Secret Cinema: News

[bsaambl]

5000 torrents and some big news! 
secret-cinema.pw may become ratioless,is limiting membership to just 3000 users and have activated automatic user class promotions.


We're finally here. 5000 torrents! There are already so many gems and beautiful films on the site that it is hard to describe how proud we feel and how thankful we are to all who have contributed and made this possible. We love you!

Now that the foundation of the new SC archive has been established, we would like to share some information about the direction we are taking with the site.

As some of you have already guessed, the site will remain on full and permanent freeleech. We consider the ratio system to be a terrible and archaic solution that abuses and penalizes a large portion of the users for no good reason. We don't want that and have faith in our users to be mature enough to allow us to operate SC without this cold gun barrel pressed on everyone's temple. So we are dropping it. Permanently.

However, we are still running on a trial period for the time being. We've seen great activity numbers and no negative effect from the freeleech so far... but we're yet to see how users behave when it is known that it's a free, all-inclusive buffet.

So, please understand that the site remaining on permanent freeleech depends on YOU. Every single one of you. Feel free to grab anything you want BUT try to give back as best you can. Keep searching and uploading great new content. Keep seeding what you upload and download. Re-seed if there are requests for it. Fill requests. And if your current connectivity or disk space situation does not allow you to do that, find alternative ways to contribute - help those who ask for it, write up guides, fix up meta data, keep the banter going in the forums etc.

If there's no negative impact of the permanent freeleech, we will gradually get rid of all the ratio related stuff on the site UX. Upload stats will be the only thing that remains. You know, to have pissing contests down the road. If, however, we see that the overall health of the archive suffers by this, we'll be forced to revert the freeleech and go back to the drawing board.


Secondly, we want to let you know that the size of the site userbase has a hard limit - 3000 accounts. SC has always been a small operation that is flying below the radar and we are going to keep it this way. We feel that this amount of users is optimal for building and maintaining the archive while also keeping the site's OPEX at a manageable level. 

Once we hit 2500 users, the doors will close down. We will reset everyone's invites to 0 and will not hand out any new invites after that. Another 500 slots will be availabe for Cinephile user invites and once the userbase grows to 3000 users, the only way in will be when we delete dormant accounts at some point in the future.

We are still 1000+ users from the initial limit so now is the time to bring on board your friends while you still can. For that, we recently distributed additional invites to everyone. Use these while you can and use them wisely!

Lastly, today we are also rolling out our version of automatic user class promotions. To align the automation with our permanent freeleechannouncement, we decided to drop ratio as the decider for matters such as class promotions that other trackers seem to favor. As such, we have taken a more holistic approach:

With Gazelle, we are able to plot out percentile rankings for a number of different stats - you can view your percentiles in your profile. We combine all of the individual rankings, with some custom weighting, into an overall percentile ranking. We calculate the overall ranking with these weightings:

Uploads percentile * 10,
GBs seeded percentile * 8,
Requests filled percentile * 5,
Forum Posts percentile * 1,
Bounty given percentile * 1

What this means is that overall ranking is determined by all of these stats, but the most important ones are uploads, followed by seeding stats, then requests filled, and then forum posts and bounty are the least important. There are no static numbers (something like 20 uploads = promotion) because all of the percentiles are relative to every other user on the site. 

We currently have 3 classes: User, VIP, and Cinephile.

If you reach the top 60th percentile, you will be upgraded to VIP. If you hit the top 90, then you'll be promoted to Cinephile.

Weightings are subject to change, and we'll monitor it closely to make sure it's how we want it. Once you get promoted, you won't be demoted if you fall below again.

It's important to note that if you desire to get to a higher user class then now is the time to act while the overall community stats that determine the rankings are still low. Obtaining the higher user rankings will become harder over time.