[bluorangefyre]

I'm going to make a rather weird suggestion. Keep the forum, but shut down the tracker. Hear me out on this. When we went through this two years ago, in the immediate aftermath it was suggested to look at the seeding opportunities link to keep old torrents from dying, which I did. What puzzled me was BiglyBT would show a torrent I'd downloaded had seeders, but the TTD tracker itself didn't. At first I chalked it up to, "Well, the site is old." It was a Fleetwood Mac concert that got my attention. BiglyBT showed four seeders, but TTD showed zero. I forced a scrape in BiglyBT and it still showed four seeders, but none here. And that's when I discovered a lot of these are floating around on DHT. I think it's about 50/50 between DHT and private torrent, based on what I've downloaded since April 2022. To prove this point, I just downloaded a rather large torrent, not flagged private, de-selecting TTD as a scrape option, and the entire thing just downloaded via DHT. I also paid attention to port numbers in the peers section. At least one seeder wasn't from here. It still reported back here that I'd downloaded it, however. I'll play around with it, because in any event my share ratio - which dropped from a 3.09 to a 3.06 just now - isn't going to matter in a couple of weeks. EDIT: On my second attempt, I flat out removed any reference to TTD from the list of sources, and successfully downloaded something over DHT, without anything bouncing back to TTD. No peers from here, nothing showing I downloaded it from here.

Tl;dr, the forum - the community, the history, the knowledge - is more valuable than the tracker at this point. And seeds (no pun intended) for the way forward were planted twenty years ago. I'll add in my editing that I'd take it on, if I had the financial resources to do it, but I won't until 2033 at the earliest, if ever.