Also frustrating that sonarr won't allow you to NOT auto search for an episode before it's released. It auto downloads WAY more garbage than early releases in my experience. In fact I'm not sure I've seen it actually download something successfully before it's official release.

But searches online show sonarr devs pushing back against it for some unknown reason.

Are people running the arr stack in windows?

Most good trackers can be used completely free of charge. But you have to work your way up to them, proving yourself as worthy on a lower tier tracker.

There are plenty of guides on this. Most recommend starting with an open interview on RED or MAM, then using the invite forums once you qualify.

You can also watch for open sign-ups. TL opens its doors a few times per year (and usually during December), and it's at least as good as the public trackers. Sometimes these have invite forums, but usually not. TL does not.

You will, however, want to spend money on a VPN with port forwarding. This should run ~$30/year.

I've been at this since Napster was a thing, so imagine my surprise to hear that folks are paying to pirate.

Usenet I get, but private trackers? only real benefit would be a risk reduction of being caught by your ISP, but that's easily overcome by using a VPN.

No, most public ones are fine. Always have been. I've never used a private tracker and have had very few issues. Especially after using Radarr, etc. to pick out good and bad torrents.

I have been using private trackers for 15 years now and have been extremely happy with them. I dont mind seeding back, plus not all of them have the ratio requirement. My tv show site knows it would be very hard to keep that from slipping so instead of ratio its just a certain length for episodes and season grabs. I really dont care about keeping my bittorrent app running since i leave my pc on anyway. As for sonarr it just copies the file to the new directory and renames it, after a few months ill do a cleanup that takes 2 min.

As for usenet, my coworker loves it but he definitely says it has issues which may or may not be an issue today or workarounds for it? He has said the takedown requests are so fast now that finding a lot of stuff that releases quickly can be difficult if you dont use sonarr or radarr to grab right away. Every now and then he has to ask me to find stuff.

The only real issues ive ever had is the instability where sometimes theres outages and not much you can do. I remember last year or maybe year before that one of the biggest had a 2 month outage and things looked bleak.