The Pirate Bay crew has been working on this secret project for quite some time now. Back in April they wrote a cryptic post on their blog announcing that something was coming. In a response to this announcement TPB admin Brokep told TorrentFreak: “The past, the present and the future. It’s all the same, but one thing’s for sure, we will radiate for weeks”, today it became clear that he was referring to the resurrection of Suprnova.
In a response to this breaking news, the former owner of Suprnova told TorrentFreak why he decided to donate the domain: “The domain was doing nothing. I know that domain has some nostalgic value and some people would be more then happy to see it back online. I don’t use it, and TPB is the only team that I know will use it correctly.”
“I will be involved in the community [Forums] on a separated domain”, Sloncek said and added, “The site has to look almost exactly like it looked before. They can upgrade it, but they cannot change it appearance completely. We further agreed that the site has to be community orientated (not private).”
Together with the relaunch of Suprnova, which will be a torrent indexer and not have it’s own tracker, a new community will be launched that will be linked to both Suprnova and The Pirate Bay. The forums will be hosted on SuprBay.org and are already up and running (more or less).
We also talked to Brokep, one of The Pirate Bay administrators and asked him why they decided to revive Suprnova. He told us: “We talked it over and decided it was
something people would have use for, it would help the torrent community and it would also signal that if you shut one down it will get back up again.”
Here’s a preview of the updated Suprnova logo. The new site is scheduled to go live this week!
For the people who are relatively new to BitTorrent, here’s a brief history of Suprnova (previously posted here).
The Rise of Suprnova.
Suprnova.org launched in the fall of 2002. At that time it was one of the few BitTorrent sites on the Internet. Suprnova was founded by Andrej Preston, a Slovenian teenager better known as Sloncek. Initially he wanted to name the site Supernova, but that name was already taken.
Suprnova.org started as a fun project, with a very primitive setup. In fact, it was hosted on a linux box at Sloncek’s home in the early days. As soon as Suprnova was ready to go public, he started to advertise the site among friends and on IRC, and it slowly started to attract more and more visitors.
The word about the “universal BitTorrent source” spread like wildfire. It was no surprise that it didn’t take long before the traffic generated by Suprnova was maxing out the meager 16kb/s upload capacity.
The increased popularity of Suprnova came around the same time when other torrent sites like donkax.com, bytemonsoon.com and torrentse.cx, decided to quit. These sites were more or less forced to go offline, either due to bandwidth constraints, or cease and desist letters. But Suprnova made it very clear that it wasn’t going anywhere.
Suprnova continued to grow, and Sloncek spent most of the time looking for mirrors, to guarantee that the site stayed in the air. At it’s top it indexed almost 60.000 torrents and about 1.5 million visitors per day. Suprnova had a very active community, and its forum was among the biggest on the Internet.
The fall of Suprnova.
In November 2004 Suprnova’s ISP told Sloncek that the servers were taken into custody by the Slovenian police. The raid was initiated by the French anti-piracy lobby RetSpan. The police never contacted Sloncek about this personally, but is was a sign that things were about to change.
Around the same time Reuters wrote about Sloncek in one of their articles, which soon after spread out to the Slovenian press. This was the turning point for Sloncek. He later said: “So I ended up reading about myself in Slovenian newspapers. And right about that time, I had a feeling something was wrong. I do not really know what the feeling was or where it was coming from, but I decided it was time to take SuprNova.org offline.”
Sloncek eventually pulled the plug December 19, 2004, which marked the end of an era.
October 18, 2005, almost a year after the servers were raided, Sloncek received a letter form the prosecutor stating that the charges against him were dropped. This was a great relief, and he later said: “This has been a huge pressure on me and I think it left some permanent marks on me. I hope none of you will ever have to go through something like this.”
Early 2006 Suprnova.org shortly resurrected as a P2P news site, but that project ended after a couple of months.
