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Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

skytorrents.in

311–320 of 366 posts

Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

#311
I'd suggest using another TLD or having multiple TLDs to avoid losing it even temporarily (if at all someone decides to take this domain down). The .in TLD policies [1] require a real and accurate address of the registrant, which is not provided for this domain [2]:

> Contact information: Registrants must provide true, accurate contact information. The following contact types are required: Registrant, Administrative, Technical, Billing. As per standing policy, the contact data will displayed in the .IN WHOIS, except for the Billing contact data, which is not displayed.

[1]: https://registry.in/Policies

[2]: https://registry.in/whois/skytorrents.in / http://whois.domaintools.com/skytorrents.in

Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I built Magnetissimo: https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo It's easy to build a crawler, the hard part is spending time on bullshit like DMCA takedowns and such. Even if you say: "I just crawl, I don't provide download links, I don't even know what is indexed", you have to deal with legal issues. So, host your own locally or for your community. No big deal. Even Google has to deal with DMCA!

How large is the database compiled by Magnetissimo? Is it Wikipedia-sized (a few dozens of Gigabytes), or several orders of magnitude above or below?

Haven't really measured to be honest. But it's only 1 model with a few fields. Shouldn't be humongous.

Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

#313
This is absolutely incredible, and the load times are incomprehensible for a modern site.

What software powers the site?

I did some looking and discovered it uses Bulma [1] instead of Bootstrap, and it's absolutely amazing. Another commenter pointed out that the site also uses Caddy for HTTP/2 and HTTPS.

Excellent work, keep it up!

[1] - http://bulma.io/

Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

#314
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried doing our site like that several times but everyone just complains it's ugly... sigh

CSS and design skills have nothing to do with having JavaScript disabled.

You'd think so, but I've heard plenty of web-devs complain that sites look "ugly" just because it was built without JS. I'm not saying it makes sense, but I've definitely heard it.

Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixed

Weird that I still see it (duplicate text hastily underlined with imgur's editing tools)[0]. [0]: http://i.imgur.com/n3VeeSh.png

Fixed for sure, was pending approval from other members

Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 3 more users vote this feature, It will be provided for free to everyone and it will provided at the same speeds as the current website.

For feature voting I've seen other apps use Product Pains[0] [0] - https://productpains.com/

Thanks for the shoutout! We definitely see huge value in letting your users post & vote on feature requests:

- You know what your users want most

- People feel like their voice is heard

- It builds a community around your product

Try it out!

Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

#317

Why is "You must identify in sufficient detail the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed." listed three times in your DMCA policy? Does the information actually need to be submitted in triplicate?

Fixed

I liked it repeated several times. It sorta made a point. (In fact I thought it was made on purpose).

Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 2 more users recommend this, it will be done.

I never download torrent files, just look for the magnet link. Same feature, why bother downloading?

Magnet links are perfectly fine for popular content, but because of the dependency on BEP 009 (Metadata exchange) for very long tail content it's often better to get the torrent file directly.

For example, to get information about torrents that are on life support (e.g. have a couple seeds that show up for a few minutes a day), having the torrent file downloadable is invaluable, as it includes info like the size and the file names, etc. In many cases it's even possible to bring a torrent /back to life/ if you have the torrent file and got the content that was in it out of band.

If you just have the magnet link you cannot do any of this.

Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

#319
post #40

Suggestion: get rid of the torrent files and just serve magnet urls in plain text without a clickable button. This way you get rid of the knowledge of who-downloaded-what, and also save some bandwidth.

If 2 more users recommend this, it will be done.

Please don't remove downloads of .torrent files. If you don't have this it's impossible to know what files are in the torrent (or even how big they are!) without connecting to the swarm and relying on BEP 009 (Metadata exchange).

I use this all the time for downloading very long tail content, and the move to have indexing sites be magnet-only is very frustrating.

Re: Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not if the link itself is unique for each user trivial to implement, this is how email campaigns track what you clicked in a email ( email after all do not server js)

doesn't that only work for sites the link creator has control of? i don't see how the technique can be used with links a search engine finds and then gives out to anon users.

This is how it would work.

1. The search engine adds itself to the tracker list in the magnet URI (&tr= query parameters), but with a unique subdomain and using HTTP (i.e. it adds http://asdfkja.skytorrent.in/announce to the tracker list)

2. The client announces itself to the tracker, sending the unique "Host" in the GET request (asdfkja.skytorrent.in in the example).

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