Notes on Private Trackers

In a recentish dialogue, I made a playful sideswipe at the sort of arcane rituals that certain private trackers force prospective inductees to undergo. The website I was most thinking of + poking fun at is Redacted, a private tracker. They have a standalone website for their study guide here. Allowing unknowns to get inducted if they pass an interview is a genuine public service. By default, private trackers live up to their names wrt privacy, and the only way to get in is if you can get someone who is already inside to send you an invite. Having a non-nepotism avenue is a ton of additional work, and it's thankless. Actually, it's worse than thankless - it exposes you to many many accusations of gatekeeping and snobbery, which you can avoid entirely by never offering a public avenue at all and disappearing from the public eye. Once you're in the ecosystem though, then things ease up a lot. A bunch of the private trackers cross-advertise in each others' forums since torrenting…