Thread: A survival guide to chinese private trackers

A survival guide to chinese private trackers

Introduction:
For a variety of reasons, more and more non-chinese users wants to use chinese private trackers. However there is a few key differences between chinese private trackers and the private trackers you use every day. I keep seeing people getting banned or run into difficulty on those private trackers because they fail to notice the difference because they assume it is just like their normal PTs and the language barrier made this situation worse. So I am writing a short guide to help non-chinese users to identify what are the key differences and how to "survive" on those trackers without getting banned.



Reasons:
The first thing a non-chinese user should consider is why they want a chinese private tracker, as I explain below they are much harder to maintain than your typical PT and some effort is required on your part to make sure your account don't get banned for inactivity. Also if you run into any trouble most staff on those trackers do not speak fluent English and google translate is not a good solution to the language barrier.

So what are the typical reasons people want to join chinese private trackers? If you like releases by Wiki, then it would make sense to join TTG since they are the home of Wiki. If you want good HD movies, CHD is a good place to go for that.

Differences:
The main section of this guide, I will attempt to list the main differences between chinese private trackers and your day to day private tracker.

Beginner's mission:
When you first create an account on those chinese private trackers, typically either the website or the inviter (or both) would ask you to fulfill certain conditions within a time period. Failure to do so would normally result in a ban. So if you join during any open registeration period, make sure you check very carefully what conditions are required to be met after you created your account. An example might be getting 50GB upload and download within the first 4 weeks. The conditions are usually about upload, download, bonus points or upload/download time ratio (the time you spend downloading versus the time you spend uploading).

Comments on torrents:
Chinese PT tend to be VERY strict regarding what comments you are allowed to make on the torrent page. Comments that asks for another version (eg. waiting for 1080p release) or subtitles (eg. I will wait for English subtitle first) will get you warned/banned in no time. So just avoid making any comments on the torrent page and if you want to thank the uploader, that's what the thank button is for. This is very important because they setup incentives for regular users to report offending comments and hence those comments tend to be picked up really quickly. Afterall you are here to get torrents, why get banned for making comments?

Activity requirements:
All PT uses some critera to prune inactive accounts, however chinese PT tend to be quite agressive in that area. So make sure you log in reasonably often and sometimes they do prune the last 5% of accounts based on total downloads+uploads, so if you just want to horde accounts, then don't complain when your accounts got pruned. When they do those type of site-wide pruning they will make a big announcement about it, so you should have plenty of advance warnings.

Another type of requirements are monthly requirements. Some chinese PT have requirements regarding how much you must download/upload each month, else your account will be warned and then banned. If you are going into those sites, think carefully whether you have the commitment to meet this requirement EVERY month and whether you think the tracker is worthwhile for you to make that kind of commitment.

Hit and run:
FInally one good news I can report. There is virtually no hit and run rules for chinese PTs, so as long as you keep your overall ratio up you won't get banned for H&R.

Cross-seeding and uploading:
Avoid doing cross-seeding or uploading releases from one tracker to another. Most of the releases are exclusive to the tracker it is released on (at least for the first 24-48 hours), so do not try uploading from one tracker to another unless you can read chinese or be very certain that the uploader is ok with uploading it to another site. This could really easily get you banned if you upload something from one tracker to another against the rules. There is very little reasons to do this anyway because there are no wait times for new users and all the chinese trackers have freeleech one way or the other.

Wait time and freeleech:
As I mentioned in the last paragraph, so far I am not aware of any chinese trackers that have wait times for new users or without any freeleech whatsoever. Therefore you should never get banned on those sites due to low ratio since they have freeleech sections.

Seedbox:
Some chinese PT have restrictions in place for seedboxes. So make sure you learn the rules properly regarding seedboxes so you don't run afoul of those rules.

Promotions:
Some chinese PT uses downloads instead of uploads as the requirement for user class promotions, usually combined with a minimum ratio requirement to ensure sufficient upload. So if you want to promote up the ladder, then make sure you check whether they want uploads or downloads. Hint: Freeleech is bad if you want to get sufficient downloads for promotion.

Conclusion:
Hopefully what I listed above will make people more aware of the differences between your normal PTs and chinese PTs. As chinese PTs become more and more popular for worldwide audiance, there is more and more people that get banned for not recogising the difference in rules due to the language barrier. I hope this guide will reduce the number of threads here and on those chinese PT forums talking about why they get banned and complain how hard it is to survive on chinese PTs.

This is my version 1 of this guide and if this becomes popular, I will add more detail to it in the future. Feel free to point out any mistakes or improvements you think I can make to the guide and I will incorporate them into future versions.

Disclaimer: This is only my personal opinion and should not be taken as substitute for any site rules or anything like that. I tried my best to make sure it is as accurate as possible but I accept no responsibility should anything goes wrong.

I really like your guide and I see a lot of people having problems with especially Chinese trackers, but it all comes down to using some common sense.
The structure of every PT tracker is basically the same and a good orientation for rules and FAQs are always numbers. I'm a member of TTG and HDroad, which both have no English frontend, but I have never had any problems, even without using Google translate once.

If you care about the rules it's not a problem to understand them and most people are just too lazy, but nonetheless I think it's great guide and I appreciate your efforts.

nice topic
thx

Well to be honest, Chinese people are really proud and resistant to change. They value there own things and especially expressed by the statement

QUOTE: " Comments that asks for another version (eg. waiting for 1080p release) or subtitles (eg. I will wait for English subtitle first) will get you warned/banned in no time"

Says it out loud.

Another thing to be kept in mind is there different concepts of seedtime which not only if a modification to there status of a user but also actually puts in "FIGURES" a person's commitment to there tracker by showing how long (i.e. loyal) does the person seed back there individual torrents. if that was the same case on other trackers such as SCC or IPT most of the profiles would not be so impressive as they are presently

So coming to think of it every tracker has its pros and cons, but chinese trackers add different DIMENSIONS to meaning of pros and cons lol.

The dedication not only shows in there life as a nation they excel, they are after all one of the FIVE ASIAN TIGERS! .... but also in there trackers, demanding u to download + uploading every month (aka COMMITMENT).

Cheers mate

and something else you may notice on foreign trackers like nCore is that you can write in any other language other than theirs

Originally Posted by WindMaker

Well to be honest, Chinese people are really proud and resistant to change. They value there own things and especially expressed by the statement

QUOTE: " Comments that asks for another version (eg. waiting for 1080p release) or subtitles (eg. I will wait for English subtitle first) will get you warned/banned in no time"

Says it out loud.

Another thing to be kept in mind is there different concepts of seedtime which not only if a modification to there status of a user but also actually puts in "FIGURES" a person's commitment to there tracker by showing how long (i.e. loyal) does the person seed back there individual torrents. if that was the same case on other trackers such as SCC or IPT most of the profiles would not be so impressive as they are presently

So coming to think of it every tracker has its pros and cons, but chinese trackers add different DIMENSIONS to meaning of pros and cons lol.

The dedication not only shows in there life as a nation they excel, they are after all one of the FIVE ASIAN TIGERS! .... but also in there trackers, demanding u to download + uploading every month (aka COMMITMENT).

Cheers mate

Lol how are you going to judge a nation and it's people based on some torrent trackers? Maybe I should say that Germans are "1337" because most german trackers are rare (ts-tracker, bitfactory, etc). Or that Romanians are bad people because they are banned in most trackers.
Secondly, I don't think the chinese are very "resistant to change" because they are liberal (communist).

Originally Posted by SKSONE

Lol how are you going to judge a nation and it's people based on some torrent trackers? Maybe I should say that Germans are "1337" because most german trackers are rare (ts-tracker, bitfactory, etc). Or that Romanians are bad people because they are banned in most trackers.
Secondly, I don't think the chinese are very "resistant to change" because they are liberal (communist).

LOL. Chinese aren't socially liberal. They may have "liberal" economic policies, but the Chinese are very conservative and authoritarian. Not liberal.

But I'll keep this on topic. The thing you said about torrent comments was so true! I've seen them get quite pissed.

CHDBits is pretty draconian about the entry requirements.

Thanks for the comments so far, I have added two more paragraphs in the guide about cross-seeding, uploading, wait-times and freeleech. Let me know if I missed anything.