[Let's just ignore the picture.]

Rutracker turned 20!

A jubilee!

Perfect reason to seed something.

Once our admin was forgotten in the server room, the office centre was closed, and everyone went home. Server room was in the basement, with no cell phone reception. Sending of email from Fedora command prompt ensued, in hope that it would be read before midnight. That server room was cold and really noisy.

On another occasion, officers from Bureau “C” [“Communications”; computer crimes unit of Russian Ministry on Internal Affairs] came to confiscate our servers, but made a mistake, and took someone else's from the next rack. They found pirated Windows there.

It was in Russia, it was long ago... [Quote from a recent Monetochka song, itself a mutation of a line from popular insert song in a 1965 Thaw era movie “Friends and Years” which looked back at pre-war youth.]

Can anyone remember that in 2013 Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs suggested putting users of “torrent” in jail for five years? Now, in 2024, they play movies downloaded from “torrent” in Russian movie theatres.

And another episode: in 2015, before getting us blocked (and with support from American rights holders), Roskomnadzor DDoS'ed us with such force that it caused intermittent failures of ATMs in the country which we used for hosting.

A lot of similar stories can be recalled after 20 years, but let them wait for the next jubilee.

Now we're in the cloud — two dozen virtual machines. Alas, own hosting has become too expensive for us. Ad banners you look at don't render much grandeur possible.

Still, there's roughly a million of downloaded torrents and about 500 new ones added each day, for free, without SMS, and even without signing up, if you wish. [2000s meme search phrase: “XYZ download for free without SMS without signing up”]

We still strive, in particular because of your feedback. If the forum is inaccessible somewhere, let us know, we'll fix that.

Yes, Rutracker looks old-school, inconvenient to check on a mobile phone. On the other hand, Google and Apple won't ban the app — there isn't any.

And there are no ads in the comments. No political shitstorms on the forum, too. Well, almost.

But there's still shortage of moderators to watch over that.

Online movie streaming is just movie streaming. Rutracker also has music of all genres, games, magazines, books, software, documentaries, firmware, etc., etc., and even banned-in-Russia Olympic Games. All in one, as it seems. You just need to use a VPN [link to VPN discussion subforum], but you would have to use it anyway...

Tiny but industrious part of our community — those who create torrents, keep them alive, validate them, keep forums in order — are getting enormous respect today from the rest of 14 million active users.

Those who are not releasing or seeding, nor participating in groups, nor moderating — just common (though not loved any bit less) users — can participate financially [link to donation options]. Or we'll introduce a monthly fee of 200 roubles (j/k).

https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6463539

20 years is quite a significant anniversary for any internet resource. In case of a torrent tracker, this result is excellent and unique.

The more worth-while this celebration is to us, and the more elongated user greetings topic [linked] is going to be.

https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6574630

Happy anniversary, Rutracker!