What.cd's Gazelle on GitHub

They wrote a small announcement in their forum. For anyone that can&#x27;t read it:<p><pre><code> This is an important change for Gazelle coders. You may have noticed that gazelle&#x2F; is now redirecting to http:&#x2F;&#x2F;whatcd.github.io&#x2F;Gazelle&#x2F;. 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 The old gazelle site had become severely outdated and a nuisance to maintain.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&#x27;s like watching how people did PHP 4-5 years ago when there weren&#x27;t many frameworks available, and people used GLOBAL variables for accessing the DB&#x2F;cache.

If you want to start a bittorrent tracker but don&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;calpaterson&#x2F;thehighseas</a>

This might get passed off as something for people looking do to evil&#x2F;illegal&#x2F;etc projects, but Gazelle is easily the best tracker front-end out there and it&#x27;s super customizable (google &quot;Gazelle tracker&quot; and you&#x27;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&#x27;s pressure being put on Gazelle right now because Waffles and AnimeBytes are writing a replacement called Batter[1] using Django. I&#x27;ve also been working on a tracker in Go called Chihaya[2] that will replace Ocelot. I&#x27;m glad they finally opening things up more, but it might be a bit too late. If you&#x27;re interested in working on a more modern rewrite of Gazelle&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wafflesfm&#x2F;batter</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/pushrax/chihaya" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pushrax&#x2F;chihaya</a>

Could someone explain what this is?

This code&#x27;s pretty riddled with SQL injection vulnerabilities. Can&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WhatCD&#x2F;Gazelle&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;sections&#x2F;user&#x2F;...</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&#x27;re posting private trackers&#x27; projects, but here is waffles.fm&#x27;s:<p><a href="https://github.com/wafflesfm/batter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wafflesfm&#x2F;batter</a>

I remember working with gazelle for a torrent site for live Phish recordings. Truly a terrifying code base.

You must maintain a 0.4 ratio of pushes to pulls on github to use this repository.

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:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;what-cd-debuts-lightweight-tracker-f...</a>

Not free (or &quot;open source&quot;) from what I can tell.<p><pre><code> COPYRIGHTED AND PATENTED PENDING BY WHAT.CD INCORPORATED, DBA&#x2F;AKA PROJECT GAZELLE </code></pre> Which is a bit confusing, but then later:<p><pre><code> FOR NONCOMMERCIAL PURPOSES ONLY</code></pre>

I don&#x27;t understand. Why is this on HN now? IIRC project Gazelle had been open-sourced several years ago.