<< Back By Panda-Admin | Nov. 12, 2024
Torrents Tracker bot is stopped
Beginning\end
The bot was created over a year ago, around September 2023. It was initially conceived as an assistant for tracking the release of new TV show episodes. New episodes typically come out once a week, and I often forgot about them due to being busy with work and life. To solve this problem, the bot was developed—its primary task was to periodically monitor pages with torrent releases of TV shows and check the number of files and the torrent hash from those pages.
After the backend that performed this function was written, I began working on a convenient interface for the logic. I decided that creating a Telegram bot to configure all the torrents through it would be a good idea. After the bot was created, a long process of optimization, configuration, and expanding the service's functionality for torrent tracking began.
Within a few months, the bot had the following functionality:
- Torrent tracking – the feature from the initial version.
- Collecting torrents from trackers – popular torrent trackers were added, and the bot periodically gathered new releases from them.
- Collecting torrents from the DHT network – the bot queried available nodes, retrieved torrent hashes, and added them for further processing.
- Torrent indexing – all collected torrents were indexed, and metadata (size, number of files in the distribution, etc.) was filled in.
- Search in the database of indexed torrents – search by keywords and various filters was available.
You can read more about the functionality in previous posts about the bot.
In active data collection and indexing mode, the bot operated from May 2023 to November 2024. During this period, information on approximately 1 million unique and fresh torrents was collected. However, only about 35% of the total volume was successfully indexed, mainly due to the lack of seeders and time limits for checking each torrent.
Serverless functions were well-suited for the collection and indexing of torrents. They enabled the parallel execution of numerous processes and facilitated task distribution through an SQS queue.
The volume of information eventually became the main reason for the bot and the entire service being halted. The bot and its environment began consuming too many resources for its operations and the indexing of all new data. While the monthly cost for the bot was around $20 in January-February 2024, by July, the bill had grown to $80 per month.
The bot evolved from just another pet project into something that required constant attention and financial support. This began to feel overwhelming.
The idea of introducing paid features to cover server costs was quickly dismissed, as none of the users who came looking for free content were willing to pay, even small amounts. What a surprise. Perhaps I’m simply not a good marketer or salesperson and couldn’t "convey the value of the bot to the audience". But, after all, I am a programmer.
Thank you to all our users for participating in the project! It was a pleasure knowing that our bot was helpful to you.