I am making a pirating server and I am following this guide and I got to the part where I need to choose indexers in Jackett.
What is an indexer exactly? I noticed that some are public and some are private. Are private indexers paid?
I do not know which ones to choose so any help would be appreciated.
There are two kinds of torrent sites: public and private. Private torrent sites require you to be a member of the site, and only then are you able to download any content. Private sites also may have a whole bunch of seeding, downloading, uploading rules in action. So you cannot just download something and remove that from your client after download is complete. Such sites often require interviews or invitations from existing members.
Now in Jackett, you can add both public torrent trackers and private torrent trackers (if you are a part of them). Each site may provide their own API key or sometimes just username/password, or sometimes nothing for public trackers.
Edit: It could also include usenet indexers.
TL;DR: Indexers are torrent sites (public and private) that you add to your jackett with either API keys or username/password or nothing in cases of public sites.
Thank you! Do you have any recommendations for public trackers I should use and/or private trackers I should look into? I am only going to be torrenting movies and tv shows
Public Trackers could include something like yifi or 1337x. Although I’m not sure if jackett provides any pre-configuration of those. And for private you can for now, unfortunately, keep an watch on r/opensignups (sometimes they let anyone sign up). Or you can join the interviews for Myanonamouse and Redacted. The first one is related to books and the second one is related to music. But once you join them and climb through the userclasses, they have invite threads for other reputed private trackers.
Thank you for the suggestions! Unfortunately looks like r/opensignups has been privated due to the strike but I will continue to look into it. For now, yifi and 1337x should be a good starting point. I just hope they have older content as well as the newest content.
Private indexers tend to require invites. On my jacket I just selected every single public tracker and sent it all to Sonarr works decent enough if it can’t find something I have 1 private indexer that will find it
Everyone has pretty much covered trackers, but here’s a repo with lists of them to choose from.