New WordPress blog

As you might have noticed the blog and the forum have been down the last couple of days. This was because we reinstalled the whole server. We have now installed a PHP blog, WordPress, because the buggy/slow Ruby on Rails blog kept locking up the whole server.

We have also installed MySQL 5 which still doesn't work with the forum we use. We have mailed Invision Power Services to ask about this because their website has been saying "news on MySQL 5.x support coming soon." for months now.

We will keep you updated on the forum...

Mininova Trackmania Nations Server

Hi all ;)

I thought it would be fun to play another game together..
This time it’s the great game Trackmania Nations.

Download the game here, here or from a HTTP mirror.

After you have downloaded and installed the game, you can find it in the server list @ NED with the name “Mininova Trackmania Server!”.

Alternatively, you can connect to “etc.mininova.org”. For more info on how to connect to a specific IP, take a look here.

Greetz :)

Banned?

Some time after we started mininova there were a few people that thought that uploading spam torrents would be a good idea to advertise their “GET A FREE XBOX 360” links (or PSP, or HDTV, or well you get the point ;)).

At this time we banned 3651 people (some of which are people who received multiple bans). To see if some country has more (persistant) spammers than others, I decided to compare some statistics.

Media_httpwwwmininova_aqgjp


If you compare these percentages with the number of visitors:

Media_httpwwwmininova_pekes

You notice France (;)) doing a great job and Germany probably has a few nasty spammers :) (or they have more of those “free stuff” sites).

These stats actually prove nothing but hey, statistics are always fun :).


The piecharts are generated using the cool php script from peters1.dk. (Gnuplot, which is used for all the graphs on mininova.org, doesn’t support piecharts)

The Pirate Bay down

Today is a sad day for our friends at The Pirate Bay. This morning, the Swedish police took down all TPB servers (Stockholm traffic graphs). Additionally, it is reported that two or three TPB admins are held in police custody.

Although we and TPB guys have a totally different view on copyrights, this is certainly not what they deserved. That the MPAA thinks differently, is not a big surprise.

If you want to stay up-to-date on the situation, please bookmark this URL.

A final note: due to all these struggles, we might experience some downtime. One of the reasons is that more users visit Mininova now that TPB is down. We try to place an extra server as soon as possible.

Update (June 3): And TPB is back up & running! Hopefully they’re safer here :)

Over 400M torrent downloads!

Today we hit the 400 million torrent downloads mark!

Considering that our site is running for 16 months, this number is a great achievment. That means we’ve got almost one million average downloads per day. If we take a look at the statistics of the last few days, we see that the amount of downloaded torrents is still increasing (almost 1.5 million downloads per day currently).

Thanks guys & gals for sticking with us! We’re looking forward for the next big mark.

Downtime due to relocation re-scheduled for today

It was supposed to happen last friday, however due to some problems it’s scheduled for today. Hopefully the relocation it won’t take too long and without problems.

Update: The relocation has been delayed, again. It’s planned for tomorrow now. Stay tuned!

Update: The upgrade is completed! Enjoy the new and fast mininova ;)

Update: Well it seemed to be working anyway :p, still having some weird problems but we are working on it!

Final Update: Everything should be up and running like it is suppose to be! :))

Google Acquires Mininova

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 1, 2006 - Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) today announced it acquired Mininova, a Great Iceberg Town, Antarctica-based BitTorrent search engine company.

“Mininova enabled users to easily search for, download and share data, and its technologies complement Google’s ongoing mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Larry Page, Co-Founder & President, Products. “Mininova is an innovator in the field of BitTorrent technology and we’re excited that the Mininova team in joining Google.”

Google also announced that the company will probably move all their servers to the datacenter of Mininova in Antarctica. “Thanks to the temperature, we don’t need no airco’s anymore in the datacenter. Besides, what’s cuter than penguins jumping around and shitting on your servers?”, said Larry.

Mininova was founded in Januari 2005. Since then, the website has gained popularity among millions of visitors. Today, Mininova is the best visited torrent search engine worldwide. Mininova users will not experience any interruption in service.

About Google Inc.

Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

Google is a trademark of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

Downtime due to new server

As you might have noticed, we’ve been kinda slow during the evenings. So today we are getting an extra server :)!

However this will mean some downtime as the other servers will be moved to a new rack (and get different ip addresses).

It could take up to 60 minutes for the dns servers to update. We also have to install the new server so the change will probably be noticeable tomorrow (or sooner if everything goes well).

Update: The upgrade will probably take place after the (busy) weekend, so stay tuned!