PublicBitTorrent - An open tracker project

PublicBitTorrent is a bittorrent tracker free for anyone to use. You don't need to register, upload or index a torrent anywhere, all you have to do is to include the PublicBitTorrent tracker URL in your torrent.

How does it work?

When you create a torrent file the application will ask you for a tracker address, then simply type in PublicBitTorrents tracker URL's:

udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce

Are there other open bittorrent trackers?

Yes! We encourage you to use multiple trackers, this will increase your torrents accessibility. OpenBitTorrent is another free, no strings attached, stable bittorrent tracker.

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce

How can I add these trackers to all my torrents?

Tracker Modify will add/delete your tracker lists to all your torrents with one command. So whether you have 50 torrents or 2 million, Tracker Modify can make adding/deleting trackers a breeze.

Scraping

An aggregated scrape file for the entire cluster can be found here. The file is updated every 5 minutes. and is ~50 MB, instead of the ~125 MB from each node in the cluster.

The file is in the the following format:

• [info_hash_urlenc]:[seeders]:[leechers]\n
• The [info_hash_urlenc] is the binary 20 byte info_hash, url encoded.
• [seeders] are number of seeders in base10 ascii.
• [leechers] are number of leechers in base10 ascii.
• There is one line per info_hash, terminated by the \n character.

Please use this way of scraping if you scrape alot of torrents from our trackers, this will reduce load on our trackers and at the same time give you all the stats at once.

Why use the PublicBitTorrent tracker?

There are few open independent stable trackers out there, most of the trackers that can be used openly are either unstable or in some way connected to a bittorrent indexing site. We felt there was a need for a free, no strings attached, stable bittorrent tracker.

Why the need for an open bittorrent tracker?

There are many reasons, the most important ones includes:

• You only want a single or a very small number of torrent files and don't know how to run a tracker or don't want the mess of setting up your own tracker for just these few torrent files.
• Most people don't have their own servers. They just have space on different blogging services and so on and simply don't have anywhere to run a tracker.
• Many people have limited space on their blogs/forums/webhosting, so if you want to make larger files available online, bittorrent is a great choice! When you don't have to go through the hassle of running your own tracker, more people will have access to this technology!

Can I remove an info_hash from the tracker?

No, the technology doesn't include any support for blocking info_hash keys from being registered with the tracker.

Just to make it clear so people sending DMCA takedown notices understand:

• We do not have any content.
• We are not a bittorrent site, we are just a tracker, we can not see what content is behind an info_hash.
• We don't have any torrent files.
• We can't give you any IP addresses in any other way than normal tracker usage.
• We can't verify any claims when we have no data other than the info_hash.
• We can't block info_hash keys from being registered with the tracker.
• We don't have any logs or ways to trace previous connections, It's not technically possible to trace connection history due to the sheer volume of connections. The only information that is possible to keep is the current torrent swarm.

So what should you as a content owner do? Contact the indexing site where the torrent download originated from and ask them nicely to remove the listing and the .torrent file!

You mentioned donations, how can I help?

If you want to help with money to pay for bandwidth and servers, if you have programming skills, linux tcp stack optimizations skills or anything you think we may require to make this project go forward, contact us at

Something's broken, the tracker doesn't work, what should I do?

First off wait 6 hours, if it's something big we will already have it fixed by then, if we haven't send an email to , and report what IP you are trying to connect from, if you can ping the server, and if you know what a traceroute is, include one in the mail.