I just cannot be bothered with going on IRC in 2026
This is the reason that private trackers make the interview process as annoying as possible. People think this way and filter themselves out without any effort on the part of the site’s moderation team. IRC has been core to the piracy world since the beginning, not being comfortable with IRC is a big indicator that a person is a newbie.
Because of the various hoops that you have to jump through: getting on IRC, reading the rules, being tested on the rules, etc. The people that make it through the interview process are pre-selected for being the kind of people who are willing and capable of finding the information that they need to know.
I didn’t have an invite for a large music tracker and so I had to take a ~2 hour test on audio codecs, formats, bittorrent configuration, etcetcetc. Yes, it is annoying, but there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so to speak.
Of course, you could just skip all of that and just get an invite, but then the responsibility for training you on the rules is on whoever invited you… if you screw up then they get kicked too.
It’s a good system, everyone has to individually prove their competence and the result is a much higher quality community.
This is the reason that private trackers make the interview process as annoying as possible. People think this way and filter themselves out without any effort on the part of the site’s moderation team. IRC has been core to the piracy world since the beginning, not being comfortable with IRC is a big indicator that a person is a newbie.
Because of the various hoops that you have to jump through: getting on IRC, reading the rules, being tested on the rules, etc. The people that make it through the interview process are pre-selected for being the kind of people who are willing and capable of finding the information that they need to know.
I didn’t have an invite for a large music tracker and so I had to take a ~2 hour test on audio codecs, formats, bittorrent configuration, etcetcetc. Yes, it is annoying, but there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so to speak.
Of course, you could just skip all of that and just get an invite, but then the responsibility for training you on the rules is on whoever invited you… if you screw up then they get kicked too.
It’s a good system, everyone has to individually prove their competence and the result is a much higher quality community.