I have some idea on whose torrents to avoid but still if you have a good list please share.

    • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      How? Just because someone has a gate on their house doesn’t mean there aren’t criminals inside

      It’s the safer option to be sure, but never feel safe or comfortable while lurkin these here seas or you might get capsized out of the blue!

      • eagleeyedtiger@lemmy.nz
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        1 year ago

        Many of the top private trackers rely on reputation. Which is why some of them are notoriously hard to get into. They usually also have active mods, admins and forums. They also generally have posting rules for torrents. Anyone wanting to spread malicious torrents would likely get their account banned in short order once it gets reported. not to mention quite a number of them have their own internal release groups that can be trusted.

        While it’s not impossible, it’s far less likely to be an issue on any well run private tracker.

          • eagleeyedtiger@lemmy.nz
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            1 year ago

            I’m still new to Lemmy so I’m not sure if there are any communities here for it. On Reddit there is r/trackers which has good info on which private trackers are worth trying to get into. There was also r/OpenSignups which posted which trackers had open signups, but it seems like they’ve shut it down since the protests.

      • yoichi@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        For the most parts, movies and tv shows is generally safe. It’s really difficult to do anything from a media file (.mkv/.mp4) and as long as the torrent doesn’t contain any other weird files you’re fine.

        It’s with software and games that you really need to be careful. For software, I would recommend m0nkrus releases from rutracker.org . Google translate the comments on any release and you will see whether any release is suspicious.

        Games on the other hand is very hard. There are a bunch of really popular sites that will include some sort of crypto software and other questionable stuff along with their games (igg-games comes to mind). The only public space I trust to get games from is fitgirl-repack.site (this domain is the only official one). Other than that, I only trust GazelleGames but you have to find a way into that and I’m not gonna say it’s hard but its definitely a bit of effort to join.

        • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Great info! Thanks for sharin :)

          Im abstaining from anything to do with Russia however given their current disposition against the majority of the globe and their efforts with WiperWare

  • webghost0101@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I am a simple man. I check if the fitgirl site i am on is the real one and thats about it.

    For rare music files il try any torrent that promises to have what i am looking for. I have yet to actually catch sm malicious.

    • B3_CHAD@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 year ago

      For games, I mostly use ova and for music, I just use a Spotify downloader or yt-dlp. For movies I do what you do lol.

    • NXL@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      How do the arrs protect you from untrusted uploaders though? Don’t they just automatically download torrents based on the names and number of seeders?

      • LastoftheDinosaurs@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Video quality is considered along with tags, which I don’t really understand myself. Torrents with the PROPER tag have highest priority, etc. It can get very granular. I never distrusted this system and find it better than going off uploader name.

        • yoichi@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Sonarr only downloads media according to the the rules you give it. If you don’t give it any rules, it will just grab whatever immediately matches the quality profile (1080p, 2160p, etc)

          What you can do is follow the trash-guides. Those will give you an updated list of decent groups, and if you use them with notifiarr/recylarr, the profiles on sonarr/radarr will also auto-update along with changes in the guides

          • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            How do I configure radarr and sonarr to only download 1080p style movies / shows? It keeps grabbing 40gb movies, I just want the 1-2gb versions, which are plenty for me.

            • yoichi@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 year ago
              1. What indexers do you have added to sonarr/radarr? dbzer0 doesn’t mind naming them afaik so you’re good to share them here

              2. Setting the quality slider as the other user suggested should work. Go to Settings->Quality and slide the size for WEBDL-1080P and BLURAY-1080P to the size you’d prefer (remember that it’s defined as size per hour and not total size of the file)

              3. The best way to do this imo is to define release profiles based on groups. I’m guessing, based on your size preferences, you’d normally grab H265/HEVC 1080p releases re-encoded by various groups like TGx and PSA

              On Sonarr (v3), create a release profile and name it whatever you want. In the Must Contain field, paste this -

              /^(?=.*(1080|720))(?=.*((x|h)[ ._-]?265|hevc)).*/i

              This will force Sonarr to only grab releases which are HEVC. This is actually supposed to go in the Must Not Contain field because re-encodes are much more inferior. But if your intention is to save space this works.

              Then in the preferred section you can define the rankings for certain groups you’d like to see. So type in -PSA on the first one and give it a score of 100. In the next one type -TGx with a score of 95 and so on with the groups you’d like to see with corresponding scores according to your preferences.

              Radarr is on v4 and now uses Custom Formats so read https://trash-guides.info/Radarr/ to get a better understanding. The Sonarr section can also help if you want to be more specific with your filters. Anyway, Custom Formats can be imported pretty easily but its best you go through that yourself and try to recreate the profile we made on Sonarr for Radarr

          • LastoftheDinosaurs@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Ok, and how is that any worse than looking at uploader name like we’re still in 2004. The automatic method is fine.

            • yoichi@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 year ago

              Maybe for you, but that’s not how it is for a lot of other people. Some of us prefer to control what releases we grab instead of blindly passing it off to what is essentially a glorified RSS reader (when you don’t set up rules)

                • yoichi@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  1 year ago

                  Like I said before it’s about control. A lot of us want to be able to control what we want to watch, the specific release groups and source of the content we watch. I’m not saying it’s necessarily better than what you do. You have a 128tb media server and you’re obviously a lot more invested into this whole thing than I am but I prefer to control my content.

  • CraigeryTheKid@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    On topic, can someone clarify if/why IGG is bad?

    They seem to have quite the following and popular on 1337x. Not a joke/troll, genuinely curious.

    • Cevilia (she/they/…)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      From the old Megathread: “These are not recommended on this subreddit as trusted sites for various reasons, but the main reasons why igg-games is not recommended is due to their history of shady behavior”

    • B3_CHAD@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 year ago

      They have put miners, keyloggers and bunch of weird shit in their installations in the past, if what I have heard is to be believed. Also them spamming multiple links of the same shit seems sketchy a.f.