After a hugely successful launch on What.CD and Ntorrents, Gazelle is nearing feature completion and relative stability. On What.CD, which is currently pushing between 1,000 and 2,500 active users at any given moment, load averages stay consistently between 0.5 and 1.0 throughout the course of the entire day.

It is thus with great pleasure that we are able to announce that the first release candidate of the Gazelle source code will be made available to a select testing group within the coming few weeks. A couple of very special friends have gained access to the pre-release svn already, and have all expressed great pleasure with the structure and organization of the code.

After Gazelle has been sent through the release candidate phase and all critical bugs have been fixed, the source code will be made available to the general public.

        After these past few months of development, the code on Gazelle is reaching its final stages of completion - only a few pages are left to be written. As such, we’ve decided to announce our official release date for the alpha - March 5th.

        On March 5th, we will allow What.CD VIPs to register accounts and basically try their best to break it. When we’re satisfied with the preliminary bulletproofing, What.CD will transition their entire site to the Gazelle codebase (keeping all of their data, of course), and run the site on a beta version of Gazelle for as long as it takes to iron out all the bugs. When we’re satisfied with our progress, we’ll release the final version of Gazelle under the AGPL license.

        For the time being, we’ve decided to show you guys a couple screenshots of the page WhatMan finished this morning - artist.php. This page is a special little page which shows all the data we have that concerns a particular artist - a wiki article, a list of torrents, requests, tags, statistics, and, of course, similar artists.

        Here’s an artist page, showing off the Layer Cake stylesheet.
        And here’s the same page, showing off the Anorex stylesheet.

        The similar artists system is probably the most interesting part of the page - the stats are generated by a script which looks at similarities in users’ snatches, and refined by users voting a similarity up or down. The tags are interesting as well - they’re composed of tags on the artists’ torrents, which can be voted up and down by users.

        Of course, the entire artist page is cached as well - which means that it’s possible to load it without touching our database.

        Hang in there for a couple more weeks, guys. Gazelle is on its way.

        Well, we’ve got requests working, and they are looking great. The requests system implements ‘bounties’, where you ‘pay’ to create a request, and users can vote on them. Each vote costs 50 MB of upload credit, and you can vote as many times as you want. 20% of all upload spent on the request is held as a bounty for the filler.

        When creating a request, users are asked for the Artist, Album name, and any appropriate tags. If the system finds that the artist does not yet exist, it creates a page for it in the artist wiki. Each artist page lists all torrents, active requests, an image, and some general information about the artist. This page is editable by all users of a pre-defined userclass and above, and features a history system for rolling back edits.

        The site features a tagging system for torrents and requests, this allows users to assign a torrent or request to multiple genres and subgenres. Furthermore, the site has a voting system for tags, so you can vote for which tag most accurately represents the torrent. We feel this offers greater flexibility than the previous ‘One category per torrent’ method, and will greatly increase a users ability to locate what they are looking for.

        Now what is a site without a decent ratio system? Well, we thought of that, and have come up with a fully automatic ratio watch system. The system requires no human intervention, and automatically warns a user when their ratio passes a certain thresh hold. The system is tiered, to allow for maximum flexibility. It gives the user a predefined period of time to get their ratio to an acceptable level. If the user fails to remedy their ratio, they are automatically disabled.

        Here are some pictures of each system in action:
Requests system using our new ‘anorex’ theme. This image also shows the ratio watch warning.
Requests system using our new ‘layer cake’ theme. This image also shows the ratio watch warning.
Ratio watch rules using our ‘layer cake’ theme.

        We feel that these images show the true extent to which our code can be customized, both design wise, and function wise. Enjoy.

        Welcome to the home of Project Gazelle. Project Gazelle is an initiative started by the What.CD? crew to create a reliable, lightweight and secure codebase. The primary goal of this project is to replace the aging TorrentBits code employed by most private torrent trackers today. Our code is designed to be secured against SQL and XSS injection attacks, allow a site to handle thousands of users on even the fewest resources, and allow easy extension of the code we’ve already written by 3rd parties.

        Our code is geared towards use by music-oriented torrent trackers, however, it can be easily adapted to suit the needs of any site. The code is designed to be feature-complete out of the box, unlike other distributions, and is geared for the experienced programmer. The source comes pre-packaged with a C++ based tracker, a PHP frontend, and a complete admin-panel.

        We see Project Gazelle revolutionizing the Private Tracker community, allowing administrators to focus more on making their individual site the way they choose then fixing the currently existing issues in the base they started from.