So then, what's a tracker?

A tracker does one thing, it helps peers find each other.

Your client asks about a infohash (a number), a tracker replies with a list of others asking about the same thing. That's it! (Think game matchmaking but for P2P file sharing.)

Trackers have no knowledge about the content being shared, in fact, during a conversation between your client and a tracker, file info, metadata like torrent name is never discolosed. Here's the full conversation.
We have DHT now, why are trackers still a thing?

DHT is pretty cool, arguably better than trackers because they are designed to solve the issue of centralization. So why bother with one?

DHT can be slow on new swarms. A tracker gets you connected faster, especially for unhealthy swarms, they generally perform better. Imagine a popular indie band in Africa releasing their album, tracker work better here. DHT also does not work well for clients behind a (CG)NAT, and unfortunately many clients are behind these (expected to improve with IPv6).

Btw! Did you know about: https://app.pkarr.org? It uses DHT for truly sovereign domain names!

Who owns OpenTrakr?

I started OpenTrakr to learn about Bitorrent technology and it was fun!

I am in the process of transferring it to a EU political party which will help it's future.

Is running a tracker risky or illegal?

No. There's millions of legal torrents that use P2P technology/trackers. We have a removals process for content that needs to be removed, and we comply with local laws where we host.

Is this tracker associated to any torrent sites?

No.

Some domains may point their domain/DNS to ours infrastrucutre. This is a typical thing with trackers, which can help keep swarms alive.

Do you have a removal policy?

Yes. In order to keep this tracker compliant in Iceland, we have a easy removals process.

How much does it cost to run a tracker?

Trackers can use alot of bandwidth. Though BEP conversations are small, these can be hundreds of thousands a second. In terms of labour, it takes roughly 1-2 days a month to maintain and a dedicated host.

Do you accept donations?

Not currently.

Can you share stats from your tracker?

We don't collect stats right now. Also we run an optimized version of OpenTracker. Any collection of stats would affect optimizations and performance.

We will collect system stats soon (CPU, memory, bandwidth, and connections per second from the firewall), but this hasn't been implemented yet.

Use our Tracker with your domain

To use this tracker, add this to your torrent:

udp://tracker.opentrackr.com:1337/announce

Want to use your own domain? Point a subdomain at our infrastructure in a few steps:

  1. Open your DNS provider (Cloudflare, Namecheap, Porkbun, …).
  2. Add a CNAME record on the subdomain you want, e.g. tracker.
  3. Point it to tracker.opentrackr.com.
  4. Save, then wait a few minutes for DNS to propagate.
  5. Announce to your subdomain: udp://tracker.example.com:1337/announce (port 6969 works too)

Note: only UDP is supported, on ports 1337 and 6969.