The Pirate Bay Reopens its Doors to New Members After Four Years

When The Pirate Bay launched nearly 20 years ago, its main goal was to become a bastion of free and uncensored information.

The site categorically rejects takedown requests from copyright holders and allows anyone to upload almost anything.

Since its early days, The Pirate Bay has always been free to use and open to the public at large. Those who wanted to share files only had to register an account, which was easy enough.

Registrations Closed to Stop Spam

The last sentence is in the past tense, as user registrations were effectively disabled four years ago. The last ‘new’ user was added to the torrent site on May 22, 2019, and, after that, there were no signs that registrations would reopen anytime soon.

The TPB team initially said that registrations had been closed to stop floods of malware torrents. This type of abuse was a major problem for the site’s moderators who asked the main operator to temporarily disable registrations.

The plan was to address the problem by putting a limit on the number of torrents users could upload in a given timeframe. That would prevent hundreds of spam torrents from being uploaded at once, so TPB could accept new users again and continue business as usual.

This temporary fix stayed in place for four years but this week, registrations were opened once again. The recent closure of ‘rival’ torrent site RARBG played a major role in this development.

RARBG’s demise took out a major supplier of new torrents. There are currently only a few public torrent sites where users can register, so the TPB moderators were concerned that a generation of potential uploaders would be lost.

Manually Approved Registrations

The team shared their concerns with TPB operator “Winston” who came up with a solution that was officially deployed a few hours ago.

New Pirate Bay registrations are not completely automated. TPB administrator Spud17 informs TorrentFreak that new users must apply for an account at the official SuprBay forums, where moderators will manually create accounts using a new tool.

This hands-on approach will help to prevent scammers and spammers from flooding the site. Users will be able to register directly in future but all accounts will still have to be approved before they are activated.

“For those who have waited years to upload, they now have the chance to get an account,” Spud17 says, pointing to the SuprBay thread.

“Whether they want to upload niche stuff every now and again, or be one of the next big scene uploaders – all are welcome. Except for the nitwits who flood the site with crap, but we’ll just nuke their arses.”

Limited # Uploads

The Pirate Bay has shown signs of deterioration in recent years. In addition to closed registrations, the comment sections under each torrent have been disabled for years and are not expected to come back anytime soon.

Whether new users will trigger an inflow of more content has yet to be seen. New accounts are limited to 50 uploads per day but those who plan to be more active than that can request an exception.

“Should anyone have designs on becoming a prolific scene uploader, you can request the limit be lifted once your account is established,” Spud17 writes.

After years of legal trouble, it appears that The Pirate Bay has entered calmer waters. There haven’t been any prolonged outages like we have seen in the past. That said, the site will always remain a top target for law enforcement and rightsholders, so a sudden storm is not unthinkable.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

TorrentFreak