Author Archive for Niek

Received mails and problem reports (NSFW language)

Published
by
Niek
on July 18, 2007
in Reports/mails
. 48 Comments

We did a few blog posts on mails and problem reports almost 2 years ago, so I thought it was time for an update :D

On an average day, our mail server receives ~650 incoming email messages. A large part of this is spam, the rest are regular messages (ranging from site suggestions to takedown notices).

As a regular visitor, you probably know that email is not the best way to contact us about torrent problems. That’s why we have the “problem reports” system: every torrent page features a “Report a problem” tab, where visitors can submit the issues they notice related to a torrent. Moderators watch the problem reports queue, and take action if necessary.

Most of the times the mails and reports we receive are useful, but sometimes you see the strangest messages. Here’s a compilation of the best (warning: NSFW language):

your website is very gay and will not let me hav my password as i put it when i created my account WHY NOT????

where is the pin nubmer to unzip the rar file?

Why is the creator of the Bill Maher torrent file so STUPID that they start the name of the file with a period?! Dammit! Get this clue: Files that start with a period are INVISIBLE on UNIX OSs!!! I am on Mac OS X and am sick of this moronic file naming. I am going to complain until this bozo problem is stopped.

hello please help me, i farted on the disc and it became rotten so i cleaned it with piss, then i shoved it into the ps2 but then my ps2 laser broke, what do i do, fart on it again?

pls view the contents of this movie. ther are 3 shadowlike people in a theater making commentaries while the movie is playing. i expected a good movie, but the sound of godzilola is drowned out by the commentaries who are watching the movie

oijioijojjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjiklpoiumnphnupn
hello 65895665 65rfui I 2387uthjds Am fdwuirhgsfjds encoding this akijhithjiorhigorjh data foihdgndj so plase read it kgjhidosskgsfdogljfd ok ediohgjhdfoighe it fuck up my computer oidhgodshgdsihgs because of corrupt data issuls

huge codec problem!

this down load is shit! it fucked my £2000 computer. i want to sue your cheap piece of fat jelly looking arse! thank you

Fuck this shit. The menus are in Spanish and everything else in english. Whoever uploaded this really fucked up. Whoever’s gonna download this is going to get fucked

dont download only trial versions. why put this shit on there.put real version not trials asshole!!!!!!!

NO HAVE SOUND!! NAO TEM AUDIOOOO

CD 1 is unburnable!

torrent says english, the language is japanese with english sub titles. tha anyway to the u/l ers but japanese is for the japanese. if you are going to put out a torrent and call it english then put it out in english

ASSHOLES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hello i have found a realy big problem which will end up shuttingdown your web site and possibbly getting you arrested for a long time .Some reason people are putting torrents of movies on the web site that are not whot thay seem .My son downloaded the movie the simpsons movie but when it finished downloading it was not the simpsons but a xxx rated movie that has the rong movie title as the torrent name this is not the first time this has happend i will be reporting this to the ploice as the copywrite laws and rateings laws of this country are being broken in a revry sinicter way. I hope you are not sent to jail over this as xx movies are against the law here in Australia .I would not be so pissed of if the names of the movies where correct but this i believe is done deliberatly to get people to download xxrated movies without the user knowing what he has downloaded . I suggest you fix this peoblem quickly before you end up in jail

You take that album Roine Stolt -Wall Street Voodoo
off the site TODAY or I’ll use ALL my legal
connections to shut you down FOREVER !!!
I assure you I DO have connections to shut you down and get you in JAIL !!!
Sincerely
Roine Stolt -author .

Sometimes you have NO idea what people are talking about:

you guys obviously aren’t too clever because on some of the subscriptions you’ve set me up for contain YOUR IP ADDRESS. You guys must be as thick as you fucking look you bunch of cunts. (by the way all i have to do is ignore the messages so im not technically subscribed)

Some users aren’t too happy with our banners:

GET RID OF THE FUCKING BANNER AD FOR FUCKING TALKING SMILYS
I have faithfully used mininova for a year now downloading at least 15 things a day…
But i will never use it again nor will my group (another 30ish people with 8mbit connections same as me) if you dont get rid of this annoying shit
every fucking time i change tab my mouse goes over the stupid banner and it shouts out oh my god go away

If you do not promptly get rid of it we will stop downloading and start 24/7 DoS attacks on your host server

Fucking cheap bastards

And the same guy, after we tracked down and banned the ad (which accidently slipped through):

Hi Niek,
Thank you so very much for getting rid of those seriously annoying banner ads.
The new look site is awesome too.

Just wanted to say thanks and Happy Christmas dude
Peace
DsC

2 Billion Downloads!

Published
by
Niek
on June 13, 2007
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 157 Comments

Just 5 months ago we blogged about the 1 billion download milestone, and I’m very happy and excited to announce that we broke the 2 billion (2,000,000,000) torrent downloads mark today!

This is very good news, it means our site is growing exponential: the amount of total torrent downloads roughly doubles every half year. And more downloads means more exposure, so more content available on our website. There is also a story on TorrentFreak about this milestone.

I thought it would be nice to show a breakdown of the download numbers per category, so here is a graph:

Torrents category Percentage of total downloads
Anime 3.61%
Books 3.04%
Games 6.59%
Movies 17.89%
Music 21.21%
Pictures 0.53%
Software 5.61%
TV Shows 40.11%
Other 1.42%

This clearly shows that TV Shows content is more popular than ever, followed by Music and Movies.

Of course this is not the end, if the growth keeps continuing we might be able to reach the 4 billion mark by the end of this year! Watch out, Apple iTunes…

BitTorrent in your browser: a round-up

Published
by
Niek
on June 9, 2007
in Interesting links and Personal rants
. 13 Comments

It has been more than a year since Opera added BitTorrent functionality to their browser. We expected that more browsers would follow the example of our Nordic browser developers.

Nowadays, there are quite some projects and extensions to add BitTorrent capabilities to browsers, so I figured it’s time for a round-up:

Opera
Opera was the first browser to support the BitTorrent protocol. Their BT support is quite solid, but not very advanced and doesn’t support some well-known BT extensions. In short: nice for new users, but not for regular downloaders.
Pros: Nicely integrated, multi-platform.
Cons: No advanced features (missing DHT, peer exchange, encrypted transfers), not open source.

BitFox
BitFox is a quite new extension for Firefox, made by the student Joshua Hendo. The backend of the extension is based on Rasterbar’s libtorrent, so it supports quite some advanced BT features. The project is in a VERY early stage of development, and can only be obtained from SVN, so I haven’t tested it yet.
Pros: Open source, using libtorrent, so a quite solid backend (including DHT).
Cons: Not usable yet, early stage of development, seems to run only on Windows & Linux.

FireStorm
FireStorm is quite similar to BitFox, it’s an extension for Firefox and still in pre-alpha development stage. They use the Mainline client as a basis, so they will probably support most BT extensions/features.
Pros: Open source, using the Mainline reference client as a backend.
Cons: In pre-alpha development stage, not usable yet, interface is quite ugly.

FoxTorrent
FoxTorrent is a project of the company Red Swoosh/Akamai, these guys have the funding and expertise to build a nice Firefox extension. This extension isn’t that well integrated in Firefox, clicking a torrent basically opens a webpage to the webinterface of an external application. The advantage is that closing your browser doesn’t stop the torrents from downloading.
Pros: Open source, torrent streaming/progressive downloading support, continue downloading even when browser is closed.
Cons: Not very well integrated in Firefox, no advanced features (missing port mapping, DHT, peer exchange, encrypted transfers).

AllPeers
AllPeers is also funded by a company, so you would expect a nice client. The whole interface looks very nice and clean, but they’re more focussed towards sharing URL’s/images/etc than downloading torrents. In the current stable version (0.60), there is not an option to download a regular torrent. They do have a My Torrents tab in the beta version though.
Pros: Clean and professional interface, also available as a bundle with FireFox
Cons: Not open source, no regular torrent support (yet), no advanced features (missing port mapping, DHT, peer exchance, encrypted transfers)

Wyzo/FireTorrent
Wyzo/FireTorrent is very new, they released their first public version a week ago. The difference between the two is that FireTorrent is a BitTorrent extension for Firefox, while Wyzo is a full-featured customized Firefox browser including the FireTorrent extension. These guys managed to integrate BitTorrent support seamlessly in the Firefox download manager. FireTorrent also has the most advanced BT features of all the projects mentioned here. The Wyzo browser has some cool advantages over Firefox, like direct searching on social sharing networks (including Mininova) and Alexa/Pagerank integration.
Pros: Seamless Firefox integration, available as a bundle with Firefox (Wyzo), has all advanced features (including port mapping, DHT, encryption, peer exchange, STUNT).
Cons: Not open source, Mac/Linux version not out yet - will be released in a few weeks

Conclusion
Of all the projects reviewed above, I think Wyzo has the most potential. This browser supports all the nice BT features/extensions and makes downloading via BitTorrent as easy as a regular HTTP download. Does Wyzo beat the “good old” µTorrent and Azureus? Probably not, but I will definitely recommend new BitTorrent users to install this browser.

References
Our friends at TorrentFreak have more background information on some of these projects: BitFox, FireStorm, FoxTorrent, AllPeers, Wyzo/FireTorrent.

Mininova.com is now ours!

Published
by
Niek
on April 20, 2007
in Mininova-related news
. 147 Comments

Hey all, good news!

In December last year we blogged that “mininova” turned out to be the 9th most Googled word. We wrote back then:

It’s good to see our site between the top-10 most popular search terms, but it probably also means the homepage of Mininova is not very trivial to find. We promise you we’re going to work on this issue next year!

One of the main reasons that so many people search on Google for Mininova, is that we use the “.org” TLD instead of the (more common) “.com”. So why not simply register Mininova.com?

The problem was that this domain was already registered by a scammer. This person was using the domain to trick people into paying money (up to 100$) to access our website. This technique is usually refered to as phishing. As a result, we received hundreds of emails from people who submitted their credit card information to this scammer.

Fortunately that’s all over now. In January, we hired the law firm Traverse Legal and started a domain dispute against “Atlas Protecta Co. Ltd.”, which is an alias used by the scammer. The decision came out a few days ago, and can be read here.

The arbiter judged that our three assertions were valid:

  1. The domain name registered by Respondent is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which Complainant has rights; and
  2. Respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
  3. The domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith.

To put a long story short, Mininova.com is now ours and redirects to the “.org” site :)

A short note to the people who lost money to the scammer: please contact your local bank and ask for a refund of the credited amount of money.

Extra server power…

Published
by
Niek
on February 12, 2007
in Mininova technical
. 116 Comments

Hi!

Just a heads up, we added some extra servers to the website, so everything should run a bit smoother from now on :) We’re currently also testing a new scraping (updates of seed/leecher numbers) system, this will significantly improve the accuracy of those numbers.

As always: in case you spot any problems, please let us know. Thanks!

Update: As some of you asked, here are the specs of the servers added:

  • Database slave: 2x Opteron 165 dual core, 4G DDR, RAID-1 (custom built)
  • Web server: 2x Opteron 165 dual core, 4G DDR, RAID-1 (custom built)
  • Advertisements web server: 2x Opteron 244, 2G DDR, RAID-1 (Sun V20z)

Mininova’s second anniversary

Published
by
Niek
on January 14, 2007
in Mininova-related news
. 85 Comments

Hey everyone,

No, we did not forget this important day: as of January the 14th, Mininova is two years old! :D

We’ve had a very interesting year, with lots of changes. In our blogpost announcing the first anniversary of Mininova, I said we were going to work on a new design. It took a while, but since Christmas the new layout is live. :) In May we broke the 400 million torrent downloads mark, and a week ago the impressive number of 1 billion torrent downloads!

Apart from the other staff members, this would have been impossible without you (as a Mininova user), the moderating team and so many more people!

I would like to thank you for using Mininova and please stay tuned for the next big milestone!

– Niek, on behalf of the Mininova staff.

More updates…

Published
by
Niek
on December 28, 2006
in Interesting links, Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 38 Comments

Hi, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas time! I will use this blog post to share some updates with you.

First of all, the new website: it took a while, but it seems that the new server setup is working fine now. We still need to fine-tune some areas, which will happen next week. Thanks everyone for reporting bugs and glitches!

Some people noticed that specific search queries return wrong results. For example, searching on “French” only returns old torrents. We hope to fix this issue in a few days. Update January 6: this problem is solved now.

Some other people reported that searching for “bla” does not return results for torrents with the name “blabla”. This so called “prefixed searching” is not possible yet with the new searching backend (Sphinx), but we hope to have this fixed somewhere in January. Update January 8: and this problem has been solved as well.

Enough about technical issues, on to the good news: several news sources (BBC, CTV, Torrentfreak) reported that “Mininova” was the ninth most Googled term in 2006. It’s good to see our site between the top-10 most popular search terms, but it probably also means the homepage of Mininova is not very trivial to find. We promise you we’re going to work on this issue next year!

And now for something else, the guys over at BitLord have released a TV show for the BitTorrent community. Mininova also plays a prominent part being the sponsor of the Torrent Top List. The guys at BitLord told me the first episode would be a first attempt at a show so they will improve it as time goes. But I have to say, the first episode is a nice start. Make sure to download the first episode here.

OK, that’s it for now… have a nice year-end and till next time!

Christmas update: big site changes

Published
by
Niek
on December 20, 2006
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 226 Comments

Hi everyone!

Just a few days left and it’s Christmas, the time of the year you spend with family, friends and… browsing the new & improved Mininova ;)

As you may have noticed, the site has undergone huge changes. We moved the site to a new hoster and datacenter, which will drastically improve performance. The search backend of the site has also been rewritten, resulting in a faster (and hopefully better) search experience.

After months of development and testing, we’re also introducing a new layout for Mininova. Extra functionality has been added and existing features are easier to use now. For example the “Jump to category” drop down box will help you quickly go to your favorite section, but also quite a few other cool but subtle features have been added.

This doesn’t mean the site is perfect now. In fact, we’re quite sure there are still some bugs & errors left, which we didn’t spot. In case you do, please let us know, and we’ll be happy to fix them! Same counts for the layout: please let us know your ideas to improve the layout.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you!

Thanks for using Mininova.

Technical updates

Published
by
Niek
on September 14, 2006
in Mininova technical
. 211 Comments

Hi all!

We received quite some complaints from users lately that the site was very slow. In order to fix this we just placed an extra search server and upgraded an existing webserver (apparently, one of its hard drives died, so read/write operations were very slow).

As a result, everything should run smoother than ever now! In the case that you spot some bugs or performance issues, please let us know.

Cya!

Update Oct 2: We added 2G RAM to one of the search servers, this should improve the overall site performance.

Forum back online!

Published
by
Niek
on August 15, 2006
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 113 Comments

Hi guys, this is going to be a quick post: I just wanted to let you know that the forum is back online (on a new server)!

You should be able to login as usual on http://forum.mininova.org/. Have fun, and please let me know if something isn’t working as it should.