Archive for the 'Mininova-related news' Category

Mininova team launches new web site: Snotr

Published on July 20, 2007 in Interesting links and Mininova-related news. 91 Comments

We’re excited to announce that we are launching a new web site today: Snotr. We worked more than 2 years on this web site, mainly due to a lack of time. But after dozens of delayed milestones, we think that Snotr is finally ready for public.

So what exactly is Snotr? From the Snotr FAQ:

Snotr is a source for short and funny or interesting videos. Everyone can submit a video, which will be reviewed by our team. If we accept your video, it will be listed on the front page and other pages. Users can rate videos and post comments to share their opinion with others. Please note that we try to keep this website family-safe, so adult submissions are not allowed.

Some of the unique features of Snotr (compared to the other “funny videos” sites out there) are:

  • Clean interface, no adult content, SFW
  • High-quality videos
  • Real-time video resizing (just drag the video-size slider)
  • Audio volume leveled (no need to change the volume for every video)

So to be clear: Snotr is NOT a YouTube/Metacafe/Dailymotion/whatever killer, if you’re looking for a place to dump your videos, stick to those sites. But in case you have some spare time to spend (*cough* work *cough*), try Snotr :)

See you there!

Update: For those who are wondering what the name ‘Snotr’ means: it doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s just a catchy name.

P.S. If you spot any bugs, please post them here.

2 Billion Downloads!

Published on June 13, 2007 in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news. 166 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…

Mininova.com is now ours!

Published on April 20, 2007 in Mininova-related news. 152 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.

Search in a specific category

Published on April 10, 2007 in Mininova-related news. 15 Comments

Until now it wasn’t very intuitive to search in a specific category. The only way was to go to advanced search and select the category you were interested in.

We now added a fast and simple way to switch to a different category after a search (as most people tend to use the search form that’s on top of every page).

In case you encounter any errors please let us know and we’ll try to fix them as soon as possible!

On a side note, just in case some people didn’t know, you can also use the “-” operator in your searches. For example if you search for “linux” but don’t want to see any of the server distributions, include a “-server” to your search (“linux -server”), and all torrents with server in their name will be excluded!

Mininova’s second anniversary

Published on January 14, 2007 in Mininova-related news. 87 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.

1 Billion Downloads!

Published on January 8, 2007 in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news. 132 Comments

Yes people, that’s not a joke! Today we hit the one billion (1,000,000,000) torrent downloads mark!

There are just a few days left till we’re going to celebrate our second anniversary, so the timing couldn’t be any better ;) In May last year we wrote about the 400M downloads mark, so in less than 8 months we counted 600M downloads.

Of course this is not the end! Looking at the counter, we see another few million downloads per day coming in, and increasing.

Thanks everyone for sticking with us! Stay tuned for the next big mark :)

More updates…

Published on December 28, 2006 in Interesting links, Mininova technical and Mininova-related news. 39 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 on December 20, 2006 in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news. 230 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.

Design and server updates

Published on November 29, 2006 in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news. 69 Comments

Hi all!

It’s been a month since we wrote our previous blog post about redesigning Mininova. We got an enormous amount of feedback (thanks everyone!), and incorporated much of this in our ongoing redesigning process. We’re happy to announce that a new version of our redesign is ready for beta testing at http://beta.mininova.org/.

A lot has been changed since the previous beta version, the main differences are a new color scheme, the navigation menu (back and improved at the top) and the advertisement spot (switched back from left to right).

Of course we would still like to hear your opinions on the redesign. If you spot any bugs, please let us know! Constructive criticism is always welcome :)

On another note, many users asked us why the site is so slow lately. The answer is simple: the site grew very big last months (both in amount of torrents and popularity) and we couldn’t add more server power. But no worries: we decided to switch large parts of Mininova to another hosting provider. The new server farm will be opened early December, so stay tuned for a blazing fast Mininova soon!

Mininova’s new design (beta)

Published on October 30, 2006 in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news. 243 Comments

Almost two years after its launch, we have redesigned Mininova.

The new design is not completely finished yet, but you can see it in action at http://beta.mininova.org/.

We are planning to publish this new layout, which should make Mininova less complicated and easier to use, along with some new features/improvements. Some of these features are already implemented, like:

  • Better “General information” of torrents.
  • Redesigned Upload page.
  • The download content of a torrent is shown as a folder tree (example). This tree view works best with modern browsers, which have CSS3 support. The icons we used are from the well-known Silk Icon set, made by Mark James.
  • The website now uses the UTF-8 character set. That means, for example, that torrents titles can now contain Chinese characters. More interesting news is that pasting the contents of an NFO file in the torrent description works great now (example). Just paste the NFO characters from your favorite NFO viewer between [nfo] and [/nfo] tags in the description area on the Upload page.

Some sections, like the Advanced search, are not working (correctly) yet. These things will be fixed in the future. The beta page is more about showing the new design.

Before we update the main website, we want to hear your opinion about the new look. Please comment on this blog post to let us know what you think about it and what could be better. Please also report all bugs and errors you discover.