Guide for those looking to find safer and more private alternatives to public tracker sites like The Pirate Bay or Mininova.

Getting into the right private BitTorrent tracker sites takes a little bit of time and patience. But, like everything in life you have to start somewhere.

You must begin with what are called "lower tier" sites and work you're way up to the more exclusive ones by either trading invites with others or by proving your ability to maintain decent share-ratios on a particular site to the extant that somebody might trust you enough to invite you directly to another. A tracker site's forums are a great place to make this happen.

For initially getting into these "lower tier" sites, it's important to note that many of them have regular open signup periods after pruning dead, unused,or banned accounts, or simply at intervals to better manage adding new members to the site.

There are several ways to find out when, here's how.

1. Tracker Checker

Program automatically checks selected sites for open signups with minimum effort. It comes preconfigured with around 69 trackers ready to check with the option to add more signup links as desired. It runs minimized in your system tray, silently checks for open signups, and alerts you when they become available.

2. Forums

There are a number of places to learn when sites are open for signups. They are regularly discussed here on ZeroPaid for example, with community members posting those they find or hear about.

READ > Trackers Open for Registration (skip to last page)

3. IRC

Otherwise known as "Internet Relay Chat," this method concerns the "virtual rooms" that nearly all tracker sites maintain as a sort of help desk and connection with site members and the outside world. It takes a bit of technical knowhow, but it allows you to talk directly with a site's staff to ask when the next signup period will be or to simply ask(or beg) nicely for admission.