Maybe not the actual biggest, but the loss of pirated material that i feel the most sad about is The Trove. The Trove was a website with a huge list of downloadable PDFs of source books for tabletop RPGs. I got the pdfs for everything DND, and also tried a bunch of other games I'd never heard of with a few friends. It also had downloads for other books and documents but I only used it for RPGs. I think it went down in 2019 or so.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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I think there are some telegram groups with that type of material in them if you take a quick look. Not sure how they compare with your old resource though.
TorrentDB. First tracker I participated. Good layout, nice rules. Sad to see it go
This is a good time to introduce the concept of backups. Remember to backup both to local storage and to have a copy that is remote, in case of natural disaster.
DC++ It was just sharing stuff. No search. You connect to someone’s computer, they have a shared folder. You download what you want and move on. Instead of searching for stuff, you discovered it.
Oink, Demonoid, AsianDVDclub... Various private Hotline sites circa 90s. Sadly missed
Demonoid, absolutely! Warez-bb, and many oldschool GeoCities blogs. I remember one that had portable cracks of any programs you could imagine.
Napster
Definitely Vimm's Lair for me. I still play a lot of GameCube and N64 games and Vimm's was always my go-to place for finding roms. They got hit with a lot of DMCAs and take down notices, and had to remove the vast majority of their Nintendo library along with anything related to Sega and Lego. The site is still up, but it's like visiting a graveyard now
This one hurt me really bad. I was just getting started with retro gaming and then all of this shit happened.
Could you give an example of a game no longer available? Just checked and was able to dl Luigi's Mansion just fine
On GameCube, I can see that Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, Mario Party 6, Smash Bros Melee are all unavailable. On N64, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Pokemon Stadium are also unavailable
Demonoid. They had a community that put together a lot of high-quality torrents.
This and I believe it was called TvTorrents. Private tracker that was amazing for TV shows.
You and another have already said it, but Emuparadise. It was...truly a shame. :'(
Newzbin.
Deeeefonitely what.cd for me. RIP WCD. We have two great music trackers now, but nothing comes close to WCD.
Absolutely agreed
what.cd was a bigger loss than just privacy - what.cd was an enormous loss to preservation of music history
the amount of content that has simply never been available for purchase was incredible, and made available in one of the cleanest and most comprehensively complete taxonomies was amazing
What.cd and BitGamer were the two private trackers where I really put in effort not just to seed but to contribute unique uploads.
I stepped away from torrenting for awhile and when I returned both were ashes.
Edit- what are the two good music trackers you're referencing?
Losing what.cd was like having a Music Library of Alexandria burn down. Such an amazing resource for rare, out of print, obscure, and or otherwise unobtainable media.
Opheus and REDacted are the two! RED has more and interview signups. I’m only on OPH because they welcomed WCD refugees and it’s been very good.
RED and the defunct Apollo both welcomed WCD refuguees at first, but they filled up fast.
Apollo is still doing awesome! It’s called Orpheus now.
I had no idea Apollo got resurrected. I gave up hope after a few months when it went down many years ago.
Oh yeah! They weren’t down for long before they renamed hahaha
figures lmao
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Megaupload. It was like the Library of Alexandria burning down. Not just pirated stuff, either.
I remember to swear by megaupload because all the other upload sites uses extremely sketchy ads and allow the fake download buttons.
Now Jdownloader is the only way for me to download non-torrents
Taringa, it was the go-to place for everything, especially content in spanish
TheTrove was a collection of tabletop RPG books and magazines going back decades that has never had a decent replacement yet. It was fairly well organized and quite complete with tons of obscure games and out of print books. It had a different name or two before that but the collection always migrated somewhere until The Trove was finally shut down. I really miss that collection, even though I've managed to track down most of what I needed, it has been much more difficult since the shutdown.
It continues marching on as The Eye.
If I understand, that collection is missing a lot from the original. I could be wrong though.
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Asiandvdclub (not the shady remake)
What.cd. - RED is great but there's still a hole...
GrooveShark was a great music streaming service. If a track wasn't available you could just upload it and it would be available to all users.
It eventually got sued into oblivion leaving us with the streaming platforms of today. I really wish it could have made the transition to being legit because it had a great interface.
GrooveShark, for me, particularly thrived on early Android as Tinyshark. It was probably one of the first ways I remember actively listening to whatever music I wanted to; no algorithm outside of the list of "most popular songs".
15ish years ago when Seagate was having lots of issues with their 2TB externals getting the click o' doom I lost 6 2TB drives over 2 years.
The data was just data, easily re-acquirable, but fuck that was a pain in the ass.
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Nzbmatrix
Going a bit old-school with this one, but unmoderated DALnet. It used to be the wild West, with everything at your fingertips.
DALnet and EFnet were both great for that
+1, the IRC days were glorious
SuprNova was the big one for me. Everything else was either redundant (Like RARBG) or just faded away (like my Usenet sources). I didn't have any replacement lined up when SuprNova died.
Websites: rarbg and emuparadise
Personally: I have an 8tb HDD completely full with shows and movies I haven't tested since a house fire. I'm afraid it may have been dropped in the move, and I don't even have my PC with me to check it out
Haven't quite filled the void from 9anime/aniwave going down, hard to replace the king.
I remember using something called ourtunes back in college that just let everyone in the dorm freely access and download each others iTunes libraries on the dorm network.
Any and all sites that offer unique content that other pirated sites do not offer, such as unknown and unpopular animes/movies, every day they run the risk of being erased by the corrupt hands of the DMCA and unfortunately they may not have repositories for them due to their rare and unique gallery.
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