There was a time, when the Passwords section of the forum first came to be, that many of these passworded torrents were actually valid and just the product of somebody out there trying to drive a little traffic to their site or maybe even make a buck. Sadly it's gone downhill from there, more and more these passworded rar's and zip's are proving to be complete junk. Even in the cases a password can be obtained the contents of the passworded rar file turns out to be either complete garbage or random content that has nothing to do with what it claimed to be. Sadly this changes the goal of the Ultimate Password Guide, it is now a guide to avoiding passworded torrents.
Strategy 1.) If it seems too good to be true save yourself some headache by looking closely from the start.
For instance: you decided you would search for
"Master of Widgets" the hottest new movie
and they are still filming it!!! but low and behold when you do your search there it is a thousand times over. If you believe they're real well I have some oceanfront property in Arizona and some moon rocks I'd like to sell you... HOWEVER, in the name of fairness there is a tiny chance its' real... leaks happen, but they are the exception, not the rule especially with movies, it's much more common for music to get leaked. Use some common sense and look at the source and the format before wasting your time downloading it. As I am writing this there are nearly 200 requests here for passwords for the same fake Saw 4 download. (It was cracked finally, turned out to be some old vampire movie)
Strategy 2.) Know what you’re looking for - Video comes in quite a few formats, here's a few of them: (the file type/format comes after the filename)
.mpg
.mpeg
.cue
.bin
.avi
.wma
.vob
.iso <--- DVD images (software/games will often be in this format)
Now you may be wondering why I'm mainly focusing on video formats here. The truth is it has long been the norm in the scene to rar large software/game Packages, that method is slowly moving over to .iso and other image formats as time goes on but there's still a good chunk of them out there.
Strategy 3.) Search Smart - Every major torrent site has advanced search options, they aren't hard to use, and usually it just involves checking a box or two.
If you don't get where the below image comes from, when you make a search from the main page, you'll get your first set of search results with the option to refine your search at the top of the list.
So, let's search for something...
Hey I know, I've been seeing this aXXo all over the place and I just saw a commercial for Transformers. So we'll try a search with those two keywords: aXXo and transformers. Once you enter your search in the simple search box on the main page, you'll find yourself looking at your first list of results, as well as another more advanced search at the top of them. Let's look at how I narrowed 144 results to 7.
First using the drop down below the "search for" box we can narrow our search down by telling it to only show results containing both those words.
This is kind of search engines 101, but I'm just trying to make sure I'm covering everything for whatever technovirgins happen across this so bear with me.Back to the image - Look to the right I've marked another
red box. I checked "
*Hide Unseeded" this will remove all the dead/no stat results.
*this will really narrow things down especially if your searching for something older.By the
red star is the "Hide non-user Uploads" option. When checked this filters out all RSS feed results from your search leaving only results from TP users. (
Even if you Plan on using this option it's a good idea to go ahead and click search again before checking it to make sure you’re not going to wipe out ALL your results.)
Now we could also use the drop down menu to filter by category, you may want to hold off on this option most the time though, it's not that the option itself doesn't work, but rather many uploaders have the bad habbit of uploading their material as "unsorted" and selecting a category drops those results
Down a little more - "sponsored links"(File names are examples) ...we'll just keep moving on to the actual search results
OKAY down to business narrowing down the search left me with only 7 results!
The results
highlighted in green are uploads made by TP users, the benefit of these is that there will be data about the uploader, like karma.. but alas, it never fails! As you see even in this refined search in the
red box you'll see we've hit a lemon, it has a red
X which means a user flagged it as
bad/Trojan/fake and the little chat bubble tells us someone has posted a comment there as well, this doesn't always mean the torrent in question is hopeless, but in this case we have other options so we'll skip over it. As luck would have it there is a green check on that one, we'll just pretend everyone here has realized a green check is a
positive flag. So we'll click on that one
In reality getting this far took about 10-12 seconds from the main site page including page loads.
Now that we're actually looking at a potential download, this is your last chance to weed out a possible fake or malicious upload short of waiting for the download only to find you've wasted a bunch of time and wound up with nothing useful, so take a second before you download the torrent.
this may seem like a process , I'm just trying my best to explain every little thing in what is probably a futile attempt to save a few newbies from fake file hell once you do it a few times you just scan through everything without even thinking about it.Alright we've chosen a search result since it was marked with a
positive flag, which brings us to the following page. (
I should probably add here once again that just as sometimes good content is marked bad so can bad content be marked good typical when that happens the only mark will be the one mark made by the person who uploaded it)
In the first
red box, we see all the flags are
positive, and there are a lot of them... usually that would be enough to let us know this download it most likely safe, but just to cover all the bases we'll walk through the rest of the info provided.
Inside the last
red box we'll see the "uploaded by" info if the release date of the software or item your chasing was say yesterday, and the added date was 3 months ago, it's either a older beta release of some sort or more commonly just more junk.
Now we can see here that the
REAL aXXo uploaded this and has 954 karma,(currently the highest by several hundred on the entire site) this means 954 individuals have given him a friendly thumbs up, being as how there are reliable uploaders with 5 and 8 karma, it's pretty safe to say we're at the end of this search. Keep in mind most casual uploaders are only going to have between 2-20 karma, I picked an extreme example for this.(as a lot of people seem to be getting fake aXXo torrents on TP)
This is the point where
Strategy 2 comes into play this should be in a video format, generally you want to see 1-8 files max, usually it's just 2 or 3. A large number of files is typically an indication of a .rar'ed video, which usually means a password and/or fake. If your still iffy about what your
looking at by the time you reach this point you can always click
[see file list] and view a detailed list of the files in the torrent.
NOTE : I used a highly rated user's upload for this example, for several reasons. Since this example involved an actual TP user account with positive marks and good karma, it gave me a chance to both point out the features, and relate them easily. A sample fake will follow...
However, you may find yourself in a situation where RSS feed results are all a search returns for you. Since RSS feeds are automatically added to the search database there will be no user data on the uploader. that's when looking at the file list, checking comments, and flags play a larger role as they will be pretty much all you have to go on. Finally if you do get a bad download, try to make a point of coming back and flagging it, if all the users participated in the ratings and comments, there would be little need for this tutorial. Also, if uploader is a torrentportal user, site administrators can actually disable the user generally a admin will want to see several reports or marks against an account before removing it, as even the best contributors get bad feedback every now and then.
Be sure to mark good content too. The system only works when you guys give feedback. Despite what some of the smaller torrent sites seem to believe since the entire P2P is basically alive and organic there is no realible way to make it all automatic.
A Sample Fakebelow you'll see someone who obviously tried to copy axxo's name as close as he could manage. Fortunately "there can be only one" so alarm bells go off right away. Someone has also taken a second to tag it fake which doesn't hurt anything. There are a few real aXXo torrents that get marked corrupt or fake, here and there by the same haters uploading garbage using his name, so always refer to the "uploaded by" when your looking for something from aXXo, TUS/hockney or any of the known release groups. I also marked the title of the movie.. mostly because
Rush Hour 3 "Unrated" just didn't sound right to me either. It's not like it's some horrid gruesome horror flick or something. Another little thing to notice sumotracker isn't exactly the first choice in trackers for most of these groups. On top of all that there's the negative karma, this guy just popped up so he hasn't managed to fall way into the negative yet. Another minor but useful thought, usually someone that knows what they are doing will either attach a .nfo file with the
imdb info on the movie, a little personal note, or even cover art with their movie loads. Typically the single file ones are adult films.
The rest of this, I would hope is generally common knowledge, but once again my goal here was to make sure even the cybervirgins understood everything.
PROTECT YOUR OWN COMPUTER - it's your responsibility
Keep in mind you download torrents
at your own risk, scan
EVERYTHING you download with your antivirus/anti-malware software before opening or running it.
EVEN IF YOU TRUST THE SOURCE. Sites like torrent portal are provided as is and it's up to the uploaders to be responsible for the content they upload. NEVER PAY FOR THE CONTENT OF A TORRENT, NEVER PAY A WEBSITE THAT PROMISES YOU TORRENTS IN RETURN. Remember, due to the massive amount of traffic and constant flood of new torrents, even with a paid staff and far greater resources than exist it would be impossible to keep all the junk out. So it falls on you guys to make it work and protect your own computers, hopefully for the noobies that read this, I've given you just enough information to get started without destroying your own computer. Just remember while the forums are here to help you with general problems and issues. It's up to you to use your own judgment using the primary torrent portal site and remember only the original uploader is responsible for the content of a torrent, the main site is primarily a search engine to help you find content. Don't come to the forums blaming us for your problems, we've gone above and beyond the call of duty trying to inform and protect the users of the main site, there's nothing we can do besides that.
What if I can't use what I downloaded!?!?!?! There are extensive tutorials and how to's here in the forums, covering everything from configuring routers, burning DVD’s, converting files, and info on how to open that file you downloaded.
A Final Footnote about the karma system:Karma works both ways beware the negative numbers -20 karma, pretty much means you’re wasting your time. Eventually the users will be removed or their accounts disabled. Just remember no one is getting paid to look after this site it's done by only a couple of volunteer's dealing with insane numbers.
As I finished this little tutorial, the following numbers show the last 24 hours stats for the primary website. It was actually a rather slow day, less than 5000 new torrents. I only mention this, to give everyone an idea as to what those couple of volunteers are dealing with.
Past 24 Hours:
Members Online: 5,494
Torrents Added: 4,577
Imported Torrents: 5,187
Members Joined: 1,264
Totals:Torrents Visible: 1,156,615
Indexed Torrents: 2,439,209
Complete DL: 4,559,965,730
Individual Files:
25,773,846 (968.87 TB)
Trackers: 10,101
Members: 778,063
"
The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather that we have made our position unassailable." -Sun Tzu
I hope this helps someone out, it was a lot of typing. If you need help with another aspect of torrenting there are endless posts and help tutorials here in the forums. ...you will have to register for the forums seperately from the main site as the two are not directly connected.
Use_Da_Force
