007 where he’s attending the Academy of Art University. He didn’t cut his BitTorrent roots completely though, as he’s currently directing TorrentFreak TV in his spare time.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Suprnova will be extremely friendly to BitTorrent illiterates. One of the new features is a Java applet that allows you to download .torrent files without having a BitTorrent client installed. This is not only useful for newbies, but also if you’re working on a PC that doesn’t allow you to install a BitTorrent client like some workplaces or Universities have. The Java applet that will be integrated into SuprNova will be similar to BitLet.

Torrents and Trackers

SuprNova’s aim was and is to index more content than any other site. Unlike The Pirate Bay, SuprNova will also index torrents from other sources. Upon its release it will crawl more than 25.000 trackers and have a database of more than 1.000.000 torrents. This will make SuprNova one of the biggest BitTorrent indexing sites right from the start.

Search

Suprnova wasn’t perfect, but the really annoying thing was that there was no search feature. In the early days this wasn’t really a problem, only a couple of torrents were added every day. But as the site grew bigger and bigger it became nearly impossible to find what you want without spending minutes digging through the categories. The new Suprnova will therefore have a search function, a significant change, but a good one.

Design

Sloncek, the former owner of SuprNova donated the domain to TPB under the condition that they would keep the nostalgic design more or less intact. There will be some changes design wise, but most people will still see that it’s inspired by the old Suprnova look. Brokep, one of the TPB admins told TorrentFreak: “The idea was to bring SuprNova to what it would have been today it if never closed. So, it’s supposed to be an updated version of the old beloved site! We hope that people still get the SuprNova-feeling and that it also feels like a modern website.”

Community

The new Suprnova will have its own IRC channel, just like in the old days. In fact, it is already up and running, so if people want to chat about Suprnova (or other things), go to #suprnova at freequest. As mentioned in our previous post, Suprbay.org will be the new forum for the Suprnova and TPB community, over 5000 people signed up already, and SuprNova hasn’t even been launched yet.

Another new feature related to the community is the comments system. Similar to other BitTorrent sites people are now allowed to post comments on every torrent. Apart from the usual rants the comments are useful to get an indication of the quality of the files.

Front Page

Like in the good old days the frontpage will show all the latest torrents by category. The categories will be on top of the page, and they will be the same as before: Games, Movies, TV-Shows, Anime, Music, Apps, Mac & Misc.

This was only a sneak peek at some of the changes on the new Suprnova. I guess you have to wait for the launch if you want to check out all of the changes and new features, the wait will soon be over.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.