Thanks for your input. I hope to address some of your concerns.

Being that you are in computer security I am sure you know there is absolutely no way possible for someone to inject a virus into a torrent connection unless it is included in the original file set. If you are getting viruses from torrents it sure is not happening here. All our torrents are created by the tapers or seeders themselves. General user uploads are allowed. If you see bad peers that never complete a download or something like that it is not a virus. It is a malicious torrent client. This is why we have an allowed clients list and block clients we know can be bad for the swarms. If you see a user that is doing this please report them and we can see what client they are using and ban it. It rarely happens.

Concerning your comments regarding ratios. We do not feel it is difficult at all to maintain a ratio here, but you have to seed. You personally have downloaded 22 shows, 13 of which currently have no seeds at all, two of them have stranded peers. You could be helping your ratio as well as other members and longevity of torrents right now.

As tapers we have all seeded torrents on bt.etree.org as well. Leechers hammer our torrents, hit and run happens to more than %70 of the peers. Torrents do not last long on etree because when the tapers or original seeder stops seeding it it dies, users just do not care and the tapers suffer by contributing bandwidth in excess. While here at cotapers.org every torrent uploaded to this tracker is still here. Some may not be seeded now but we do have features to ask for re-seeds. Keep in mind this is possible because we track members and require logins.

I do appreciate that you would like to share some "non-current" shows. If they are from Colorado they would definitely be welcomed here. However with your lack of torrent connectivity I would be apprehensive to do so. Even here at cotapers.org the initial seeder does end up bearing the most load on the torrent, and will frequently receive "Reseed Requests". If you are good with this I would be happy to up your permissions to allow you to upload.

When it comes down to it, cotapers.org is not really about how many torrents or members we can acquire. It is about the quality of the members we have. We take pride in having a nice tracker with a very organized database of seeds. For the tapers that contribute it provides a system to track recordings and ensure even there own copy's are replaceable, if need be.

Oh, and you should know.. we actually do not ban users for low ratios here. We may someday, but currently we have only ever banned one user, and that was a bot from China :P

phrog