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FileList 12th Anniversary

Dear community,

We are entering the "holy week" and we would like to organize a few contests because we need your help. On 4th of September we celebrate our 12th anniversary, thus starting today up until September 7th global FreeLeech will be enabled. Besides that, every 24 hours you can claim your anniversary gift by clicking on the gift in the bottom left corner. Before revealing the contests that start today I would like to offer some context.

This is about our new website: https://cdn.mnmlsv.net/32a2d9af54282...5101a075f2.pnghttps://cdn.mnmlsv.net/463c463911d74...8890156cf2.jpg https://cdn.mnmlsv.net/749ed38c9fb4c...e9bd297a33.jpghttps://cdn.mnmlsv.net/2bb3f7eacf6c6...393f199303.png

Roughly 2-3 years passed since we first started thinking of changing the source code that gives life to our website. Even though over the years we have optimized the existing code base hugely, we are convinced that we can do better. The code is old and any tracker that is based on old sources like TBDev is bound to have some issues at some point. We want to avoid this.

Obviously, our first thought was to migrate to Gazelle (for those that don't know, Gazelle is one of the best tracker sources out there) but the huge problem was we would still have to re-code a lot of it to make it fit our needs. Gazelle is mainly focused on music and us being a general tracker, it would require core changes. However, even if let's say we would make those changes, it still wouldn't really fit our needs. With that in mind, one and a half years ago we began coding everything from scratch. We have built it from ground up, inherently build it around our needs and wishes (the community needs and wishes, because yes, we do see every suggestion and request you make). To accomplish this we have used cutting edge technologies which allowed us to reach our goal: performance.

There's no point in chasing our tails, so here are some details of what we are doing: - for those with technical knowledge: OOP coding pattern, PHP 7.2+ native, PDO MySQL with prepared statements (better security), Memcached, javascript, Bootstrap 4 front-end framework. We are using state of the art security functions, AES-256 encryption and for hashes only SHA-256. Because everything is OOP it will be a lot easier to maintain and upgrade the code base in the future. - everything is built from scratch, we have copied nothing over from the old source. - we have improved the torrent structure, implemented new categories and options. The browse page will look different. - we are changing our search engine to something modern with realtime indexing capabilities (includes the new torrent filters). - native language system. The website will be 100% Romanian or 100% English, no mixing anymore. The only content that won't be translated is the user content (forum posts, torrent comments) but you are free to talk in English anywhere and if you need help with something our community will gladly help you and respond in English. We have a lot of Romanians and foreign users that know/speak English. - modern & responsive design. Users will be able to create themes and share them with the community. - two new user classes and some changes to privileges. - performance will be greatly enhanced, allowing us to implement pretty much anything the community will ask for.

There is much more to be said, but we really don't want to spoil all the surprise.

As a small comparison between our current source (and I repeat, it does work good) and the new one that we code: - on the old one, because of the way the old code is written, roughly 40-45 queries (per visit) to the database are required to display the main forum page; - on the new one we have cut that down immensely, 3 queries are required in case of a server restart, otherwise one query per visit is all we need. This brings a huge performance boost and it will allow us to enable things that are normal to have on a forum. Sure, we could have re-coded it on the current source, however the lowest we could bring the query count would still be too high.

The amount of work that we need to do is far from small. We are also upgrading the entire database (structure, tables, fields, data, etc.) and considering that we also have a personal life, family, job, etc. it takes much more time than we have wanted. I think that any technically skilled person that understand what we are doing knows that the amount of work that needs to be done is massive. At the end of the day FileList is just a hobby and there are moments when we didn't have time to work on this at all. Even so, we are 50% done.

And why would I tell you all of this? Well, first, we don't want you to think that we do not want to improve our lovely website. Second, we need a new logo and some new forum icons. There will be more contests and information to follow in the near future. The prizes are worth your while in my opinion and contests will stay open much longer than the anniversary ones.

Wishing you all an amazing week! FileList Staff