Thread: What is the Scene? This might help explain!

Very good article indeed. I got to know about many things like nuked release, scene release.

Also, realised about Warez scene hierarchy. Really, many security should be breached to get final pirated copy for torrent-world.

Good explanation.
But not one word about usenet??

Originally Posted by bsbsbsbsbsbsbs

Good explanation.
But not one word about usenet??

Newsgroups = Usenet.

This is a great and informative writeup, but it doesn't explain "pre's." I ran a dump server from 2002 & 2003 on a 10Mbit line with 200GB of space back in 2002 & 2003 that was mostly filled via FXP with fillers (we called them "couriers") from topsites (or sites below the actual topsites; to be honest I don't know how close my couriers were to the topsites). We did have one or two groups trying to get into the scene though, and they were using my box to stage and then "pre" their releases; their activities are where my knowledge of the term come from. They'd upload the content to their servers (presumably they had several, of which mine was only one), then at a coordinated time they'd log in to those machines and run the "site pre" command (specific to glftpd and other scene-related servers; you won't find it on ProFTPD), which would cause the bot to announce to the IRC channel that the release was live. All of the couriers active in the channel would then hustle to jump on the box and start FXP'ing to their other sites, racing to complete the upload. (And as the OP mentions, races were quite entertaining!)

So, a torrent tracker with "good pre times" means the tracker gets ahold of the release very soon after the release goes live from the topsite. In my opinion, having good pre times is essential for trackers that focus on TV shows, and essentially useless elsewhere (although it does perhaps give some measure of how well-connected a tracker is with the topsites feeding it).

Dang pretty long, but thanks a lot... was quite informative.