Warez-BB

» see warez-bb.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Warez-BB was a phpBB forum with four words under its logo: appz, gamez, moviez, muzik. It hosted nothing. Members posted threads that paired a short description with a block of links to a file host, RapidShare and Megaupload in the early years and whatever survived them later. Guests could see a few sections and had to register for the rest, which is one reason the member count climbed the way it did.

The domain was registered on 24 March 2005 and the board was already up a week later, on 1 April, though members who mourned it in 2021 dated the community to 2004. Growth can be read off the statistics line at the bottom of the index page. It showed 72,930 registered users in June 2006 and 1,238,518 three years later. By June 2012 it was 2,961,374. The slogan above the forum list was "Come as guests, stay as family."

An Alexa breakdown quoted by a blogger in February 2009 ranked the site 467th in the world and listed its biggest audiences in order: the United States, India, the United Kingdom, then Turkey. That fits what I remember of the TTNet broadband years. Turkish boards covered local releases and Turkish subtitles, and for everything else the English-language board with the deepest archive was one bookmark over.

~ the dossier ~

~ links, not files ~

Link forums lived on a legal argument: the forum holds text, and the files are somebody else's problem. Warez-BB's footer said it "respects the rights of others" and pointed rights holders to a takedown contact. Beside that it called itself "a proud donor" to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and two other organizations.

The argument did not impress the High Court in London. In November 2014 it ordered the big British ISPs to block Warez-BB in a batch that also included Torrentz and Isohunt. The file hosts were the weaker point anyway. Megaupload was seized in January 2012 and RapidShare throttled its free downloads the same year, so millions of links in old threads went dead within months, and a forum of links is only as good as its live ones.

~ the counter at the bottom ~

The record for simultaneous visitors was set on 15 December 2013: 33,022 users online at 4:04 pm forum time. After that the line kept growing, only slower. It read 3,481,569 accounts in June 2016 and 3,706,994 in May 2019. A WJunction regular wrote later that in its last years the board "was down mostly of time" and the "great uploaders left". On 20 September 2020, the last day the archive saw the index load, it showed 3,754,429 registered users and 56,402,829 posts.

~ one person had the passwords ~

From 29 September 2020 the archive records only Cloudflare error pages. For months nobody outside the staff knew why. On 2 February 2021 the official Twitter account explained that "the issue is not with the Site's structure but rather due to a severe health issue with the owner that holds the access info needed for the Site & our inability to make contact with them". A forum with millions of members and a ranked ladder of moderators had exactly one person who could log in to the server.

On 7 April 2021 the staff reported that the owner had decided not to revive the site or release the domain, and added that the decision "was not related to the Site or the Internet". Five days later they wrote that without the database and the passwords the site was considered closed. Today warez-bb.org is a parked page saying the domain may be for sale.

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