Can anyone vouch for this?
Seems weird to require an account for a torrent, and the torrent size is 9gb while any other link shows ~14gb
I've never had problems with torrents from rpdl and yeah the account stuff is sort of a gimmick imo. They're gonna end up with a whole bunch of single-use accounts like that.
That being said I didn't download this particular torrent so dunno, they re-archived it with 7zip from what I can see (the rest are .zip) and that's probably where the space is saved. If you don't trust it, there is also this torrent I made earlier (attached lower). Seeded quite well from what I see and no complaints so far.
In addition to being a tracker, we also seed every single torrent on our platform. We do this to allow for quick downloads on any game, and because most people don't bother with seeding which would leave us tracking mostly dead torrents (which is kind of useless).
The "problem" is that having multiple machines seeding 16tb on a 24/7 basis costs us money – money that is donated to us by our users for a service that benefits them.
When RPDL was started, all our torrents were public and we didn't require users to log into anything. This worked great and people loved it, until we realized that multiple third-party sites started sharing our torrents as their own. This meant that we had a lot more traffic from people who weren't aware where their torrents originally came from.
Seeding every game on F95zone at high speeds provides a good service and equally good experience to users.
We are crowdfunded, and can't provide our service to the users donating to have us exist if our machines are busy seeding to people who have never even heard of F95zone or RPDL.
That's why we went semi-private and now require accounts. Doing so allows us to attach a passkey to each torrent, and if we find our torrents being hosted on some other website, we cut that torrent's access to the swarm.
As for the rest:
1. We don't collect any access logs, account passwords are hashed and salted, there's no verification process, and you can use any kind of gibberish username/password you want.
2. I can't personally vouch for this as I'm a part of the team, but torrents under the RPDL name have been posted on here for over a year and a half. In that time, we've posted upwards of 30,000 torrents and haven't had anyone report them to F95 staff for containing any virus or malicious content. Our process consists of taking files from the links in the OP's, compressing them the most we can with 7z, and uploading them as torrents – that's basically it.
3. Concerning single-use accounts: yeah, we have a lot of them. Last I checked we were somewhere above 100,000. They're not ideal, but they allow us to maximize the privacy of our users while also being able to manage our service.
I hope this provides some clarity regarding our service.
We also get that needing to log into a random website to access a torrent is not for everyone, that's okay too.
If you haven't downloaded the update yet, I checked McAztec's torrent and got some pretty good speeds with it, so you shouldn't have to wait too long for the game either way.
At the end of the day, what matters is people getting their games one way or another.
Enjoy the latest update.