RIP BaconBits

After more than 12 years, BaconBits, the unofficial Reddit torrent tracker, has shut down for good. It’s terrible to see such a solid community disappear.

On many torrent trackers users are able to request specific content to be uploaded. As of BaconBits' final hours, the request fill ratio stood at 89.28%. A dedicated community member would provide almost anything you could ask for. For a site that never had more than 6000 users, that’s quite a feat.

BaconBits pressed against its user cap of 6000 active accounts for years. But after a computer error 4 years ago, dubbed the “Robot Uprising”, the servers pruned a large portion of tracked torrents. The community and site never recovered.

Here’s an excerpt from the original Robot Uprising announcement post:

Our semi-airgapped database came up with the wrong system time. As in, with a date and time a few years behind… while the appservers were running on the correct time. That means a bunch of torrents were being marked as last having been seeded “a few years ago”, while the appservers knew it was 2017.

That’s all fine and dandy except for the fact that we automatically prune torrents that haven’t been seeded for “2 weeks”. From now. The situation unfortunately went unnoticed for a while (12+h).

tl;dr we’ve lost about half our uploads.

RIP bB. That’ll do.