Fenopy

» see fenopy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Fenopy was a torrent index that appeared at fenopy.com in the spring of 2006. Torrent sites of that period mostly looked like what they were, tables of file names with seed counts. TorrentFreak later remembered Fenopy as "the first full-fledged torrent site with a 'modern' looking design and nifty web 2.0 features", and the placeholder page that outlived it repeated the claim in its own words: "the first web 2.0 Torrent website".

It launched in the stretch of years when I had a TTNet line at university and a torrent search meant opening several index sites side by side. Fenopy was never the biggest of them. The sites that led the category, Mininova and later KickassTorrents, were far bigger names.

The end was unusually quiet for a torrent site. In early December 2014 the domain registration ran out and nothing was done about it. The last live capture is from 9 December. On 18 December the owner told TorrentFreak that this was no accident and had been planned long before. "Fenopy was being operated by an Artificial Intelligence that I created back in 2011," he said, and for the last two years it had run without him. TorrentFreak added that traffic had gone down considerably in recent years, partly because of ISP blockades.

~ the chronicle ~

~ fakefinder and the 500 points ~

The capture of 15 March 2008 shows what web 2.0 meant on a torrent site. The front page advertises "Access to over 300,000 Shared Torrents through a user friendly interface". The tools menu lists the site's inventions with trademark signs after their names, FakeFinder and TrackerStat among them. A feed called Event showed downloads and ratings as they happened, under the line "Watch what's happen on Fenopy right now".

A banner at the top read "Register and get 500 points". Members could keep favorites and add friends, which was unusual furniture for an index whose visitors mostly wanted one file and no account. The bottom of the page carried TorrentFreak headlines.

~ three addresses in nineteen months ~

Fenopy.com began forwarding to fenopy.eu in May 2011. In December 2012 the .eu address started forwarding to fenopy.se, in the Swedish registry where The Pirate Bay also sat at the time. Domain hopping was routine for torrent sites in those years, a way to stay ahead of seizures aimed at .com names.

The move did not help in Britain. In February 2013 the High Court, on an application from the music industry group BPI, ordered six major ISPs to block Fenopy along with two much bigger sites, KickassTorrents and H33T. BT and O2 were among the providers that switched the block on when TorrentFreak reported it on 21 March 2013. Loz Kaye of the Pirate Party UK called it "the latest in the continuing Internet whack-a-mole farce".

~ on liberty of knowledge ~

The owner left a farewell text under that title, and it was angrier than the shutdown. "Shame on us," it said. "For taking the greatest invention of our era, The Internet, and turn it into a marketing and surveillance web; all for feeding our greed". He called the founders of The Pirate Bay "the martyrs of the digital era". By March 2015 fenopy.se held a Swedish site-builder page with an empty blog module, "Inga blogginlägg att visa", no blog posts to show. Neither address answers today.

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