Rules

Rules are the biggest separator between public trackers and private trackers. Rules are generally made to promote retention, speeds, organization, community, and overall quality of the tracker. All trackers of course have their own rule sets however there are many rules that are widely adopted.

When joining a tracker you should make sure you look at their rules, they likely have their own and if you fail to follow them you risk getting your account disabled. Blaming rule breaking on the fact that you didn't read the rules will not get you anywhere with tracker staff.

The following serve as a general idea only, do not expect them to all be true for any one tracker.

You are responsible for reading the trackers rules upon registration at that tracker.

Account Rules

 * Only one account per lifetime
 * Unofficial giveaways of invites or buying/trading/selling of invites is strictly prohibited and will get the invited user, invitee, and invitee's invite tree disabled. If you're looking for legitimate ways to get invites then look at the invites page
 * You must remain active on your account. This usually means visiting the website and/or participating in the community at least every 60/90 days. Failure to do so will mark your account as inactive and disabled. If you know you not going to be active for an extended period of time, talk to the staff about it and they may make note of it
 * Some countries are banned by trackers. This isn't because of racism but rather because of an extremely high percentage of invite sellers, cheaters and other rule breakers

Downloading Rules

 * Users are expected to keep a good enough ratio. Numbers vary from tracker to tracker however one can expect required ratios to be anywhere from 0 to 1.
 * Do not post your .torrent files on other websites, each .torrent file contains a passkey individual to your account, if your passkey gets leaked your account will report improper stats and your account will automatically be disabled. This doesn't necessarily mean you can't share the contents of the torrent, just the .torrent file itself.
 * Attempting to cheat the system will get your account disabled with no chance at getting it back. You may be disabled on multiple trackers, even the one you didn't cheat at
 * Users are expected to seed the torrents until 1:1 ratio or for a set amount of time. Anywhere from 24 hours to 1 week seed time is a common requirement. Failing to do this will result in a hit and run
 * Only certain clients are allowed because some don't report data properly or don't promote good torrenting ethics. Most versions of Deluge, KTorrent, qBittorrent, Transmission, and uTorrent are allowed however there are some that aren't.

Uploading Rules

 * If the tracker has a niche then only content of that niche is allowed
 * Naming rules are common and individual to every tracker
 * RAR and other compress formats are often not allowed
 * Purposefully distributing malicious or wrongly named files will result in immediate disabling
 * You must seed your content until at least one or two other users have completely downloaded it
 * Repeated bad uploads may result in your account being disabled or at least upload privileges being revoked.

Connection Rules

 * Viewing the website through a VPN or proxy is usually not allowed
 * Torrenting using a VPN or proxy is allowed
 * Only one account per IP, mobile networks and shared seedboxes often trigger this causing accounts to get automatically disabled. Tracker staff are usually understanding of this the first time if you talk to them after

Community Rules

 * No flaming
 * No talking in the non-main language (usually English) except in specified forums.
 * Obey staff members
 * No spam