scarywater.animesuki.com
 

I visited the AS Scarywater clone today in search of torrents for Dennou Coil. I know they are at Baka, but I can't point to anything there because it includes licensed content. Still when I downloaded the torrent file, it points to tracker.scarywater.net which, as you know, has been out of operation for about two years now. (The name still resolves to an IP address, but it's not pingable.) So is scarywater.animesuki.com only a clone of the listings without an affiliated tracker? If so, I don't understand what purpose the AS clone site serves.

I *think* it was just to host the torrents themselves, in the hopes that the torrents could survive via DHT and other peer-to-peer methods even if the trackers were to die. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to mass-rebuild torrents with different trackers in them (though I suppose there might be).

wouldn't doing a simple search and replace for the old URLs for the new ones work? Some regular expressions magic could do the job.

Well, you would have to modify each torrent file individually -- I'm not sure what would be involved with that. Perhaps it's as simple as systematically appending/editing some plain text in the file, though I don't know if there are any checksums or signatures in torrent files (or if you'd have to modify the binary content). I suppose there's also the matter that anyone who already had the torrent either downloaded or open wouldn't get the fix unless they download the torrent file again. And, in addition to all that, it doesn't really help if no one is seeding the file to begin with. Don't most torrent clients these days support DHT anyway?

In the end, it may just be easier for people who have the source files to create new .torrent files, host them on a new tracker, and re-publish them somewhere so that the AnimeSuki site is updated with the new link. I assume that one of the reasons for hosting the archive (as opposed to letting the site die) was simply because people hadn't gotten around to doing that yet and this could buy us more time.

Then again, this is all just me speculating out of turn, as I wasn't really involved with any of this stuff in particular.