They wrote a small announcement in their forum. For anyone that can't read it:<p><pre><code> This is an important change for Gazelle coders. You may have noticed that gazelle/ is now redirecting to http://whatcd.github.io/Gazelle/.
This is due to the fact that we are now hosting our public Gazelle repository on GitHub.
The old gazelle site had become severely outdated and a nuisance to maintain.
Luckily for us, GitHub is the perfect solution.
You can view our Gazelle repository here—it is accompanied by a GitHub page providing a brief overview of the project as well as a wiki with important information such as installation instructions, coding standards, and API documentation.</code></pre>
Cool, it's like watching how people did PHP 4-5 years ago when there weren't many frameworks available, and people used GLOBAL variables for accessing the DB/cache.
If you want to start a bittorrent tracker but don't want to bother with all of the trouble of things like Gazelle, you might like thehighseas, a straightforward bittorrent tracker I wrote:<p><a href="https://github.com/calpaterson/thehighseas" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/calpaterson/thehighseas</a>
This might get passed off as something for people looking do to evil/illegal/etc projects, but Gazelle is easily the best tracker front-end out there and it's super customizable (google "Gazelle tracker" and you'll likely find a bunch of screenshots of different sites implementing it differently—from skinning it to adding new features). Bittorrent is underused as a medium for legal downloads and I encourage anyone interested in a torrent site of any kind to check this out before they try to write their own.
There's pressure being put on Gazelle right now because Waffles and AnimeBytes are writing a replacement called Batter[1] using Django. I've also been working on a tracker in Go called Chihaya[2] that will replace Ocelot. I'm glad they finally opening things up more, but it might be a bit too late. If you're interested in working on a more modern rewrite of Gazelle's software stack that has actual software development practices (continuous integration, tests, style guidelines), check out the projects. Both projects are BSD 2 Clause, btw.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/wafflesfm/batter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wafflesfm/batter</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/pushrax/chihaya" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pushrax/chihaya</a>
This code's pretty riddled with SQL injection vulnerabilities. Can't imagine anyone recommending use of this for new projects.<p>For a single instance,
<a href="https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/sections/user/user.php" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/sections/user/...</a><p>The $UserId variable, which is used throughout the queries within this file, is set by an unfiltered GET variable.
I was an architect and coder on this project back at the very beginning and for a few years after launch, if you have any questions about the code then ask away :)
not really sure why we're posting private trackers' projects, but here is waffles.fm's:<p><a href="https://github.com/wafflesfm/batter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wafflesfm/batter</a>
Ocelot, their custom-made C++ tracker is a nice piece of code.
They were forced to drop out php-based and XBTT-based trackers some years ago when the server load from their became huge peer swarm became unmanageable.<p>TorrentFreak made a great story about this[1].<p>[1] <a href="http://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-debuts-lightweight-tracker-for-its-5-million-peers-101014/" rel="nofollow">http://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-debuts-lightweight-tracker-f...</a>
Not free (or "open source") from what I can tell.<p><pre><code> COPYRIGHTED AND PATENTED PENDING BY WHAT.CD INCORPORATED,
DBA/AKA PROJECT GAZELLE
</code></pre>
Which is a bit confusing, but then later:<p><pre><code> FOR NONCOMMERCIAL PURPOSES ONLY</code></pre>