What.CD

About
What/CD (What, or WCD) was a very large private tracker focused on music content. What was started the day that Oink's Pink Palace, a very popular music private tracker, shut down. Waffles was launched at about the same time and the two competed for 'superiority' although What ended up going the more public route trying to bring in as many decent users as they could whereas Waffles went for a more closed community structure.

Besides having the single largest collection of music on the internet, What also has had multiple infamous uploads that gathered a lot of unwanted media attention. The first being the leaking of Microsoft's COFFEE forensics tool, and the second being three of J. D Salinger's unpublished stories. Due to the media attention that these uploads generated, the staff decided it would be best for all the users and staff to remove them from the tracker and never allow them in the future. By the time they were removed the files had already been spread far across the internet and was out of their control.

The popular Gazelle and Ocelot codebases originated on What.CD and were created by the staff over the course of a few years.

IRC
Server: irc.what-network.net

Port: 6667, or 6697 for SSL

Channel(s): #what.cd, #what.cd-help, #what.cd-disabled

2007
October 23 - The tracker is created the day that Oink's Pink Palace was shut down

November 14 - Starts development of their new codebase Ocelot as well as Gazelle, also reached the milestone of 30000 torrents being tracked

November 30 - Official debut of the Gazelle codebase, although still in development. Server is changed, now hosted from Sweden

December 1 - After host and Paypal problems plagued Waffles, What.CD offers to temporarily host Waffles on What's new server. Waffles however managed to get by without the need of assistance

December 12 - 40000 users and 70000 torrents being tracked

2008
February 4 - Servers are moved to Canada

April 18 - Gazelle is officially released and implemented

May 18 - Celebrates 3 million snatches on close to 200000 torrents

July 13 - Notification feature is added as well as individual RSS feeds for filters

August 23 - Collages are launched

November 5 - 300000 torrents being tracked

October 29 - Unofficial store is launched, it closed on December 4 after users "finally accomplished something with [their] bitching"

2009
February 15 - A feature is added to allow the separation of different release types (like albums/EPs/compilations/etc)

April 19 - 1053955 MP3s snatched, 1604862 FLACs snatched. Torrents being tracked: 323069 MP3s, 118511 FLACs, 4947 Oggs, 3205 ALACs, 2061 AACs, 1806 APEs, 687 WavPack's, 138 DTSs, 110 AC3s, 79 M4As, 1 MP4, and 1 unknown. All Ape, WavPack, and ALAC releases will be deleted in two weeks unless it is the only lossless format available

September 2 - Backup strategy changes from manual off-site backups to being continuously replicated to an off-site server

November 6 - Microsoft's COFFEE, a forensic tool supplied to law enforcement officers all around the world is leaked to What.CD after the request quickly became popular on their new request system. The decision was made to remove the file off the tracker based on feelings about the security of having the software. They were not contacted by Microsoft or any law enforcement agency, neither was their host.

December 29 - Announces the collaboration between What.CD and Open Your Eyes Records

2010
February 28 - What releases Gazelle RC2, an update to the popular Gazelle codebase

March 3 - 125000 members of the website, and 731000 torrents being tracked

September 11 - After a database crash users accounts registered after August 1 2010 were removed, torrent stats were rolled back 10 days, and although torrents were recovered most were lacking in information

October 3 - 10000th revision of Gazelle

October 13 - Ocelot tracker software is officially released

December 22 - 1 million torrents being tracked. The 1 millionth was a dupe

2011
March 21 - The founder of What.CD steps down

2012
February 29 - The official What.CD Online Store (TWOS) is released

April 7 - MusicBrainz information can be automatically added to new uploads

June 17 - System is added to automatically check extensions of files included in a torrent to make sure only whitelisted files are uploaded

2013
November 28 - Three of J. D Salinger's unpublished books are leaked onto the tracker after a request for them gained an extremely high amount of bounty after everyone assumed it would never be fulfilled. These stories are kept under lock and key in two different universities. An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls was previously only accessible at Princeton library and required exclusive permission for scholars to see and required to be locked in the room with people watching. This generated a lot of media coverage and just as the staff did with the COFFEE leak (see November 6 2009), the torrent was removed and banned from the website however by that time the stories had already been spread to many corners of the internet

2014
January 2 - What.CD as well as many other popular private trackers start experiencing heavy DDoS attacks with sustained average data volume of 35Gbit/s for months on end. The tracker was hit with numbers as high as 55Gbit/s and the website hit with spikes of 90Gbit/s

March 10 - The tracker and website are both fully functional again following the DDoS attacks. The longest service downtime in What.CD's history

June 2 -The first official What.CD music compilation is released on the What.CD online store, or for download through the tracker

2015
January 27 - Ocelot 1.0 is announced, denoting it is now a stable release