The team shared their concerns with TPB operator “Winston” who came up with a solution that was officially deployed a few hours ago.
New Pirate Bay registrations are not completely automated. TPB administrator Spud17 informs TorrentFreak that new users must apply for an account at the official SuprBay forums, where moderators will manually create accounts using a new tool.
This hands-on approach will help to prevent scammers and spammers from flooding the site. Users will be able to register directly in future but all accounts will still have to be approved before they are activated.
“For those who have waited years to upload, they now have the chance to get an account,” Spud17 says, pointing to the SuprBay thread.
“Whether they want to upload niche stuff every now and again, or be one of the next big scene uploaders – all are welcome. Except for the nitwits who flood the site with crap, but we’ll just nuke their arses.”
Isn’t TPB horrible, though? Last time I heard about it, people were saying it was a cesspool.
It’s earned its terrible reputation over the last 15 or so years. Dunno how it got so easy to dupe the tracker, but once scammers found out, it was open season. Anything you searched for was not only there, but had hundreds or thousands of seeders…except it didn’t actually. And the content you thought you were downloading wasn’t either. Its “verified uploader” or “trusted uploader” system was only a band-aid on a gushing wound, because it was so flooded with scams that it drowned out any of the actually trustworthy content. By the time I started shifting to private trackers in 2009, I was barely visiting there anymore because I couldn’t trust it.
She turns 20 this September, and I have some very fond memories of those early years, but the name is completely mud to me now. They’d be better served just starting fresh as an exclusively private tracker using much better software and an entirely different name; I doubt anyone who knows their reputation is gonna jump on this.