OpenBitTorrent is a bittorrent tracker free for anyone to use. You don't need to register, upload or index a torrent anywhere, all you have to do is to include the OpenBitTorrent tracker URL in your torrent.
When you create a torrent file the application will ask you for a tracker address, then simply type in OpenBitTorrents tracker URL's:
http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
There are no open independent stable trackers out there, most of the trackers that can be used openly are either unstable or in some way connected to a bittorrent indexing site. We felt there was a need for a free, no strings attached, stable bittorrent tracker.
There are many reasons, the most important ones includes:
We kindly ask you not to use the OBT trackers in torrents resulting in unauthorized distribution of copyrighted files (movies, music, games and so on).
If you want to add OBT to a massive amount of torrents, you must ask us first.
Don't add OBT as the default tracker when torrents are uploaded on your site without our written consent.
We have received lots and lots of e-mails from people that have read that we are The Pirate Bay, and asking if we are their new tracker after The Pirate Bay trackers were closed down, so we feel that we need to clear up the confusion.
OpenBitTorrent has been mixed up as being a part of and/or a side project to The Pirate Bay. The reason for this is that during the startup period during February through August of 2009, we shared the same hosting company and to some extent used the same tracker cluster and IP-address space provided by DCP Networks, the same service provider as The Pirate Bay used. OpenBitTorrent was at the time a customer of DCP Networks and Fredrik Neij, one of their employees but also one of the founders of The Pirate Bay.
The reason that we choose to get the tracker service from DCP Networks is that they were already hosting the largest bittorrent tracker in the world, and have many years technical expertise on running trackers. They even had an out of the box tracker solution that meant that we did not need to have our own servers, and we got a really good price. By choosing this option we got started quickly and very cheap, then we slowly raised the money to buy our own servers to expand our service.
When DCP Networks got in some trouble with their Internet provider we had just bought our own servers and were about to move our service to them, to get the service back up as quickly as possible DCP Networks recommended a few other Internet providers that we contacted and then we bought a Internet connection from one of them and we got back online in just a few days.
We are a bunch of students studying IT engineering and computer science in Lima. We first meet in 2008 and got very interested in the possibility's that the BitTorrent technology could have for individuals and companies with limited technical knowledge. We want to educate and simplify usage of this technology, our first step to making it as simple as possible to use the BitTorrent technology was to eliminate the need to know what a BitTorrent-tracker is, how it works, and how to install, maintain and run a BitTorrent-tracker, so we decided to start OpenBitTorrent.
We hope that this project is just the first of many aimed at simplifying the usage of the BitTorrent technology that we will start, with the goal of making this technology widely available to the general non technical Internet and computer users.
An aggregated scrape file for the entire cluster can be found here. The file is updated every 5 minutes. and is ~50 MB, instead of the ~125 MB from each node in the cluster.
The file is in the the following format:
Please use this way of scraping if you scrape alot of torrents from our trackers, this will reduce load on our trackers and at the same time give you all the stats at once.
A few pointers to people considering sending DMCA takedown notices:
So what should you as a content owner do? First off, contact the indexing site where the torrent download originated from and ask them nicely to remove the listing and the .torrent file!
After that you can send a request to get the info_hash blocked from the tracker. To get a info_hash blocked you as the rightholder must send us a e-mail with the following information:
If you want to help with money to pay for bandwidth and servers, if you have programming skills, linux tcp stack optimizations skills or anything you think we may require to make this project go forward, contact us at donations@openbittorrent.com
(Or maybe you're even an ISP that's thinking, hey bittorrent trackers, that sounds like fun, I want to run one! A nice box (dualcore, 4gigs of ram) and a 60pack of megabits, and you could have a node, free of charge at your facility, and maybe a nice "we love you" adspot here on the site! ;) ;) )
First off wait 6 hours, if it's something big we will already have it fixed by then, if we haven't, send an email to broken@openbittorrent.com, and report what IP you are trying to connect from, if you can ping the server, and if you know what a traceroute is, include one in the mail.
