MaM is a bit bizarre. But I think it mostly boils down to the open interview process. Since lots of users can easily join it can cause headaches if not managed well. Especially since they have a notable invite forum lots of people will use it as a stepping stone possibly to create multiple accounts on “upstream” trackers through the invite forums. This creates a lot of burden on the staff.

• IP requirements are mostly to avoid duplicate accounts and ban evasion.
• Torrent client requirements are mostly to make cheating harder, but also help reduce support load by banning buggy clients.
• Strict IP seeding rules help mitigate damage from less knowledgeable users leaking their passkey.
• MaM is also quite old and does have a handful of what I would consider “annoying legacy” but I don’t think any of it is about elitism.
• The mobile bans are because few mobile clients are good seeders (often online and connectable). This raises support load hugely.

Basically I don’t envy the moderators and other staff on MaM. There are tons of relatively inexperienced users “passing through” and they are a big abuse target. So they make strict rules to make policing this easier.

At the end of the day if you don’t like it you can not use it. They don’t owe you anything.

I honestly don’t know what OP expected here. Honest question, how does one get access to a private tracker? I run a seedbox (not a fucking mobile phone) on a 10 Gbps network in Europe, my ratio is ridiculous.

Private tracker, private rules. If you don’t like the rules take your ball and go home.

Removed by mod

Only here for the comments 😅

But also, reading all the comments, suddenly my total upload amount of 120 terabytes with a ratio of 25-ish on public trackers feels… Unappreciated? 😂 Can somebody please pat me on the head, telling me to keep seeding? :3

I’m on MAM + other private trackers. MAM isn’t particularly strict on rules, and it’s ridiculously easy to have a positive ratio there what with all the freebies.

Private trackers are designed to make sure there’s always plenty of seeders. They mostly do that by enforcing that people maintain a certain ratio - i.e. don’t just hit and run. (There’s other advantages like that you can request re-seeds and the system will message previous seeders but that’s besides the point) You can’t force people to maintain ratio if it’s easy to game the system - that’s why there are these rules about IP addresses.

Many torrent clients are broken, or just lie about their upload stats. Those clients are banned, as are other that are broken in ways that cause others problems. Phones are a terrible source to download from - signal issues, limiting battery usage, etc. They just waste download slots that could be used for real clients on real connections.

Where is all the freedom on that shit?

Are you serious? You’re getting this stuff completely for free and you’re whining that there’s a few house rules. Entitled, much?

this is a “you” problem, not a platform one.

not a single rule there exists that’s not rooted in technological limitations and choices.

no, it’s not about “just seeding back”, it’s also about protecting the community from people - frankly - like you who don’t bother to look into CSVs or platform limitations.

What you call “freedom” is a claim to do whatever you want no matter the impact on others.

the shout box on MAM would have helped you with setting up or any questions you might have.

but I don’t see any questions, just complaints qjd entitlement with question marks at the end.

MAM is unusual, but not really for any of the reasons you mentioned. Every private tracker I know of only allows a narrow list of desktop clients.

The expectation on private trackers is that you’re seeding 24/7 or as close to that as possible. Not that you just seed when your laptop lid happens to be open. If you want a cheap low-power seeding setup, get a Raspberry Pi or some other single-board computer and connect it to an external hard drive. Seeding from a smartphone, especially one you actually use day-to-day, is just not going to work and battery optimizations are only one reason why.

I’m not on that specific tracker but some of the others have similar sort of rules

They have something about changing IPs, it seems you can’t change IPs too often and you can’t have multiple accounts in the same IP. Why?

That’s generally for detecting ban evasion / duplicate accounts. But I think with most private trackers you’d just need to let staff know if you’re in a shared IP situation.

They absolutely not allow mobile client, which means, you need to let your PC on all the time, sum this up with the fact that they require 72h seed within the next 30 days, this is a t least 2.5h of seed daily and if you miss one day for any reason it’d be even more for the next days. But my question is about the mobile, why the hell can’t I use my phone to seed? I talked to a mod and they argue mobile isn’t reliable due to battery optimization and it might kill the client. What does this even mean?

The mod is sort of right about that one. Most mobile users aren’t even connectable (port forwarded) so that’s problem number 1. And problem 2, yes Android does pause apps for battery optimization - but technically you can configure your Android to not do that for specific apps, not sure if it works for all phones but in mine I just bring up the App Info, go to App Battery Usage, and make sure to enable “Allow Background Usage”… most people wouldn’t really want to do that and run down their phone battery constantly but I guess it’s an option. Maybe bring that up as a tracker suggestion/rule change though it does seem easier just to tell members not to use mobile clients.

Why the torrent clients are so limited even the version you can use? What it has to do with anything at all? Again, is not seeding just enough?

Maybe specific to that tracker, not sure. But usually torrent client lists exist because the tracker staff tested those clients against the private tracker software to verify that stats are being tracked correctly. And sometimes they do ban clients due to being buggy, being used for ratio cheating, that sort of thing.

I don’t know MAM, but I always assume these rules exist to stop abuse or a headache rather than some kind of elitism.

Multiple accounts with the same ip? You get into ban evasion and the argument of “ThAt’s NoT mE, tHaTs XYZ” if you just ban them all.

I’ve read reasons about the client thing, but I don’t remember any, and the mobile thing, probably just stops an argument about “I’m trying, my phone just keeps killing it”. Could it be simpler? Of course, but if you deal with people all the time sometimes it’s just easier to make a rule and be done with it.

Private trackers kinda expect you to have a 24/7 server for seeding. I just keep seeding everything on my homelab indefinitely so I can just ignore all the complicated rules

I’m not in MAM but the others I’m in have much stricter seeding requirements (like 4 days of seeding in 2 weeks). Like others have said, these rules are there to keep people from creating headaches for the volunteer staff as well as ensuring that you’re contributing something too. These sites have a fixed number of users and if everyone else is constantly offline or doing hit and runs, the whole thing falls apart.

If you’re not setup to where you have a server running 24/7 or can’t get a seedbox, you might use public sources. Since it sounds like you’ll primarily be using a phone you probably don’t even need high bitrate 4K Remux files with 7.1 audio like you’d get on private trackers. Places like TPB and 1337x have most everything popular. For music, SoulSeek is a great option and doesn’t have rules like this.

MAM is great though, compared to a lot of other private trackers, it’s easy to maintain a good ratio and the community is super nice and helpful

I hate to tell ya, but out of all the private trackers I know, MAM is the most lax when it comes to rules and expectations

Try out milkie.cc

I do not believe there are any rules, and no seeding requirements.

DM me for an invite!