Too Many Warnings. Most private trackers will give you the opportunity to clean up your act, and issue warnings for most minor infractions (hit and runs, low ratio). Individual warnings come in many flavors of severity; for example, a warning on a H&R can easily be fixed or removed by complying to the seeding standards. More serious warnings may last up to 2, 4 or even 8 weeks in some instances, and can include rule breakage in regards to improper etiquette in the forums & torrent comments, offensive avatars, or uploading their content to other trackers. Obey the rules, and you won’t get any warnings. It goes without saying: Multiple consecutive (or especially concurrent) warnings will often result a ban.
Warnings can also come back to haunt you across other private trackers. For instance, when providing a profile link of a tracker to a community representative in a recruitment thread, he/she will check if you have any warnings. If so, your likelihood of acquiring the invitation will be greatly diminished or not possible.
Solutions:
- • Be on your best behavior while on warning watch, and do not get more than one at a time. You’ve been warned.
- • While on warning watch, try to avoid commenting in torrents or making forum posts. This is not the time to attract undue attention to yourself. Be a lurker until the warning disappears.
- • Just because the warning has been lifted, it doesn’t give you the green light to go back to your old asshole self. Learn from the experience.
Ratio Cheating / Using a Banned BT Client. Banned Client: This is somewhat less common than expected. Often a banned client (BitComet, BitLord) just won’t connect to the peers and is rejected by the tracker, and usually warnings are not even issued - but it can happen. Cheating Client: The usage of a cheating BT client will result in far more dire consequences, if discovered. There will be no warning here, and the punishment is prompt. Tracker staff incorporate scripts that seek out sudden ratio (GB) changes, or check for blacklisted clients in the peerlists. Worse yet, in can affect your accounts at other private trackers (yes, they share IP addresses of the most notorious offenders).
Solutions:
- • Use a proper BitTorrent client that has been whitelisted by the tracker.
- • Don’t use clients that are in beta, and upgrade your client to the latest stable version.
- • Never use a cheating client, and avoid any public torrent services (ImageShack seedbox, TorrentRelay, etc).
- • Don’t use a ratio faker program, or anything else designed to fake ratio statistics on private trackers.
- • Never add more than one private tracker to the announce URL in a torrent.
Account Sharing (too many IPs). Under normal circumstances you’ll be able to safely login to your private tracker account from an unlimited number of locations. But (and this is big) the moment you decide to actually download a torrent file from a second location, it raises a red flag. Trackers generally don’t care where you login from, but they care where you download to - since this immediately looks like you’re sharing the account. TorrentLeech is even fussier about this: You can get banned for downloading the same torrent file twice, even if it’s from the same computer through the same account.
By and large, most trackers will allow members to download torrents from multiple locations (usually this is between 3 and 5 unique IP addresses) to compensate for those who have a seedbox, or more than one. What.cd admonishes this quite clearly:"Be careful when sharing an IP or a computer with a friend if they have (or have had) an account. From then on your accounts will be inherently linked and if one of you violates the rules, both accounts will be disabled along with any other accounts linked by IP. This rule applies to logging into the site."
Solutions:
- • Don’t share your .torrent files with anyone, or allow anyone else login to your account.
- • Avoid logging in from other locations whenever possible.
- • If you have multiple seedboxes (or switch providers frequently), leave a message in your profile Info area ("I have more than one seedbox") or something similar. You can also contact staff directly in regards to this.
Using a Proxy. Logging into your tracker under the cloak of a proxy (or worse, actually downloading torrents while logged in and proxied) can only show one thing: You’ve been previously banned for any of these aforementioned reasons. This also includes adding a SOCKS proxy to your BitTorrent client or web browser, or using an "anonymous" CGI web proxy to browse the site, and also includes using TOR or other anonymizing services. Trackers have varying rule standards for proxies; the safest practice is to avoid them altogether.
Solutions:
- • Use a VPN service instead of a proxy. Most trackers are OK with VPNs, but ask first.
- • In the event for trying to evade the efforts of a throttling ISP, use a seedbox instead.
Torrent Forum Involvement. Account/invite trading is frowned upon by just about every tracker; and if you’re caught (yes, they have spies) you and the trader are out the door. Even something as simple as offering invite giveaways can get you busted. Some trackers could care less; others are not so forgiving. But to make one thing clear: It’s absolutely imperative that you use different usernames on torrent forums than you do on private trackers. I know one guy who uses a different name/pass on each & every private tracker he’s a member of, and even goes to the trouble of using a different gmail address for each.
Trickle-down effect: If you get banned for being involved in trading or giveaways, there’s the distinct possibility that your entire invite tree will also get banned, as well. It can even carry over to other trackers.
Be careful who you invite: You’re completely responsible for the people you invite. If your invitees are caught cheating or trading/selling invites, not only will they be banned, so will you.
Solutions:
- • Use approved tracker recruitment, found in both torrent forums and in other private trackers’ forums. Get in the legitimate way.
- • Don’t offer invite giveaways. It’s better to receive than give - not many tracker staff would go to the trouble to offer invite giveaways for the sake of catching members trying to sign up in this method. However, they will (and do) ask you for an invite, since you’re the one breaking the rules by offering the invites in the first place. Once you invite them, they know exactly who you are.
Bonus #11 - Delete Your Own Account. Not all trackers have this, but some do. Members often have the ability to delete their own accounts themselves through the delacct link. Just add this to the URL of your private tracker: /delacct.php. If not, just wait 42 days without logging in - we’re fairly certain most trackers will automatically delete you anyways.
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The 10 best ways to get banned from a private tracker
Inactivity (not logging in). The number one reason for being banned on a private tracker is for not using the account. The majority of trackers have an automated pruning system in place to clear out unused accounts to make room for new ones, or for general housecleaning. You’ll need to login to your account once in a while - as a rule this is usually every 6 weeks (42 days) but this is often lower and varies from tracker to tracker. Be sure to read each tracker’s individual FAQ/Rules to clarify. Some trackers may notify you via email if you haven’t logged in for awhile (RevTT sends an email notification warning that the account will be deleted in a few days unless you login). It’s also important to note that having torrents that are seeding is not the same thing as logging in. Activity on the tracker and activity on the website are entirely two separate entities.
Duplicate Accounts. Just like on Torrent Forums, creating more than one account is a surefire method to get banned on any private tracker. Multiple accounts created under the same IP address are dead-simple to spot, assuming that their database goes back far enough. The age-old excuse, "My brother lives with me, and wanted his own account" just doesn’t hold water. While the vast majority of dupe accounts are created because of being previously banned for inactivity (which doesn’t necessarily make you a bad member), it shows trackers staff that you’re too lazy to try to get the account re-enabled. However, this can extend into a far worse scenario for inviters or entire invite trees in the event you’re a good member who’s invited someone trying to sign up more than once.
Tracker Inactivity. It’s not always enough just to remember to login to your account once in a while. Actual torrent activity is often a must, and some trackers impose a weekly or monthly minimum GB transfer allowance that must be fulfilled. Others may require a certain amount of torrents to be downloaded each month. Akin to remembering to login to your tracker, be sure to download torrents. Again, the FAQ/Rules is your best friend.
Bad Sharing Ratio. This one should be a no-brainer: Failure to comply with both global and per-torrent minimum ratio requirements will inevitably result in the banhammer. Right as rain, eventually you’ll be banned if you don’t bring up your ratio to tracker specs. But as long as the problem can be resolved within the given timeframe, members will likely not be banned for repeatedly having a bad ratio. Some trackers are somewhat relaxed on this; others are quite strict. Stick to a 1:1 sharing ratio and you’ll be fine - the FAQ/Rules will tell you all you need to know.
Hit and Runs. A hit & run (H&R) is the practice of downloading a torrent and removing/stopping it in the BT client before it has reached a specific sharing ratio or required seed time (or both criteria), as stipulated in the rules for the tracker. As is often the case, members won’t be banned for a single H&R but when accumulated, they can be devastating. Some trackers may only allow members to have 5 H&Rs (or less) for the life of the account; others may have no limits as long as you remedy the torrent’s individual ratio.
