March Update

Some small improvements we made the last couple of days.

Frontpage (Erik + Niek): The frontpage now lists the 10 most downloaded torrents for each category for the last 24 hours. We think this is more usefull than the 10 latest torrents.

(for all people who still don’t get it, the today page is the same as the old frontpage and can even be set as your default frontpage in your settings).

Search RSS feed (Erik): The page with search results now contains a link to the RSS feed for that search. This is a easy way to monitor if there are new search results.


Search caching (Erik): Turned on search caching, I forgot to turn it on with the previous update. Search should be a little faster again now.

RSS feeds (Erik): The category and subcategory pages now contain a RSS feed column with a link to their RSS feeds.

Search Cloud (Jos): Jos has made the search cloud look much better and came up with a better formula to calculate the word size and color.

Frontpage Improvements (Niek): Niek made some improvements to the frontpage such as the “Show all of today →” link for each category.

Better caching (Erik): I have improved the frontpage and search cloud caching which should lower the sql server load and improve the load time of these pages.

Labs (Erik): As requested I have created an RSS feed for the mininova labs. Note that we don’t often add new things, but I’ll try to increase this.

Uploads Graph (Erik): There is now a graph containing the number of torrents uploaded each day. It is added to to the graph section of our stats.


Hope you all like this updates. I have reactivated my World Of Warcraft account and made a new character (Firik, NE druid on Al’ Akir) so don’t expect any more updates from me any time soon

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Frontpage Update

New Frontpage: As you might have seen we have changed the frontpage. The reason for this change is the incease in bandwith usage. Which is cause by the increasing number of torrents uploaded per day combined with the number of visitors which enters the site through the frontpage.

The old frontpage was an average of 150 KB (smaller in the morning, larger in the evening). With 750.000 pageviews on the frontpage, it used 107 GB per day! This is 1,27 MB per second!

The new frontpage is only 35 KB which results in 0,2 MB per second.

We are paying for a 70 mbit connection (8,75 MB per second). As you can see in this graph this isn’t enough at the end of the day (when the frontpage gets larger than 220 KB).

This is also the reason why mininova got slower in the evenings.

We hope everybody understands this and likes the new frontpage. If you don’t you can use the today page.

Edit (Niek): Added a “show all of today” link under each category, for easier navigation.

Edit (Erik): Added a “Use the today page as my frontpage” setting to the settings page. Setting this option makes your frontpage the same as the old frontpage was.


Search Cloud (Erik): There is now a mininova search cloud. It contains the most searched words of the day. The words get bigger when they are searched for more often. The cloud is empty at the start of the day and will grow as the number of search increases for the day.


Visual passwords (Erik): I have added a cool example for visual passwords to the mininova labs. Don’t worry, we won’t use it for mininova.


Improved search performance (Erik): I have managed to increase the speed of the search queries by almost 400% using a temporary table. The bad thing is that this table is updated only once every hour, so new torrents can take up to 1 hour to show in the search results. The good thing is that we won’t have to buy a new database server because of this.

Opera adds support for BitTorrent

Opera has decided to add BitTorrent support for Opera 8 and 9 (press release). Let’s hope the Firefox and IE developers will follow this good example. Let’s also hope that their client implementation is as good and lightweight as utorrent.


Quote from Opera:

Opera does not encourage the use of BitTorrent, FTP and HTTP protocols for downloading illegal, copyright infringing material.

Note how they see BitTorrent as just another protocol and not something specially used for filesharing.


The Opera downloads are now also available as a torrents

What is up with the French?

Here is a graph showing how many visitors mininova gets from different countries:

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And here is a graph containing searches on mininova for specific languages:

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(languages not in the graph got even less searches)


The conclusion I take from these graphs is that French people only want to watch/play things which are french. Is this because they don’t understand English?

I really don’t understand this. I always hate it to see stuff which has voice-over in my own language. Especially comedies, it almost always ruins the jokes.


(oh and could someone translate this to French so they can also read this :)


Edit: Eriks intention was not to offend French people, the post above is simply an observation of the search queries with his own opinion. Of course we do not dislike you, French people, at all :) Thanks for understanding - Niek


Edit: As Niek said, it was not my intention to offend the french (I don’t get why some people got offended). I don’t know why people think this but I’m not from america and yes I have learned french at my school (long time ago so I’m not that good at it anymore).

Karine: I don’t download french movies because I can’t fully understand them if they speak to fast. I always download english stuff even though that is not my native language.

Barraka: I counted the searches which contained the word “french” and the other languages.

- Erik

Mininova 1 year young!

Hey everybody, today is the first birthday of mininova!
About a year ago, I started working on a website that would replace SuprNova, a very popular BitTorrent site that cancelled its services in December 2004. Shortly after I started, my friends Erik, Jos, Matthijs en Rob joined the mininova staff.

Who could ever have thought that 1 year later, this website would be the number 1 place for millions of people worldwide to get torrents off?

What was the reason for mininovas huge growth?

  • Was it the simple layout?
  • The perfect timing after SuprNovas shutdown?
  • The many revolutionary and advanced features?
  • The forum with its great community?

The only thing I know for sure is that we’ll stay here with you, the BitTorrent users :)

Of couse I’d like to say thanks to everybody who helped us (the staff) accomplish what we’ve got now:

  • You, the users! For getting fresh torrents from mininova every day!
  • All our moderators, at the forum and the site. Their work is probably invisible for you, but they accomplish huge things. Without them, mininova would be a mess…
  • Anakata from ThePirateBay, for hosting the website the first week (for free!)
  • Gary from isoHunt, for hosting our servers a month in exchange for recommending his site
  • FD for his help setting up the forum and the servers at Leaseweb
  • The guys from Leaseweb for hosting our servers for almost a year now
  • And everybody else who I forgot

I’d like to emphasise that we’ve just started, and we’ve got a long way to go! I’m sure many interesting and important things will happen this year.

As usual, we’d like to know what you, as a BitTorrent user, would like to see changed on mininova. Please share your ideas by posting a comment in this blog.

Personally, I was thinking that a new design for mininova would be a good idea (the current layout is getting quite old). Having said that: if you’re working for a webdesign company and you’re interested in a nice offer, feel free to contact me.

New year update

I’m just posting some updates here to keep you all informed…

  • Disable pasting to the password fields at the register page. (Erik)
  • Added caps-lock detection to the register and login pages. (Erik)
  • Added a description field to the rss feed. (Erik, Niek)
  • Added some techincal details to the FAQ page. (Erik)
  • Improved the playlist generator. (Matthijs)
  • Almost total rewrite of the cooperative painting project. (Erik)
  • Improved the search stats page. (Erik)
  • Added 2 new graphs to the graphs stats page. (Erik)
  • Fixed the hover above the
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    icon text on the sub and cat-list pages. (Niek, Erik)

And a (late) Happy New Year from the mininova crew!

Christmas update

here is a little mininova christmas update.

  • The nice christmas logo. (Jos)
  • The Detailed Information page now contains a “Download playlist (.pls)” link for all music torrents which don’t already contain a playlist (Matthijs).
  • You can now search for specific files contained inside the torrents. Just enter the filetype preceded by a dot. For example “linux .tar .gz” will search for all files containing the word linux and of type .tar or .gz (Erik)
  • Your search keywords are now highlighted in the result set. (Erik)
  • “Did you mean” feature which suggests better keywords for your searches. For example “linex”. (Erik)
  • Files stats page. (Erik)

The mininova crew wishes everybody a merry christmas.

Some nice artwork

At the Mininova Labs there is a page called the Cooperative Painting Project (warning: may crash IE). This is a heavy html/javascript (Could even be called AJAX but doesn’t use the X of XML) page on which you can paint. You can not just paint things for yourself but veryone can see your paining skills (in realtime) and can modify the painting. Every day at 12:00 GMT+1 the painting is stored and a new fresh painting is started. All the old paintings can be seen at the History page.

Here is a list of some of my favorite paintings.


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Update: 23-12-2005

Added 2 new images mailed by mazin.


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