Popular trackers and their scope. Movies/TV AB - AnimeBytes - Anime, manga, Asian live action, soundtracks and general weebshit. The best of it's kind by a wide margin. Other cabal trackers were not happy about the loli/shota content hosted there. ASSOCIATED PTP - PassthePopcorn - General movie tracker, the best of its kind by far. Other movie trackers can fill specific niches but 95% of everyone's needs can be filled with PTP. CABAL BTN - BroadcasTheNet - General TV tracker, the best of its kind by far. Other TV trackers can fill specific niches but 95% of everyone's needs can be filled with BTN. CABAL KG - Karagara - Obscure, rare or arthouse cinema. Very large archive, does have some content missing on PTP. ASSOCIATED MTV - MoreThanTV - Ratioless tracker for movies and TV, though the focus is on the latter. The closest competitor to BTN however distantly. Has been down for some months and is being rebuilt by the EMP sysop, expected to go live in early 2021. A good alternative to BTN if you haven't got it as it used to mirror the new content, while lacking the larger back catalogue. ASSOCIATED TVV - TV-Vault - TV only content that finished airing at least 5 years ago. Has lots of rare content not found elsewhere. Will fill much of your niche content needs if you don't have BTN and sometimes even if you do. No recruiting, user invites only. Users get lots of invites to give out and they often do so on a variety of trackers so keep your eyes peeled. Currently beyond usercap though so don't expect any for some months, "elite" userlcass can still invite though. Some dated rules which are irritating. ASSOCIATED CG - Cinemageddon - Movies with no IMDB page, or <1000 reviews, or a score <3/10. Lots of "erotic" cinema that Travis Bickle would watch in some seedy 70's wanking kinoplex. Sister site of TVV and the invite process is the same. Below usercap, but invites are given out much less frequently than TVV. ANT - Anthelion - General movies, run by Alastor who has a storied history of public meltdowns. Seems to have chilled out in recent years. Shit tracker though easy to join. NEB - Nebulance - Sister site of ANT, also run by Alastor, Ratioless. Not terrible for new users, but still pretty shit. TIK - Cinematik - Untouched releases of obscure and rare content. Full Discs and so on. Very difficult to join as a user must vouch for you and then request an invite in the forums. Unnecessary for most users. SC - SecretCinema - Ratioless tracker for obscure, weird or arthouse movies and TV. Easy to join with a very active requests section. Users often fill from PTP/KG/TIK/CG etc so it's a good source of that content for anyone without access to a specific tracker. THC - The Horror Charnel - Horror, sleaze, scifi, B movies etc. Boomer tracker through and through. An easy to join alternative to CG. BBT - BakaBT - Old anime/manga tracker. Content is curated by staff so uploads come slowly. Has IRC signups. Good for old content to supplement nyaa. ADC - AsianDVDClub - Asian media, dead. Was recently "revived" as ADC2 by solcen. This was a ruse to scam donation money from people, avoid at all costs. ACM - AsianCinema - Untouched disc images and remuxes of asian content. Relatively new tracker and good at what it does, useless if you don't need this sort of content like all ncihe trackers. JPTV - JPTV - Nip telly. You'd better be able to understand moon. New tracker that looks promising. SDB - SDBits - HDB sister site, for SD content obviously. NOT a path to HDB. As SD has fallen larely out of favour the site is slowly dying, don't waste your time. HD (virtually all have both movies and TV, a handful allow porn. If you don't have HDB, or even PTP/BTN than a mix of HD trackers is a good idea for maximum content coverage) HDB - HDBits - General HD tracker with movies/TV and porn. The best of it's kind by far. The biggest HD archive as well as the largest population of knowledgeable encoders. Often encoders on other good HD tracker will also be internal and release on HDB. CABAL UHDB - UDHBits - Originally a Vietnamese HD tracker. Mediocre archive. Internal encoders are good. Recently had HDB invites offered in the forums to users with >200 uploads and high underclass. This has caused a flurry of activity with users reaching these same requirements in the hopes of getting HDB invites again. Unlikely to happen given HDB's historically autistic approach to giving out invites and getting butthurt when people find out where they are being offered. AHD - AwesomeHD - Notably allows unlimited encodes to coexist. High quality internal encoders. Staff refuse user donations, though the tracker is notorious for going down. Recruiting has been pulled for the moment. ASSOCIATED BHD - BeyondHD - Notable for being very fast to get remuxes, even before scene. Good for 4k content. Allows un-encoded SD content if no HD version is available. BLU - Blutopia - Similar in quality to BHD and AHD, that is pretty decent. Has a lot of more obscure content. Also allows SD rips of content with no HD version. HDT - HD-Torrents - Low quality HD tracker, though easy to join for new users. Run for profit, requires users to download >15GB quarterly or get b&. Get it if you're a brand new user but don't sweat if you lose the account eventually. HDS - HD-Space - Somehow a shitter version of HDT. Same considerations apply. Music OiNK - Oink's Pink Palace - Music tracker which was the genesis of the private tracker ecosystem we know today. Closed over 10 years ago. WCD - WhatCD - Music tracker that replaced OiNK. Huge archive, huge userbase. Created the cabal and headed it. Pussy admins hit the self destruct button at the first whiff of police heat. Closed in 2016. CABAL RED - Redacted - Music tracker which has solidified it's position as the WCD successor. Controversial seedbox economy and it's use as an invite stepping stone into other trackers has divided community opinion. Regardless it still has over 2 million torrents. Can be joined via IRC. CABAL Orpheus - OPS - Formerly Xanax, Apollo (a-poo-in-loo). Music tracker with a much more user friendly economy than RED. The archive is considerably smaller than RED's but it lacks a lot of the junk uploads people vomit onto the tracker for userclass. ASSOCIATED JpopSuki - Music tracker for Asian content. User invites are given out like candy. Worth joining if you like this content as much of it can't be found on RED or other big music trackers. E**** - ExigoMusic - Ratioless autisim based music tracker. Joined for epeen mainly, avoid. TMB - TheMixingBowl - Semi-private music tracker for radio shows and sets. Open registration and easy economy. Very good if you want this kind of content. General IPT - IPTorrents - General tracker, the largest of it's kind. Sworn enemy of cabal as the sysop runs IPT and other trackers for profit. Has in the past DDoSed cabal trackers. Giving out user invites to IPT banned on many tracker for this reason. Worth joining if you can just don't give them any money. FL - FileList - Romanian general tracker. The language is some sort of indecipherable text instead of English. Decent tracker which mirrors a lot of content from HDB. AR - AlphaRatio - Middling tracker, more closely associated with cabal than the other general trackers. Bb - BaconBits - Reddit general tracker, yes really. Used to have a top tier invites/requests section, this is no longer the case. Medicore. TL - TorrentLeech - Much like a smaller version of IPT, slightly less scummy, has open registration regularly. now has freeleech so you can easily use it without a seedbox. Other OT - Oppaitime - JAV and hentai, but any porn is welcome for the most part. Staff & users are cabal renegades/pedophiles. GGn - GazelleGames - Videogames and associated content like artbooks, soundtracks etc. The best of it's kind. Other cabal not happy at all with the loli/shota content constantly posted as freeleech by the known pedophile users. CABAL nonetheless. EMP - Empornium - General porn tracker and the best of its kind by far. Has every and a dedicated coomer userbase willing to buy onlyfans packs to share. CABAL BIB - Bibliotik - ebooks, audiobooks, some comics (though new uploads of those are banned). Focus on retail quality which means ripping them in a certain way. Strict rules and uptight admins sees users regularly btfoed who come crying to r/trackers, endlessly entertaining. Very hard economy but given the size of ebooks you could download more with the initial 2GB uploadgiven to you than you could read in a lifetime. CABAL MAM - MyAnonamouse - ebooks, comics, audiobooks, radio shows, sheet music and more. VERY friendly, bordering on cultish, community. Naughty language is banned. Has IRC signups twice a week and one of the best trackers a brand new user can join. 32p - 32 Pages - Comic tracker, formerly the best of its kind, closed early in 2020. A long history of staff opsec breaches and general incompetence. Not coming back, MAM is the best alternative now. CABAL S - Sinderella - Korean Porn tracker, as in run by Koreans. Porn is illegal in Korea. Used to have actual Korean porn and also be closed up tighter than a nuns snatch. Admins purged all the Korean porn and started recruiting again early in 2020. Still gets frequent JAV uploads though. FDC - FemDomCult - Femdom, obviously. Has open signups now and then. Good if you are a degenerate coomer. MS - MySpleen - Obscure cartoons and nostalgic content. Things like broadcast television cartoons from the 90's with the original commercials included. Closed, but the usercount does tick up every now and then so it may be possible to join if you try hard enough. AOM - Art of Misderction - Tiny meme tracker for actual wizards only, i.e you have to fool penn & teller to get in. 100% newfag bait. Don't waste your time. Chinese Catagory of their own with their own idiosyncrasies. Unfortunately I can't access the old paste to copy it across and can't remember the details. Nor do I give a shit about these trackers so I don't know anything about them. "AvistaZ" Network (When you get on one of these you can invite yourself to the others internally) PrivateHD - HD tracker. Sysop went nuclear and banned all of the staff and internals, effectively killed the tracker. It still has a back catalogue of releases but consider it dead. AnimeTorrents - Shit anime/manga tracker. CinemaZ - Shit euro cinema tracker. ExoticaZ - Shit porn tracker. AvistaZ - Asian movies/TV. The only tracker within this network worth joining and it is worth joining. The crown jewel of the network so the sysop shouldn't fuck around with it. Probably. .click Network (incomplete) TheEmpire - Commonwealth television, NOT including the UK itself. Colony TV if you will. Hard economy like all .click trackers. Decent for niche content in these regions, though for Aus/NZ tasminites is easier to use. TheOccult - TheGeeks - ThePlace - TheShow - Terminology CABAL refers to groups of trackers who work together to share user information, using it to globally ban people who do things like sell accounts or buy invites on any of the cabal trackers. WCD was originally the head of cabal. Nowdays RED, PTP, BTN and HDB are the core of cabal, if you fuck up badly enough on those 4 you are for sure going to be banned from the other 3, there are tools built into the tracker software to facilitate this as well as a #KGB channel. Many other trackers are ASSOCIATED with cabal however. Getting caught commiting high crimes on them has been know to get you banned everywhere. Be careful. For ratio difficultly see the tracker spreadsheet, only trackers with notable or novel economies will have them elaborated on here. I can just turn my router off and on again to get a new IP and start over, r-right? Wrong. The private tracker community is small, so unless you live near a large population center there's a real chance you are the only person in your town or city on private trackers. Which means it'll be obvious when after getting banned a similar IP pops up the next day in the RED interview channel. This isn't even considering what exchange you use and what IP range range your ISP uses. As well as other data like the torrent client you have, browser version and so on. If you ever do get banned and want to get back in it's best to wait a few weeks, or better yet a few months. Treebanning is when admins looks at a users invite tree and bans them all. But what is a tree. Think of it like a family genealogy diagram. If you send a user invite to person A they are in your tree. If person A sends a user invite to person B, they are also in your tree, as well as you in theirs. The tree also goes upwards, if you get invited by someone you are both in each others tree. If that person also invites others the tree continues. The first invite your give out puts you in a unknown number of invite trees and it's completely out of your control. It could be years later that people in your tree sell invites. The admins might elect to treeban them, wiping out the entire tree, you included. It's why you should always try to be /pure/, by only accepting invites from official sources like recruiters. Don't sweat too much though, admins in the past have treebanned people, but if you have a history of being a good user and are only tangentially related to the people who triggered the treeban you will probably get your account reactivated. Dead end trackers are those which haveuseless or non existent invite forums. This alone does not make a tracker bad, but a shit tracker that has no invites is probably not going to be worth your time, unless it fills a particular niche you require. As described below the pathway into 95% of trackers worth joining is via RED > PTP, so lots of "dead end" trackers will still be worth joining even if you never see their invite forums at all. So how do I join? You first want to set out by keeping your accounts as /pure/ as the driven snow. Some trackers only have user invites, but they generally are not cabal so don't sweat it. The best way is to join RED via IRC. The prep site is here https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html The interview is conducted like an online exam, they ask you to close everything but IRC and screenshot your desktop. You aren't supposed to look at the prep material. The prep site is monitored, if you try to cheat they will see your IP connecting. They'll stop the interview and ask you to admit to cheating. If you fess up you can try again the next day. If you lie they'll permaban you, this is like a cabal ban too. So if your rural New Zealand IP shows up in the interview channel the next day they'll know it's you again. Instead, cheat by saving the prep as a pdf. it's all fairly simple stuff to remember anyway and you'll need to know if you plan on uploading. Next reach the elite userclass and get invited to other trackers from the forums. The requirements for this are 50 uploads, 3 months of account age and 100GB of upload. The first two are easy, you can just upload shit from deezer, or transcode FLAC's with no Mp3 version. Getting 100GB is tricky. Without a seedbox you'll likely get 1.00 ratio on your uploaded torrents so it will take considerably more than 50 FLACs. You can seed your initial uploads with a seedbox, which should get your better returns. You could also race by autosnatching. RED is very competitive however, so do this only if you have some experience using a seedbox and configuring it correctly. pay2win is an option, you can usually get 5-10GB filling a request for an album from bandcamp or similar. Another option is to use the "premier" plugin for Deluge, which manipulates the swarm and piece distribution to only upload a new piece once everyone in the swarm has the previous one, which means you upload 100% of the torrent to every single user. Proceed with extreme caution though, this plugin is not specifically banned on RED, but if autonstachers notice they are getting 0 upload from you they may add you to a blackl-, sorry, BLOCKlist. If no one autosnatches from you at all you will only ever get upload from permaseeding or requests. RED has by far the best invite forum for new users. The goal now should be to join PTP, when it opens again. In the meantime, join the trackers you want and try to get the elite equivalent userclass there too. For instance on BIB (if the recruiter ever responds), GGn, EMP. You never know what good invites can pop up on random trackers. After getting on PTP you goal is likely BTN. Last time they recruited they wanted 15 uploads, get at least this many. BTN is the path to KG. There is no reliable path to HDB other than getting noticed by someone for being a prolific uploader, encoder or just knowing someone on the inside. The majority of other trackers are either closed, are user invite only or have pulled recruitment. If a tracker is not recruiting on one of the 4 core cabal trackers (PTP/BTN/HDB/RED) there's a good chance they are not recruiting anywhere. Other info If you don't have PTP/BTN you'll need a mix of trackers to get maximum coverage. Your best bet is to get yourself a few HD trackers. AHD, BHD and BLU will get the job done. At least one general tracker, usually IPT but FL or TL will do. Whatever niche trackers you can get your hands on, such as TVV for television and CG, SC, THC for movies. SC especially will let you request content from anywhere as long as it fits the type of content SC wants. Most importantly, regional trackers. They often have an enormous amount of content that isn't found anywhere else due to having such a narrow audience. If you really want Spanish content having BTN won't be of great use to you, but Spanish trackers will. Though out of date, the paths into various trackers is in the PYRAMID link in the OP. The list of trackers and some basic info is in the spreadsheet. r/trackers plays along with private tracker staff demands. Shitpost, but never reveal your tracker identity there. A list of release groups can be found here. It's out of date, but still informative. https://pastebin.pl/view/f19e4e48