I don’t live in the US, so my ISP doesn’t really seem to care what I torrent, but the megathread vehemently recommends to always use one. Since VPNs aren’t cheap and I’m on a strict budget (wouldn’t pirate otherwise), is it really that dangerous to torrent without one?
I used to be all over usenet. Starting about 10-12 years ago most of the indexers turned to shit; either that or takedowns have eviscerated the back catalog of content from providers. I’ve yet to find a good tracker that can find anything (that’s more than 12-24 hours old).
Nzbgeek
I wish I had gotten into Usenet back in the day. I feel like I missed out on a big part of the early internet.
I use usenet, but I find that I have a lot of issues finding content in other language than English. Also, finding rarer content is harder too. So I also use torrents to complete what I can’t find over usenet. To this day I would like to get content in French, but it’s hard.
This means that I still need a torrenting setup with VPN.
Yeah this is my setup. Sure it does mean you have to pay for a couple of things, but I find its the best way. Plug a Usenet provider and a couple of indexers into the aars, set it as highest priority, then some decent torrent trackers as lower prio.
Usenet will handle grabbing the majority of your requests without having to worry about seeding, ratio and such and the torrent trackers act as a fallback and for stuff like season packs which don’t tend to get uploaded to Usenet and anything older or rarer that might not be available on usenet. So far though I’ve found it’s not too much that doesn’t get grabbed by usenet, but the torrent trackers are a nice backup.