Suprnova.org

Suprnova.org, deemed a Universal BitTorrent source, was a web site which distributed descriptor files for various music and video files, computer programs and games. Many of these torrents described could potentially have been used for copyright infringement.

Suprnova did not host any of the shared files, nor did it operate any BitTorrent trackers. All it offered were the ".torrent" meta files which would tell a BitTorrent client where it could find the BitTorrent tracker. The client could then go to the tracker to find peers to obtain the file from. Suprnova would connect to the tracker periodically to obtain statistics for display on its web pages, so visitors could determine how popular a file was, and how likely it was that they could obtain a complete copy of it. The two important statistics were "Seeds" and "Peers". "Peers" was the number of participants currently uploading and downloading the file. "Seeds" was the number of participants who had the complete file available for download. The number of seeds was important, as if there are no seeds left or the last seed leaves the network, all other participants would have most likely been unable to finish the file.

As well as the torrent files themselves, there was a set of forums for visitors, where people talked about various subjects, and requested different files that they'd like to see people upload. This resulted in a greater sense of community spirit than on the self-contained networks such as FastTrack and Gnutella.

Suprnova.org had a problem with two similarly named scam sites, Suprnova.com and Suprnova.net. These sites have the same layout as suprnova.org but require a usage fee (Suprnova.org did not).

As of late November 2004 a French company, RetSpan, has been seeking legal action against SuprNova. [1] (http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=602)

The admin of Suprnova.org, "Sloncek" ("little elephant", in Slovenian) gave his support for the creation of eXeem.[2] (http://www.exeem.com) This was initially the subject of much debate and excitement on the internet, but upon the release turned out to be a disappointment - eXeem contained the Cydoor adware, like software such as Kazaa, and escaping this adware was the reason for many's use of Suprnova in the first place. A hacked version of the program, eXeem Lite, was released afterward, and upon realising the effect of this program, the adware was eventually removed from eXeem.

As of December 19, 2004, at around 5PM (GMT+1:00 Slovenian time), a message was displayed on Suprnova's front page stating it has officially closed down. Some speculation states this is due to its poor server and constant downtime, whilst others speculate that Suprnova had been receiving legal warnings, which was the underlying reason of its shutdown.

Later, Sloncek, the lead administrator and owner, revealed on Suprnova's IRC channel that his site was shut down because neither he, or the other administrators will want to continue to fight against the legal warnings which they have received.

Amazingly, this unexpected event took place in the span of merely 12 hours. After the some downtime, the Suprnova page reappeared encouraging visitors to visit the Exeem project webpage.

Size

• As of July 2004, it listed approximately 60,000 torrent files.

As of late December 2004, it no longer lists torrent files because it was shut down.

External links

• Suprnova.org Closes (http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=626) article by Thomas Mennecke for Slyck (Dec 19, 2004)
• An early fan reaction to the news of SuprNova's closing (http://mike-b.deviantart.com/journal/4103616/)
• Suprnova Lite PHP: A low bandwidth Suprnova.org mirror (http://project-2501.net/php-scripts/suprnova-lite/)
• Unofficial RSS feeds (http://varchars.com/rss/)
• Relatively Complete Suprnova Mirror (http://bi-torrent.com/)
• The Unofficial SuprNova.org Closure FAQ by SilentDragz (http://www.silentdragz.net/suprfaq)