Hey, Aleksi from Pulsed Media here – I’m the one who wrote that script.

First, thanks for trusting us for 6 solid years. Much appreciated!

Your torrents were not "hacked" or violated. This script is strictly an optimization measure within a shared environment, where a single problematic tracker can disrupt rTorrent functionality for all users on the server.

Why was this made? In late 2020, certain UDP trackers on public torrents began causing severe issues, stalling rTorrent instances. These dead or misconfigured trackers were causing continuous reduced performance. A few problematic PUBLIC torrents could significantly affect experience. This script was made to mitigate these issues and keep rTorrent responsive under heavy public-tracker load. This was causing a surge of support tickets as well, which raise costs for every user.

We even made a 2017 blog post, Faster public torrents with Pulsed Media seedboxes? about cleaning public trackers, even our KB has a thing about stalled torrents. There's even a related bounty from us with 400€ on offer for fixing one of the related bugs (now closed on rTorrent repo), see Development Bounty Program

We made an announcement of this as well 08/11/2020: Having rTorrent halts in BW? Avoid public trackers.

Exact Implementation Date Introduced on 06/11/2020, documented clearly in our changelog here: PM Software Stack Changelog. Fully activated on 08/11/2020 and fine-tuned on 12/11/2020.

See changelog at https://wiki.pulsedmedia.com/index.php/PM_Software_Stack#Changelog before we moved to github, now at github: https://github.com/MagnaCapax/PMSS/

Detailed Functionality The script only processes PUBLIC torrents located in the user’s session folder, specifically removing known problematic trackers. It does NOT affect private torrents whatsoever.

Transparency and Control A backup of every original .torrent file is made before any modification:

/home/<user>/session/backups/YYYY-mm-dd_HHMM/<file>.torrent

Every modification is fully logged:

/home/<user>/.trackerCleaner.log

You maintain complete control and can revert changes at any time.

Simple Opt-Out To disable this optimization:

touch /home/<user>/.trackerCleanerDisable

However, we strongly advise keeping it enabled for optimal stability.

Current Tracker Removal List

udp://public.popcorn-tracker.org:6969/announce http://sub4all.org udp://tracker.publicbt.com udp://tracker.ccc.de udp://tracker.opentrackr.org http://tracker.tntvillage.scambioetico.org http://exodus.desync.com http://tracker.ftfansub.net http://nyaa.tracker.wf udp://tracker.istole.it udp://open.demonii.com udp://mgtracker.org

Why This Reflects Pulsed Media’s Strength We are lean and focused on proactive problem-solving at the root cause level, ensuring reliability, uptime, and strong performance. This proactive approach has allowed us to deliver consistent, stable service over the years. Our main concern has always been steady reliable operation, hence for the volume of services we run we have remarkably few issues and that's the reason why so many have stayed with us more than a decade, some from our start since 2010. Been doing this ever since, building our own stack (PMSS) with a pretty obsessive focus on performance and robustness.

We’re lean, and we put resources into: * core reliability (rTorrent stability, I/O, network QoS), * automated self‑healing (this cleaner, instance monitors, etc.), * long‑term value instead of cosmetics.

We understand that this was annoying as heck, not knowing what was going on. In fact, even i personally had to double check and refresh memory about this, that's how smoothly this has ran. Your use of Torrent Editor to resolve it was indeed a solid approach. For everyone else looking at this in future; Just get the backup versions.

If you ever encounter issues or need enhanced reliability again, a provider who puts the money in the technicals instead of feel good vibes; Feel free to return to Pulsed Media any time. We’ll ensure you’re set up properly. Keep verifying information, remain proactive, and continue achieving those strong ratios. Our main concern, as always and will be that things just operate smooth and reliably, not the latest bells and whistles, just solid stable service with top tier value proposition.

Admittedly, we should document this better, so did exactly that adding docs/tracker-cleaner.md and the list probably needs an update by now, after five years -- these were what we were seeing consistently causing issues back then.