We all have our favorites that we go-to overtime to meet our pirating needs. We’ve also watched a lot of big names in this year alone, go down in a blaze of glory and others in a whimper. I’m awfully curious what, to you, is the biggest loss to date?

For me it’s Uloz, first thing that came to mind. Uloz has served me very well in acquiring music albums through them, for a good 6 years I recall that I used them for getting albums. When they decided to switch the way in how they do their service, that to me felt like a sucker punch. No longer can I just collect album names, find a sacrificial wi-fi network and go to work.

I also remember missing ISOHunt, EmuAsylum, EmuParadise, OG Pirate Bay, AnimeSuge (soon HiAnime once the piss-ants of ACE get their way soon) and I really hope we don’t lose Internet Archive. But with the way it’s been hammered by shitty people and court lawsuits, I predict that it doesn’t really have much time on it’s side in the near future.

All I can say is just thank you to all of those sources and of course the ones everyone is familiar with. Helped save me a lot of money, helped me increase my interests and eh, can’t argue against free shit.

  • Taako_Tuesday@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    1 hour ago

    Maybe not the actual biggest, but the loss of pirated material that i feel the most sad about is The Trove. The Trove was a website with a huge list of downloadable PDFs of source books for tabletop RPGs. I got the pdfs for everything DND, and also tried a bunch of other games I’d never heard of with a few friends. It also had downloads for other books and documents but I only used it for RPGs. I think it went down in 2019 or so.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    2·
    3 hours ago

    This is a good time to introduce the concept of backups. Remember to backup both to local storage and to have a copy that is remote, in case of natural disaster.

  • hitmyspot@aussie.zoneEnglish
    1·
    3 hours ago

    DC++ It was just sharing stuff. No search. You connect to someone’s computer, they have a shared folder. You download what you want and move on. Instead of searching for stuff, you discovered it.

    • Varyag@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      Demonoid, absolutely! Warez-bb, and many oldschool GeoCities blogs. I remember one that had portable cracks of any programs you could imagine.

    • aStonedSanta@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      This and I believe it was called TvTorrents. Private tracker that was amazing for TV shows.

  • Console_Modder@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    46·
    2 days ago

    Definitely Vimm’s Lair for me. I still play a lot of GameCube and N64 games and Vimm’s was always my go-to place for finding roms. They got hit with a lot of DMCAs and take down notices, and had to remove the vast majority of their Nintendo library along with anything related to Sega and Lego. The site is still up, but it’s like visiting a graveyard now

    • acannan@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      21 hours ago

      Could you give an example of a game no longer available? Just checked and was able to dl Luigi’s Mansion just fine

      • Console_Modder@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        21 hours ago

        On GameCube, I can see that Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, Mario Party 6, Smash Bros Melee are all unavailable. On N64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Pokemon Stadium are also unavailable

  • Sabata@ani.socialEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    Haven’t quite filled the void from 9anime/aniwave going down, hard to replace the king.

  • flux@lemmyis.funEnglish
    20·
    2 days ago

    TheTrove was a collection of tabletop RPG books and magazines going back decades that has never had a decent replacement yet. It was fairly well organized and quite complete with tons of obscure games and out of print books. It had a different name or two before that but the collection always migrated somewhere until The Trove was finally shut down. I really miss that collection, even though I’ve managed to track down most of what I needed, it has been much more difficult since the shutdown.

    • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
      3·
      14 hours ago

      what.cd was a bigger loss than just privacy - what.cd was an enormous loss to preservation of music history

      the amount of content that has simply never been available for purchase was incredible, and made available in one of the cleanest and most comprehensively complete taxonomies was amazing

    • Uninvited Guest@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      What.cd and BitGamer were the two private trackers where I really put in effort not just to seed but to contribute unique uploads.

      I stepped away from torrenting for awhile and when I returned both were ashes.

      Edit- what are the two good music trackers you’re referencing?

      • spyd3r@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        Losing what.cd was like having a Music Library of Alexandria burn down. Such an amazing resource for rare, out of print, obscure, and or otherwise unobtainable media.

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        Opheus and REDacted are the two! RED has more and interview signups. I’m only on OPH because they welcomed WCD refugees and it’s been very good.

  • hitstun@fedia.io
    25·
    2 days ago

    Megaupload. It was like the Library of Alexandria burning down. Not just pirated stuff, either.

    • bountygiver [any]@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      19 hours ago

      I remember to swear by megaupload because all the other upload sites uses extremely sketchy ads and allow the fake download buttons.

      Now Jdownloader is the only way for me to download non-torrents