Ed. note: Last week, popular BitTorrent tracker Mininova started limiting torrents to only approved partners. If you’re hunting for a new torrent-tracking home, all-things-BitTorrent weblog TorrentFreak is here to offer some worthwhile alternatives.

After nearly five years of loyal service, Mininova disabled access to over a million torrent files when it partly shut down its website. Starting today, only approved publishers are able to upload files to the site, but luckily there are plenty of alternatives and potential replacements BitTorrent users can flock to.

With an impressive 175,820,430 visits and close to a billion page views in the last 30 days, Mininova set a record that they will be unable to break in the near future. Last August a Dutch court ruled that Mininova had to remove all links to ‘infringing’ torrent files, with disastrous consequences.

Since it is technically unfeasible to pre-approve or filter every potentially infringing torrent file, the Mininova team decided to throw in the towel and only allow torrents to be submitted by approved uploaders. This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all.

Thankfully, there are still plenty of alternatives for those BitTorrent users who are looking for the latest Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, or Fedora release.

Below we provide a random list of public torrent sites that are still open, but there are of course hundreds more sites we could have included. If your personal favorite is missing, feel free to post it in the comments below–-preferably with your reasons why it should be included in any upcoming lists.

1. Torrentzap

2. Fenopy

3. ExtraTorrent

4. KickassTorrents

5. BTjunkie

5. Monova

7. isoHunt

8. yourBitTorrent

9. The Pirate Bay

10. ShareReactor

Update: The owner of Monova told TorrentFreak that he has reserved all Mininova usernames for people who want to make the switch to his site. The account names can be claimed here.

TorrentFreak is a weblog devoted to all-things BitTorrent and file sharing. To get all of the latest from TorrentFreak, be sure to subscribe to the TorrentFreak RSS feed.

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Windows only: uTorrent, the most popular BitTorrent client on the planet, has released a new 2.0 beta complete with bug fixes and new features, including UDP tracker support.

UD-wha? As all-things-BitTorrent weblog TorrentFreak explains, UDP trackers are much less resource intensive than HTTP trackers, and most torrent sites out there support UDP—meaning that if uTorrent, the most popular torrent client, were to support it, that’s great news for all the torrent trackers out there. On the surface that might not seem like the most exciting news, but it will likely mean browsing your favorite torrent site in a browser could be significantly speedier now that your BitTorrent client isn’t slowing down the tracker with all those HTTP requests. Hit up the uTorrent forum for a list of all the changes and fixes in the beta if you’re ready to try it out.

uTorrent 2.0 Beta is freeware, Windows only.

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