Scoring Invites to Private BitTorrent Sites

August 14, 2007 7:31 AM

Looking for advice on how to score invites to private BitTorrent sites- specificially Oink.cd.

My sister called last night asking me to get myself invited to join Oink.cd so I can invite her. I believe I've seen some sites listing invite exchanges here, but can't seem to find any of those questions. So, any advice on how to go about scoring an invite to Oink or any other interesting private BitTorrent sites? Other similar sites I should be directing her to instead are welcome, too.

posted by hwickline to technology (19 comments total)

Try Invite Share, recommended in past invite threads.
posted by ALongDecember at 7:35 AM on August 14, 2007

Your sister needs to cut out the middle man -- you don't get invites until you've done your own fair amount of sharing on oink. Or so I'm told.
posted by bonaldi at 7:38 AM on August 14, 2007

That's correct. You don't get invites until you:

* have been a member for at least 2 weeks,
* have uploaded at least 10GB and,
* have a ratio at or above 1.05.

Or so I've heard.
posted by darkshade at 7:44 AM on August 14, 2007

Oink has made it very risky to share invites with strangers, lately -- basically, if an invitee if yours tries to cheat his ratio, you lose your own ability to invite forever. So if you find that Oink invites seem to have dried up, that's a contributing factor.
posted by mendel at 7:56 AM on August 14, 2007

I second inviteshare - I got a demonoid invite there. Oink invites are hard to come by - but so worth it!
posted by heartquake at 8:23 AM on August 14, 2007

I always wonder, how does someone hear about Oink but not know someone who can invite them? Do folks hang out in bars and talk about the torrent sites they're members of?
posted by phearlez at 9:22 AM on August 14, 2007

Phearlez: probably from people who don't have invitations, or got kicked out.
posted by stereo at 9:55 AM on August 14, 2007

You can get instant Oink invites when you become a member and then donate at least 5 Euros. Incidentally, I have extra oink.cd invites. If someone hasn't sent you an invite already I'd be happy to send one along.
posted by ofthestrait at 10:19 AM on August 14, 2007

You know hwickline, if someone wanted to invite you, they'd have no way of contacting you.
posted by stereo at 11:29 AM on August 14, 2007

hwickline's email is in his/her profile. i would send one along but i dont know if one has already been sent.
posted by ofthestrait at 12:07 PM on August 14, 2007

So there's no way to pay for an Oink invite? Dang. How else could a high ratio–lovin' dude or dudette get an invite?
posted by wemayfreeze at 12:41 PM on August 14, 2007

Paying for Oink invites will bring down the banhammer on both the invitee and inviter.
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 12:56 PM on August 14, 2007

D'oh! Thanks for the headsup, stereo-- I just switched my profile to my current mail. And thanks to everyone for their answers. Ofthestraight, just mailed you...
posted by hwickline at 1:40 PM on August 14, 2007

oink is run by people who are so mathematically illiterate they can't understand that the overall average ratio always equals 1 no matter how many times or how clearly it is explained to them, and that the existence of people with high upload bandwidth who keep their ratio at 2 or 3 NECESSARILY means there will be people with lower upload bandwidth who will be unable to maintain a ratio of 1 no matter how hard they try.

Even an essay by Bram detailing why their practices hurt filesharing overall fails to penetrate their high-school-dropout peabrains.

The primary reason they ban so many people is so that the people in the circle jerk can all say their ratio is way over 1. The only way to keep the inner circle's ratios way over 1 is to ban lots of people before they are able to get their ratio to approach 1.

The practice does mean that an individual download will be a little bit likely to be faster, even if unpopular, with the downside that you have to put a huge amount of effort into monitoring your ratio and if you accidentally download some large files that are really well seeded and few people want them after you (because they are not new) you may have to run bittorrent day and night for a very long time before you can download anything else without getting banned, to the benefit of all the ratio-fetishists who were sitting on the same torrents as you.
posted by lastobelus at 5:19 PM on August 14, 2007 [2 favorites]

lastobelus, this assumes a fixed size population, which isn't the case on oink. Also, the minimum ratio isn't 1.
posted by stereo at 5:28 PM on August 14, 2007

this assumes a fixed size population

Yeah exactly. Once you go down the path of rewarding high ratio and banning low ratio, you create a culture where people try to keep their ratio high, as in over 1. The more you want to maintain that culture, the more draconian you have to get with your banning strategies, which in turn stokes the high-ratio culture. Positive feedback loop. Meanwhile, unecessary seeding actually results in more overhead. That's not huge, mind you, but Bram makes a pretty good case for the idea that the strategy will harm filesharing overall.

On top of that the inherent hypocrisy in the fact that the frikn filesharing site feels it's somehow appropriate to exercise more draconian control over access to the files than the people they "stole" them from is just disgusting.
posted by lastobelus at 5:53 PM on August 14, 2007

the existence of people with high upload bandwidth who keep their ratio at 2 or 3 NECESSARILY means there will be people with lower upload bandwidth who will be unable to maintain a ratio of 1

This is nonsense. The ratios aren't linked across users! If you've downloaded 10gb and uploaded 10gb, your ratio is 1. It's irrelevant how many other people have ratios of 2 or 3. Or so I've heard
posted by bonaldi at 6:37 PM on August 14, 2007

Well at least explain to him why it is not nonsense:

Every byte that someone UPloads is DOWNloaded by someone. The total number of bytes uploaded EQUALS the total number of bytes downloaded. The global average ratio therefore equals 1. The ratios ARE linked across users. The link is the bytes that are being shared.

If we ever get filesharing that uses multicast to some degree or another, the global ratio will necessarily be less than 1.
posted by lastobelus at 8:43 PM on August 14, 2007

[this IS getting a little far afield, please take the upload/download ratio discussion to email or metatalk]
posted by jessamyn at 7:10 PM on August 15, 2007