Orpheus.network News

[TheDarkKnight]

The June '19 Update

Whipper accepted for ripping

After much ado, we have finally officially added support for logs generated from whipper 0.7.3 and later. We feel comfortable allowing Whipper now as its most outstanding issues have been fixed and is reasonably stable for general use. By allowing uploaders to use Whipper to rip CDs, we aim to help bring more rips to the world and do our part in helping in adoption of this wonderful open-source ripper. Please note, we do reserve the right to change what versions of whipper we accept going forward as we watch the project progress towards its 1.0 general release.

For this, we have split out the Logchecker that was built into Gazelle into a standalone library (released on GitHub and installable through composer for other PHP projects on Packagist). Given the "pre-release" status of whipper as a project still, we will be keeping a close eye on torrents uploaded using it and may be adjusting the logchecker as we see more people use it and test it out.

Rules 2.2.10.2, 2.2.10.3, and 2.2.10.5 have been adjusted to account for this change.

A tale and a gift

What happened during the downtime and why did it take so long?

Our previous backend was showing signs of trouble, leading to the infamous "11 past the hour" downtime. This was caused by the hourly search update killing disk performance and preventing the database from being able to respond to queries in a timely manner (for what, it should be said, is a relatively benign operation).

We decided to replace the backend, and having had a few months of experience to get a feel of what a tracker requires in terms of resources, we ordered a new server, with twice the amount of diskspace and twice the amount of RAM.

At the same time, once the site was offline, there was a series of tasks we decided to undertake at the same time. We wanted to move to using Percona instead of Mariadb (as it offers a number of nice features over Mariadb), upgrade the distro our servers ran on, and upgrade a host of dependencies we use, such as memcache and PHP to help squeeze out more performance out of the site. Unfortunately, using Percona and the distro upgrade proved incompatible, so we have
switched back to Mariadb for now, though we keep our eye on moving to Percona or potentially Postgresql in the future.

At the same time we also moved away from stunnel and OpenVPN to use Wireguard everywhere. This has been a great success. Performance is much better, with less CPU load. At some point we will document the architecture in more detail in the Gazelle repo, so that people who want to launch a Gazelle installation have a fighting chance of success. This knowledge should not be kept secret.

Don't be too worried about people saying that Wireguard is not ready for production. Remember that a certain email application by a search engine advertizing agency was kept in beta for years. Further reading: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=openvpn+versus+wireguard

The other thing to remember is that we are all volunteers, and the time amount of time we can dedicate to the site on a daily basis can sometimes be measured in minutes. So sometimes a little delay can't be helped. (Hi Waffles we feel your pain).

Now that you have reached this far then a reward is in order. It has been a while since there have been any presents, and what's the point in running a tracker if you can't hand out presents every once in a while?

To celebrate the return of the site on a brand new backend, Bonus Points are being handed out. 8000 points has been handed out to all enabled accounts.

Changes to Scene trumping rules

Ah, the scene.. remember them? Perhaps that's just me. The scene was pivotal during what you may consider to be the infancy of modern file sharing. To this day, the scene is responsible for 0-day uploads of our favorite TV shows and games.

Times change, and nowadays scene uploads are not considered to be aligned with our music naming standards. While scene uploads are certainly welcome, ALL scene uploads of music, FLAC or otherwise, are trumpable with a non-scene replacement that conforms to Orpheus file and folder naming standards. Scene applications and otherwise are not trumpable solely for originating from the scene.

Rules 1.3.4, 2.2.5, and 3.10 have been updated to reflect this change.

Inactive torrents removal begins

After a long time hoping against hope that former users would join the site and reseed the catalog, it is time to draw a line and acknowledge that what is unseeded today will be unseeded tomorrow.

We have wrestled with Gazelle to delete the torrents, but leave the metadata intact. If you see a torrent whose details are marked deleted, you may simply Add format to bring it back to life. The path to repopulating our music collection just got that little bit easier.

Some people have reported receiving notifications for deleted torrents that they never snatched. You may receive some spurious notifications in your inbox; you may safely ignore them.

Site cap reduced

The previous site had a cap of 40,000 members. For a time, it looked like it would make it, until it didn't. Without open signups or greater mindshare, our user growth has pretty much flattened out. But that's OK! We don't want or care to be the biggest, we just want to build a reliable service for music lovers. To that end, the cap has been reduced to 20,000. We shall see about raising it if and when we have to.

Interviewers needed

Our interviewers need a coffee break every now and then. Help them with the growing influx of interviews by applying today! If you have an hour or so per week that you can spare, helping to interview a candidate for membership will help the site grow.

Developers needed

Our devs are more into yerba mate, but the same applies. Are you familiar with PHP? Javascript? SQL? C++? Python? (Some of these talents are more useful than others).

There is always more work to be done on the site, both to optimize the user experience and to create new and exciting features! You can't put it on your Linkedin profile, you can't even mention it to colleagues. But if you believe this is something worth doing, we need to talk.

If either of these things sound like something you could do, check out the applications page for more details as well as you can get a look at the code we run at our GitHub to see if its something you think you could contribute to.

Community upload contest

The long-promised Inaugural Upload Contest has arrived. Upload Perfect FLACS (WEB, CD and Vinyl) for greater glory. The more you upload, the more Bonus Points you will win. But pay attention, Singles don't count!

Prizes are as follows: the person who uploads the most gets a Freeleech pick (to be published later on at Staff's discretion), for any torrent up to 1GB in size.

For everyone else, the prize depends on the generosity of the network of Orpheus. Alongside the upload contest is a Bonus Point Pool. Donate as many points as you can, and everyone benefits. There is a tax. Not everything you donate makes it to the pool.

At the end of the contest, a 5% cut will be taken, and distributed evenly to every enabled member, whether they uploaded anything or not.

A second 10% cut will be taken, and distributed evenly to everyone who uploaded at least one release. The remaining 85% of the pool will be divided up pro rata according to how many releases were uploaded by each person.

An example may help. Consider that there are ten enabled members, of whom five participate in the contest. The five uploaders finish by uploading 40, 34, 20, 4 and 2 releases, respectively. The Bonus Pool at the end of contest stands as two million BP.

5% of 2,000,000 is 100,000. The ten enabled members is therefore awarded 10,000 BP each.

10% is 200,000. The five members who uploaded something are awarded a further 40,000 BP each.

The number of non-Single perfect FLAC releases at the end of the contest stands at a total of 100. The remaining 1,700,000 BP is then distributed evenly for each torrent uploaded. In this example, one upload comes out to 17,000 BP. The top uploader with 40 uploads therefore nets 680,000 BP. The fifth uploader who uploaded two releases is awarded 34,000 BP.

Example payout:

Uploads BP
40 730,000 (10K + 40K + 680K)
34 628,000 (10K + 40K + 578K)
20 390,000 (10K + 40K + 340K)
4 118,000 (10K + 40K + 68K)
2 84,000 (10K + 40K + 34K)
0 10,000
0 10,000
0 10,000
0 10,000
0 10,000
0 10,000

The contest began on 2019-06-15 00:00:01 and finishes on 2019-07-15, 23:59:59 UTC. (That's site time.)

Yes, the start date was pushed back into the past, recognizing that most activity on the site occurs over the weekend. No point in penalizing everyone who was busy yesterday.

– OPS Staff, with

Talkin' about it

 

[Archiee]

@megadeth1990 It's your last lance!Don't be hustle & impatient.Next time I'll don't delete of anything dupe content.You will be warned without  notice.You are doing great job but I'll recommend to do it smartly not randomly.Hope you understand.

Regards

AR! 

[TheDarkKnight]

2 minutes ago, Archiee said:

@megadeth1990 It's your last lance!Don't be hustle & impatient.Next time I'll don't delete of anything dupe content.You will be warned without  notice.You are doing great job but I'll recommend to do it smartly not randomly.Hope you understand.

Regards

AR! 

hi @Archiee
sorry never will happen again
regards

Edited June 17, 2019 by megadeth1990