Check out Brian's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide.

Movie-Shack is based upon the TBdev Source code, but has since been modified!

All donations go towards the running costs and continued improvement of Movie-Shack!

Firstly make sure it has not been sent to your junk mail folder, if not please contact a staff member on IRC.... #movie-shack

Please use the Account Recovery form..

We DO NOT rename accounts except in the case of VIP/Donors.

You must Contact a Staff Member to have your account removed!

Firstly it's important to distinguish between your overall ratio and the individual ratio on each torrent you may be seeding or leeching. The individual ratio takes into account those values for each torrent. The overall ratio takes into account the total uploaded and downloaded from your account since you joined the site. You may see two symbols instead of a number: "Inf.", which is just an abbreviation for Infinity, and means that you have downloaded 0 bytes while uploading a non-zero amount (ul/dl becomes infinity); "---", which should be read as "non-available", and shows up when you have both downloaded and uploaded 0 bytes (ul/dl = 0/0 which is an indeterminate amount).

Only You and the Site Staff can see your IP and eMail addresses. Regular users do not see that information.

This problem sometimes occurs with Internet Explorer. Close all IE windows and open Internet Options in the control panel. Click the Delete Cookies button. You should now be able to log-in.

You do not have to anymore. All you have to do is make sure you are logged in with your actual IP when starting a torrent session. After that, even if the IP changes mid-session, the seeding or leeching will continue and the statistics will update without any problem. Please Note: Members caught using IP Generators will be Banned!

The tracker has determined that you are firewalled or NATed and cannot accept incoming connections. This means that other peers in the swarm will be unable to connect to you, only you to them. Even worse, if two peers are both in this state they will not be able to connect at all. This obviously has a detrimental effect on the overall speed. The way to solve the problem involves opening the ports used for incoming connections (the same range you defined in your client) on the firewall and/or configuring your NAT server to use a basic form of NAT for that range instead of NAPT. The actual process differs widely between different router models. Check your router documentation and/or support forum. You will also find lots of information on the subject at PortForward.

Please see the table at the bottom of this page for an explanation of user classes.

Please see the table at the bottom of this page for an explanation of promotions.

The PU limit used to be lower and we didn't demote anyone when we raised it!

There is a max user limit. When that number is reached we stop accepting new members. Accounts inactive are automatically pruned, so keep trying, you might hit an open day! You can also chase up an invite through the proper channels Note: There is no reservation or queuing system, don't ask for that.

First, find an image that you like, and that is within the rules. Then you will have to find a place to host it, such as our own BitBucket. (Other popular choices are Photobucket, Upload-It! or ImageShack). All that is left to do then is copy the URL you were given when uploading it to the avatar field in your profile. Please do not make a post just to test your avatar. If everything is allright you'll see it in your details page.

1. The user is cheating. (a.k.a. "Summary Ban") 2. The server is overloaded and unresponsive. Just try to keep the session open until the server responds again. (Flooding the server with consecutive manual updates is not recommended.) 3.You are using a faulty client. If you want to use an experimental or CVS version you do it at your own risk.

1. If a torrent you are currently leeching/seeding is not listed on your profile, just wait or force a manual update. 2. Make sure you exit your client properly, so that the tracker receives "event=completed". 3. If the tracker is down, do not stop seeding. As long as the tracker is back up before you exit the client the stats should update properly.

No! Hacked Clients and some others are all banned from MS, using banned clients is done so at your own risk and could result in your banning.

If for some reason (e.g. pc crash, or frozen client) your client exits improperly and you restart it, it will have a new peer_id, so it will show as a new torrent. The old one will never receive a "event=completed" or "event=stopped" and will be listed until some tracker timeout. Just ignore it, it will eventually go away.

Only Authorised Users can upload torrents, you can apply for Uploader. Power Uploader must however be earned.

Casual Uploaders must meet a minimum amount of torrents uploaded each week, you must read and agree to the uploader rules upon promotion and adhere to all site rules, consistently good uploaders are rewarded with Power Uploader Status!

No. We are a closed, limited-membership community. Only registered users can use the MS tracker. Posting our torrents on other trackers is useless, since most people who attempt to download them will be unable to connect with us. This generates a lot of frustration and bad-will against us at Movie-Shack, and will therefore not be tolerated. Complaints from other sites' administrative staff about our torrents being posted on their sites will result in the banning of the users responsible. However, the files you download from us are yours to do as you please. You can always create another torrent, pointing to some other tracker, and upload it to the site of your choice.

Check out this guide here

Check out this guide here

There may be three reasons for this: 1. The torrent may have been out-of-sync with the site rules. 2. The uploader may have deleted it because it was a bad release. A replacement will probably be uploaded to take its place. 3. Torrents are automatically deleted after 28 days.

The site blocks addresses listed in the (former) PeerGuardian database, as well as addresses of banned users. This works at Apache/PHP level, it's just a script that blocks logins from those addresses. It should not stop you from reaching the site. In particular it does not block lower level protocols, you should be able to ping/traceroute the server even if your address is blacklisted. If you cannot then the reason for the problem lies elsewhere. If somehow your address is indeed blocked in the PG database do not contact us about it, it is not our policy to open ad hoc exceptions. You should clear your IP with the database maintainers instead.

(In first place, it's unlikely your ISP is doing so. DNS name resolution and/or network problems are the usual culprits.) There's nothing we can do. You should contact your ISP (or get a new one). Note that you can still visit the site via a proxy, follow the instructions in the relevant section. In this case it doesn't matter if the proxy is anonymous or not, or which port it listens to. Notice that you will always be listed as an "unconnectable" client because the tracker will be unable to check that you're capable of accepting incoming connections.

Some of our torrents use ports other than the usual HTTP port 80. This may cause problems for some users, for instance those behind some firewall or proxy configurations. You can easily solve this by editing the .torrent file yourself with any torrent editor, e.g. MakeTorrent, and replacing the announce url movie-shack.com:81 with movie-shack.com:80 or just movie-shack.com. Editing the .torrent with Notepad is not recommended. It may look like a text file, but it is in fact a bencoded file. If for some reason you must use a plain text editor, change the announce url to movie-shack.com:80, not movie-shack.com. (If you're thinking about changing the number before the announce url instead, you know too much to be reading this.)

Post in the Forums or contact a Staff Member on IRC, by all means. You'll find they are usually a friendly and helpful place, provided you follow a few basic guidelines: 1. Make sure your problem is not really in this FAQ. There's no point in posting just to be sent back here. 2. Before posting read the sticky topics (the ones at the top). Many times new information that still hasn't been incorporated in the FAQ can be found there. 3. Help us in helping you. Do not just say "it doesn't work!". Provide details so that we don't have to guess or waste time asking.      eg.What client do you use? What's your OS? What's your network setup? What's the exact error message you get, if any?            What are the torrents you are having problems with? The more you tell the easiest it will be for us, and the more probable your post will get a reply. 4. And needless to say: be polite. Demanding help rarely works, asking for it usually does the trick.

GET OFF THE DRUGS!!