Hi, Ayo.
Personally, I'm not sold on the idea of a private tracker (but am open to being convinced). The benefits come at the cost of a limited community, and yet most of those benefits can easily be overcome by a determined attacker. Although, not being a member of a private tracker I can't speak from anecdotal experience, so if you can correct my understanding I would appreciate it.
The largets benefit of a private tracker, it would seem, is protecting one's activity from being tracked. However, in practice a private tracker doesn't actually seem to offer this benefit:
- If the tracker has open-registration then anyone can get in and track your activity
- If the tracker is closed, but has paid (i.e. "donation" based) registration, the usual USD$10 won't block a determined attacker from getting in and tracking your activity
- If the tracker is closed, but has invite-only registration, an attacker can easily get an invite via social-engineering or on one of many invite sharing forums
You could go to the extreme and limit registration to a close-knit group of people, but that would severly limit community growth and size which is important for this type of community (it may even be enough to ensure that the new tracker never even reaches critical mass).
Regarding your mention of having DoA encoders directly sharing files only on a private tracker, I don't think this is an issue. Since the beginning of The Scene (the tv, movie, warez one), releases have been restricted to private channels and are then reposted to public ones (traditionally releases were made to private FTP servers, downloaded by users, and then reposted to public FTPs and UseNet). What is preventing us from following this traditional system? We only need one or two members that DoA trusts and proivides access to their private tracker, who can then create a new public torrent on our site for each release. It's what happens with DoA releases already...
Besides, in this day of DHT and public trackers, there isn't a major reason to run your own tracker, even if it were public. Yes, you lose the ability to track user share ratios, but there are other ways to encourage the community to share (my idea centres around gamification. People like to collect badges and other untangible items, leverage this to promote people to share). Besides, a 72-hour share requirement doesn't help users who are late, or want old content.
Again, I haven't actually used a private tracker, but this is my understanding. Please correct me as necessary.
Of course, if we knew the reason Ruroshin shuttered the torrent section and left the site it would make the public/private decision very easy to make!
