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Interview mit suprnova.org - Admin Sloncek
Dieses Interview mit Sloncek, inzwischen ehemaliger Webmaster und Eigner von suprnova.org führte importantpeople.net am 24.04.2004. Suprnova ist lange Zeit eine der größten BitTorrent - Trackerseiten weltweit gewesen und schloß Anfang 2005 die Pforten. Sloncek gab einige Zeit seinen Namen zur Promotion des trackerlosen eXeem her - ein Engagement, welches er aber bald wieder beendete. eXeem scheint inzwischen in der Bedeutungslosigkeit zu versinken, Sloncek startete vor kurzem Suprnova.org als Newsseite wieder, konnte aber von den Torrenttrackern auf Dauer nicht die Finger lassen: inzwischen betrieben von einem Freund Slonceks, ist die vom Meister himself überarbeitete Trackerseite inzwischen wieder im Netz - unter dem neuen Namen NewNova.org. Es folgt die Retrospektive: wie sah Sloncek die Torrentwelt letztes Jahr?
ImportantPeople.net: Suprnova.org is with nearly 500 000 different visitors per day (comparison: ebay.de has about the same visitor-number) one of the biggest - if not THE biggest - underground-website in web. It also became bigger than the "traditional gigant" ShareReactor.com who had about half of this number of visitors in his last days. Where does this enormous success comes from?
Sloncek: SuprNova.Org has indeed become a lot bigger than I ever expected it to be. We have all seen a lot of BitTorrent sites that came and went, but SuprNova.org has been here for more than a year. This is mostly because some of us dedicated a lot of our free time and a lot of our nerves in to this. Many admins of other torrent sites just didnt want to bother with it anymore, but me and people that helped me never gave up, no matter how bad it got.
A lot of people found our site through message boards, IRC, search engines, magazines and of course by word of mouth, which was the biggest factor here. I think so many people visit BitTorrent sites this much, because they like the fact how easy it is to use, you simply go to a website, click a link and your download should start.
ImportantPeople.net: The content one can get on Suprnova.org is based on the rather new p2p-Tool "BitTorrent". Could you explain how BitTorrent in combination with Suprnova is working and what advantages there are, for example compared to the "old" filesharing-tools like edonkey/emule or Kazaa? Why are downloads in many cases really much faster than via edonkey?
Sloncek: To use BitTorrent you also need torrent files, which are files that have information about where the file you want do download is being tracked and the hash of that file. So SuprNova.org is basically a big archive or torrent files that users upload. The big advantage against kazaa is, that usually files are not faked, for instance if you want to download a Linux in a rar file, there are smaller chances that you will get a fake file like on Kazaa. eDonkey sites, like ShareReactor.com was, were doing about the same, just that they werent using BitTorrent but eDonkey/eMule.The downloads in BitTorrent are faster because, when users are downloading via BitTorrent, they are at the same time sharing that file with the rest of the people that are downloading. Meaning if you have downloaded a byte that i dont have yet, you will send it to me, while i may send you something that you dont have yet. Also there is no "waiting in queue" like there is with eDonkey/eMule...
ImportantPeople.net: Suprnova.org differs from most of the other BitTorrent- and edonkey-linkpages through the fact that it offers an enormous bandwidth of new files (usually much more than 100 new ones) every day – and nearly all downloads are working, in most cases very fast. How is this quantity AND quality of downloads possible? What is the "secret" of Suprnova.org? ;)
Sloncek: SuprNova.org has currently about 16 000 torrent files in its database, all uploaded by users. SuprNova.org was developed so that almost any tracker you use when making a torrent will be read by our script and torrent stats of it posted on the website. A lot of BitTorrent sites are made so that they only support stats if their tracker is used, meaning a lot less torrents which leads to a lot less visitors. SuprNova.org is also different then edonkey link sites, because SuprNova.org can show stats of how many people are at that time connected to that torrent and edonkey , unfortunatelly, can't.
ImportantPeople.net: Suprnova.org is a big international site with visitors from all over the world. Where do most of the visitors come from and why is Surpnova.org so attractive for everyone, doesn't matter which culture and language he speaks?
Sloncek: The most visitors, of course, come from the United States and that is around 37%, the second is Canada with 8% then UK with 7% and so on and on. Very active are also Scandinavian countries and countries from Central Europe.
Probably there are so many people from so many coutries, because there is no or very few quality websites for a specific country. Germany is the only country with many torrent websites in their language. SuprNova also offers a lot of subcategories for different languages, and the most popular are German and Spanish. So even people that dont speak English and would like to find a file in their language, will often find it.
ImportantPeople.net: With its unbelievable number of visitors Surpnova.org creates very, very much traffic every day (although, besides the small .torrent-files, it doesn't provide any download-files at all). Could you tell us how much traffic it generates per day (estimated) and how a server can bear this much traffic?
Sloncek: SuprNova.org generates about 100 GB of traffic per day. Even when torrent files are only few KB, there are so many of them downloaded every day that the bandwidth gets quite big.
SuprNova.org was in the early stages based on only one server and only on HTML (which forced me to add torrent files manually to the site). But with time we evolved and a script was created that makes html files and uploads them to different mirrors that we add to the database. This has been done, because one mirror can hardly bare the bandwidth that all the people make. Often when we add a new mirror it crashes right away, because it cant handle such big load, and people visiting SuprNova.org will get an error when trying to access the site. Right now there are about 5 servers in our database handling all the SuprNova.org traffic.
ImportantPeople.net: Like most of the real huge websites in web, for instance Eselfilme.com or Sharereactor.com, Surpnova.org contains some ads of sponsors – which is the only critics one can find when browsing through the comments of visitors. Isn't it possible to come along only with the donations Suprnova.org gets and to take the ads off?
Sloncek: SuprNova.org didnt always have ads on the site, in fact when i created it, I said that there will be as few ads as possible, or maybe none. But with time that SuprNova.org grew larger we also needed more money to pay for the servers and unfortunaly donations weren't going up with the visitors. I am aware of this critics that SuprNova.org gets because of the advertismets, but people are not aware what kind of costs are involved and I wish that we could survive with only donations, but we can't, so advertisments must stay.
ImportantPeople.net: With regard to the general situation of p2p-systems and filesharing in the internet, unfortunatelly, the current situation isn't very satisfying: Many sites like Suprnova.org had to close their pages – a very famous example is ShareReactor.com during the last weeks – because of problems with the law. Furthermore, more and more filesharing-users all over the world are sued by software– and entertainment-companies who want to scare the majority through this tactics. Does Surpnova.org also has experienced problems like these and – if yes – it is possible that Suprnova will go offline, too, anytime in the future?
Sloncek: Yeah it's really awful time for all the P2P programs, sites and users. But I believe that this is just a process that world needs to go throught, before they will learn that there is no way to stop piracy and will start working in different ways, for instance maybe selling movies online for not too big fees, like it happened with mp3s. But until that happens, a lot of bad things will happen and nobody can't do anything to prevent that.
SuprNova.org has received a lot of MPAA emails, or mostly our hosting companies, this is why SuprNova experiences problems so often. There is always a chance that something very, very bad happens and SuprNova goes offline, but lets not think like that. We will see what time brings ;)
ImportantPeople.net: Do you think that tools like edonkey or bittorrent have a future – with respect to the increasing number of actions initiated by the industry and states against filesharing?Since its foundation more than one year ago, you have developed many new functions and ideas which are available on Suprnova.org . What might the future bring for Suprnova.org? Are there already any new plans?
Sloncek: Well yes indeed I do think that eDonkey and BitTorrent have future, but maybe in a bit modified versions of them.
SuprNova has been trying to improve its system the whole time, to lower our bandwidth and to make it easier for users to use. Also SuprNova has a future plan, thats not so much away from us anymore. But you will just have to wait and see ;)
ImportantPeople.net: Behind the webmaster of Suprnova.org, Sloncek, there's also a "human being" in real life. Would you like to tell us anything about the "real" Sloncek? and what he is doing in his real Life?
Sloncek: Oh well, hehe. My name is Andrej and I'm just a normal 18 years old boy ;). I live in Slovenia and I go to a Waldorf School. I also like acting very much and my plan is to go study acting after the high school, I dont want to have much to do with computers later in life, hehe.
antPeople.net: How many admins or Team-members are needed – besides you as the webmaster himself – to keep Suprnova.org online? Is this a-one-man-work mainly or are there also other supporters of this Site?
Sloncek: SuprNova right now has 5 admins, 2 of them are PHP coders. Other 3 of us take care for the rest of work that there is to do. SuprNova could in no way be maintained by one person alone, since there is too many things to take care off. There are also two admins for our Forum, because nobody else has time to take care for that too, so I'm glad that so many people are willing to help. SuprNova also has about 15 site moderators and around the same number forum moderators. Site moderators filter out the torrents with weird names and forum moderators keep the forum clean and help people.
ImportantPeople.net: The last question is the question I ask all of my inter-iew-partners finally: Sloncek, how do you think will the internet look like in the future, perhaps in 4-5 years?
Sloncek: Well i'm hoping, that users will be able to get faster connections to the internet. I also hope that downloading movies/games will be legalised or at least that the prices of this products will drop. I expect there will be many p2p programs, probably many of them encrypted. Also i expect Google will make their own OS ;) hehe. I expect SuprNova to still be online in one form or another, we will just see in what direction wind blows. Oh and maybe Internet 2 will be already plugged in my computer? :D
ImportantPeople.net: Sloncek, thank you very much for the interview!
