Although it won’t ring any bells with the ‘younger’ torrenters, the name Mongo56 will certainly bring back some great memories for BitTorrent veterans who have been around for more than four years.
In 2005 the site was one of the largest BitTorrent trackers around, operating without a searchable index of torrent files much like OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent are doing right now. As of today there are still a few older torrents floating around that use the tracker which has been unresponsive for years.
However, back in the day its role with most BitTorrent users was vital, since clients did not support more than one tracker for a torrent, which meant that a download would simply stop working if the tracker was experiencing downtime.
During 2005, Mongo56 broke several records. It was the first XBNBT based tracker to run with more than 100,000 peers connected, and it broke the XBTT tracker record when it hit 763,000 peers. Great times were ahead, so it seemed, but continuous attacks on the tracker caused it to close prematurely.
“As of December 1st 2005 Mongo56.org will no-longer exist. I am sorry about this, but after over a month of battling flood attacks and the like it’s time to kill the tracker,” the site’s owner informed its users.
Since Mongo56 went down, thousands of new trackers have come and gone, and now, at the end of 2009 where standalone trackers have had somewhat of a revival, the name Mongo56 has resurfaced.
The operator of the new tracker hosted on the Mongo56.co.cc domain has no connection with the operators of the old tracker, but simply wants to reintroduce the brand name. “I used the name simply because I loved how much of a following they had, and I knew that domain would bring back good memories,” TorrentFreak was told.
Unlike most other standalone trackers, the new Mongo56 uses the PeerTracker software, and seems to be running smoothly for now. But, with DHT, PEX and multitracker torrents, tracker uptime is not as crucial as it was back in 2005. Nevertheless, Mongo56’s introduction is a welcome one – BitTorrent users can never have too many options when it comes to finding other peers.
