Archive

Direct RSS feeds

Published
by
Matthijs
on May 26, 2007
in Mininova technical
. 25 Comments

As you might know, all our RSS feeds point to the “General info” pages of torrents. However, this is not very convenient when using our feeds in combination with torrent clients that require direct links to the .torrent files. We got quite a few mails from people that asked for an option to let the RSS feed link directly to the .torrent files.

So how do you change your feed to point to the .torrent instead of the “General info” page? Well, all you have to do is add “?direct” (when it’s the first “argument”) or “&direct” to your RSS feed!

So the global feed would become (note the question mark):
http://www.mininova.org/rss.xml?direct

All other cases require a ampersand:
http://www.mininova.org/rss.xml?cat=8&direct

Even though this flag was around for quite some time, not many people probably knew about it, hopefully this post changes that :)

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.

Technical issues April 18

Published
by
Matthijs
on April 19, 2007
in Mininova technical
. 40 Comments

After having quite some issues earlier tonight we made some source code changes. This proved to be a bad strategy (we didn’t test these changes enough) and we ended up with a corrupted database. We are restoring a backup as we speak, but many of the torrents uploaded today are probably lost. We are going to try and restore those as well, but our first priority is to restore the backup of this morning.

If you uploaded torrents today, please re-upload them again as soon as we are up and running again.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for understanding!

Instant update: We’re up again! Minus all torrents of today, unfortunately…

Search in a specific category

Published
by
Matthijs
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!

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.

1 Billion Downloads!

Published
by
Matthijs
on January 8, 2007
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 130 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
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.

Design and server updates

Published
by
Jos
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!