The popular Bittorrent indexer The Piratebay announced yesterday that they would switch the position of torrent and magnet link download links on the website in order to save bandwidth. Many media sites reported that The Piratebay would be dropping torrents altogether, but that is not true. While it is still possible to download torrent files directly from the site, most users will probably click on the first download link they see that is not advertisement, and that loads the magnet link instead.
If you have never heard about magnet links before I suggest you check out What Is A Magnet Link And How Does It Differ From Torrents?. For those in a hurry: A magnet link is a hypertext link that contains information that the torrent client can use to find the data to download.
Downloaders should not experience many issues when they switch from torrents to magnet links. It may take longer before the client begins the download, but that is about it.
Another issue is that without access to the torrent file, you cannot use it in a program like Torrific which turns torrents into direct http downloads.
What most users do not know is that their torrent client will actually save a torrent file once the magnet link has been added to the client and the download has been started.
Users of the popular uTorrent client can for instance open the %appdata%\Roaming\uTorrent\ directory to find all torrent files listed in that directory. Torrents only appear here once the client has started downloading the file, and not before.
Having to start to download the files to get the torrent link is not an optimal solution, but it seems to be the only option at this point in time. Maybe someone will create a program in the future that downloads only the torrent file, for now, that’s not possible.
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