Bring in the torrents

[Guest s1500]

I've been thinking. Torrents should be made present & utilized. I forgot where I was reading on this site, but torrents were frowned upon due to the fact that sometimes it was used for piracy. But shunning torrents entirely due to copyright violation usage, etc is akin to shutting down the whole highway because one person was speeding.

Many of the rapidshare links on here are not working. Putting them up on a torrent is at least a fighting chance for people to get what mags they want, ie better than nothing.

My idea? Do packs of mags, ie not individual torrents for individual magazine issues for that would really get messy. I dunno, a 10-pack of a magazine would make a nice torrent, or a whole year of issues. Put 'em up in a zip file, list the file format they are in on the description, with a nod to to this website, and you're good to go. Nice & neat. Post the URLs of the torrents here(host the .torrent files on here or piratebay or something), and boom.

If there's no seeders, no worries, as like I said before, a fighting chance. Better a slow 1-seed torrent than a non-working rapidshare,etc link. No worries of hosting fees, registration, or money changing hands. The mags live on forever in digital immortality.

[Data]

If we had torrents they would be slow because nobody wants to seed 7 days a week. It uses too much bandwidth and you have to leave your computer on. I'm not saying we shouldn't add torrents but, I can't afford the bandwidth. It seems I use it all up and more every month already. We also have to think about the spam something along the line as, "Please seed, I really NEED this!"

[Guest s1500]

Asking to seed a torrent, I don't see a problem. Heck, make an individual forum for seed requests for not-so-popular mag distributions. x days later someone asks "hey, can you seed this?", someone might go "I need to torrent some new stuff anyway, so I shall seed this", and bam. You don't need to seed 7 days a week if you don't want to.

As for bandwidth costs, it's going to vary for individuals. Some might have plenty of bandwidth to spare.

Getting magazines distributed is going to cost bandwidth either way, in the forms of paying rapidshare or webhosting fees, which brings money into the equation. That hasn't seemed to work out so well. Bringing bandwidth to individuals, on a strictly opt-in basis allows for a lot more flexibility.

Heck, a lot of these mags can be hosted on picasa, which is free.

[Data]

I don't know how to make a torrent. I know if it's a large file like 5 gigabytes, it gets compressed and split with winrar into 50 or more pieces and if 10 people are seeding, it downloads as fast as your Internet service provider throttles you.

It'd be interesting to learn how.

[Guest s1500]

Going with the smaller-sized distributions would work a lot better, ie 300 dpi, resized down to 19xx pixels. Tat would make it a lot more manageable. Even multiplied by 12x, for a whole year of issues, would be a snap.

[Mister Zero]

Making a torrent is pretty easy. You just make a torrent file and point it to the location of the files on your hard drive, add trackers and seed. As for the magazine files, they're not huge, so it wouldn't be terribly taxing to seed or download.

Like I've said before, I was lead here a few years ago by downloading a supposed Retromags Nintendo Power torrent. This is a good and bad thing. If you can just find a torrent out there in the open, there's no need for membership to a website. Plus, some torrents may not even be real Retromags torrents. They could also be taken off-site and shared elsewhere but I guess any of this current work could, too.

Torrents are linked with piracy a lot of times, yes. Someone in charge of actually publishing these magazines could come across something like a torrent that is easy to access and may take it the wrong way. They could do the same thing with the website itself, though, so this is open to suggestion.

To me, it's a double edged sword. You could easily access the full RM collection of a magazine through a torrent, pick through and download the issues you want like with the site, or you could just download all of them through the torrent. The downside is losing new RM memberships, and the exclusivity of it all. We could possibly lose new contributors also because a lot more people would just be taking and not giving or even knowing they can contribute.

I think right now we've been successful at creating a pretty useful little community, with a good few people contributing to the site in different ways. Putting torrents out into the internet may affect this.

[KiwiArcader]

Like I've said before, I was lead here a few years ago by downloading a supposed Retromags Nintendo Power torrent.

I think right now we've been successful at creating a pretty useful little community, with a good few people contributing to the site in different ways. Putting torrents out into the internet may affect this.

I think I was lead here by the same torrent. But now that I have been here for a while I wouldn't grab a file via a torrent anymore no matter what as it is just simpler to click on a download link and not have to worry about bandwidth issues that torrents typically bring if a torrent site has ratio's to deal with etc.

And the community aspect of the site is interesting [warts and all]

I am making PDF versions of all of my uploads available via Megaupload. It was Rapidshare but their delete if not used policy sucks ass so bought a 2 year sub to MU and am shifting everything over now.

I really hate .CBR's and so I convert all my retromags downloads to PDF. If people want I can upload those I have grabbed & converted to my MU account as well so people have both options as Philly gets the .CBR's onto the site MU account [ that could be a while though ] Just a thought ....

[Data]

CBR's are good because you can rip a page out while PDF's have a more complicated process to it.

PDF's could be considered good because they can encrypt the author's data but for just reading a magazine, you can't go wrong with Comic Book Reader. It's also easier for the masses to install and quicker to create.

[KiwiArcader]

CBR's are good because you can rip a page out while PDF's have a more complicated process to it.

PDF's could be considered good because they can encrypt the author's data but for just reading a magazine, you can't go wrong with Comic Book Reader. It's also easier for the masses to install and quicker to create.

Never said .cbr's don't have a place .... or followers .... just that I prefer PDF's.

Mainly because PDF's allow indexing/bookmarking & the use of OCR'd pages meaning text searching is possible within a document. Encrpytion is a questionable plus given the amount of unlocking programs out there.

The big plus for .cbr's in my mind is that anyone can compile them as they are just a renamed zip or rar file. But that's about it really. But given the volume of PDF's out there I just prefer to keep all my stuff in the one format for the reasons stated above.

[kbf_private_joker]

If we had torrents they would be slow because nobody wants to seed 7 days a week. It uses too much bandwidth and you have to leave your computer on. I'm not saying we shouldn't add torrents but, I can't afford the bandwidth. It seems I use it all up and more every month already. We also have to think about the spam something along the line as, "Please seed, I really NEED this!"

I think torrents are a good idea. In fact, I seeded GamePro 006 over at Mininova and in 2 months, over 55 people downloaded it from me. I have a dedicated torrent machine and have no problem leaving it on 24/7. One of these days when I have time, I'm going to seed every GamePro from this site.

[Mister Zero]

It seems torrents are getting many votes. I wonder what Philly thinks? I think it would probably be a worthwhile thing to do, and it's cool that some of our uploaders are doing it with their own work. The MU idea is pretty good, too.

Like I said before, with torrents it's possible to put every issue into the torrent, and then if someone only wants a few certain issues from it, they can take those as they please and not have to download the whole collection. This to me is pretty convenient.

Are .pdfs generally smaller in filesize than .cbrs? I'm wondering because it would be nice to keep a torrent collection small in size for bandwidth reasons. Not to mention people would probably seed it more.

[Phillyman]

It seems torrents are getting many votes. I wonder what Philly thinks? I think it would probably be a worthwhile thing to do, and it's cool that some of our uploaders are doing it with their own work. The MU idea is pretty good, too.

Like I said before, with torrents it's possible to put every issue into the torrent, and then if someone only wants a few certain issues from it, they can take those as they please and not have to download the whole collection. This to me is pretty convenient.

Are .pdfs generally smaller in filesize than .cbrs? I'm wondering because it would be nice to keep a torrent collection small in size for bandwidth reasons. Not to mention people would probably seed it more.

Honestly we worked off of torrents from June 2005 to November 2008, the download manager has only been in place for a little over a year.....but torrents never got seeded, thats why we dropped them.

[KiwiArcader]

Honestly we worked off of torrents from June 2005 to November 2008, the download manager has only been in place for a little over a year.....but torrents never got seeded, thats why we dropped them.

I remember that.

The big problem with torrents is that the leecher crowd out there just grab and run .... generally contribute nothing back to the cause ... and the seeders never increase meaning the originator and one or two others use a boatload of broadband usage for nothing in return.

With the site as it is currently at least they have to sign up or use the rapidshare or megaupload links if they don't so the originator gets points towards a subscription renewal or to add to their download usage. It isn't much but it is something. And it doesn't blow out their internet usage.

[kbf_private_joker]

I remember that.

The big problem with torrents is that the leecher crowd out there just grab and run .... generally contribute nothing back to the cause ... and the seeders never increase meaning the originator and one or two others use a boatload of broadband usage for nothing in return.

With the site as it is currently at least they have to sign up or use the rapidshare or megaupload links if they don't so the originator gets points towards a subscription renewal or to add to their download usage. It isn't much but it is something. And it doesn't blow out their internet usage.

I wonder if instead of having a huge torrent for each magazine, if they were split up. This might discourage people from downloading EVERY magazine that GamePro put out and instead only pick the ones that really want. Another option is to put all the magazines into a huge RAR file (maybe 10 issues at a time). This way, a user is forced to bear part of the internet load. It kinda depends on how many people are downloading. But I guess that's the nature of any torrent.

I frankly don't have a problem giving away bandwidth. I'm limited only the the upload speed. I've left my torrent machine on 24/7 since June and probably upload 25GB per month. I doubt Time Warner cares. In fact, in July, they upped my speed from 6mb down to 10mb and 500kb to 1mb up.

[Guest s1500]

With more than one issue per torrent, you can pick & choose which individual files you want to download. I've done that before with episodes of TV programs.

[kbf_private_joker]

One of these days (when I have some time), I'm going to torrent all the GamePro magazines I have (as 1 mag per torrent). I'll report back and let me know what the results are.

[badinsults]

Personally, I think putting the magazines on a private tracker would probably be the most ideal way to do torrenting. I got approximately 30-40 GB of magazines scanned by Retromags from Underground Gamer, though it was in a largely disorganized and random collection compiled about two years ago. The fact that I was able to get everything I wanted (ie 16 bit era magazines) shows the ability to have continuous seeders on that website. I was seeding the Gamepro 1993 collection torrent there, and had about 5 people get it off me. Because that website requires people to have a good ratio, it is far more ideal than a public tracker where you have far more leechers than seeders.

I personally want complete sets of magazines through the 16 bit era, because sometimes the most important information for my SNES research comes in the more obscure magazines (ie look at the info I found about the Canadian StarFox competition, which I found in an issue of Game Players). Trying to go through and collect it by doing individual web links is tedious, a drain on the bandwidth of this website, and I currently don't have the ability to do it.

[Guest s1500]

This makes me ponder one thing: What happens when "all the mags" are uploaded? If a new user wants to come on and they want to contribute a mag that's already uploaded, what are they to do? Seeding torrents could be seen as a way for new users to help out the site, providing some bandwidth for the mag sharing.

[te72]

Much as I hate to practice necromancy, I feel compelled to bring this thread back from the dead. I understand the difficulties that can be related to torrenting, but all of these posts were from 3 years ago. Is torrenting for many of us not easier now than it was in 2009? I know for me it most certainly is. Not to mention, storage space is cheaper these days too.

Now, a couple points I'd like to raise:

-Batch torrenting. Rather than individual issues, or complete collections of a particular magazine, what say you to year-by-year or volume-by-volume torrents? I recently came across the Nintendo Power torrents from 1988 through 1995. Wasn't a frequent reader of the magazine, but I like having collections of stuff like this. I've been seeding ever since I came across them, seems I'm in a group of about 10-12 people doing so.

-Private torrents. This was mentioned above, with the private tracker thing. Could we not (or is it a gray area) have a section of RetroMags that is only accessable to members, with the links to said torrents? We all know things on the internet have a way of leaking out, but it is certainly one option. I am part of the staff on another forum (my car hobby), and there are plenty of sections on that site that are only accessible to members of various levels. I can't say for certain, but this might be something to do with how the forum software is set up. Might be something to look into for RM 2.0, no?

Anyway, my apologies if I'm beating a dead horse, but to me it seems more convenient way of distribution, and I am certainly willing to help out with seeding duties. Also have plenty of storage space on my computer, so there's no issue there. Thoughts? Are we as a group willing to give torrenting another try?