Worth noting that when What died, ~4 new sites popped up immediately and invited all the old members, and everyone raced to re-upload everything from What onto them, which was actually pretty effective. At this point, RED and OPS have greatly surpassed What in many ways, aside from some releases that never made it back (you can actually find out which releases used to exist because What's database was made available after its death). Users and staff are a lot more prepared if it happens again, e.g. keeping track of all metadata via "gazelle-origin".

If by "in" you mean how to get into them, generally you're supposed to have a friend invite you. If you don't have anyone you know on private trackers, you've gotta get in from scratch. Luckily, RED and OPS both do interviews to test your knowledge on the technicals of music formats, though I've heard RED's interview queues are long and OPS's interviews are often just not happening: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html https://interview.orpheus.network/

Alternatively, you can interview for MAM, which is IMO the best ebook/audiobook tracker. They're super chill and have a very simple interview e.g. "what is a tracker": https://www.myanonamouse.net/inviteapp.php. After that, you can just hang around there for a while until you can get into their recruitment forums to get invites to other entry-level trackers, and then on those entry-level trackers you can get recruited into slightly higher-level trackers, and so on, and eventually RED/OPS should be recruiting from somewhere.

This can feel a little silly and convoluted, but I guess I'd just appreciate that these sites put the effort into conducting interviews for new people at all, since the alternative is that you will just never get into anything without a friend. Reddit's /r/trackers wiki is unfortunately one of the better places for information about private trackers if you want to do further reading.

When WCD closed, it had over 1M releases. Now these respectively have 1.8 and 1.3. Requests are filled-up quickly thanks to Spotify downloaders. Most torrents are xseeded on both, so there is redundancy. I'd say it's doing pretty well.

My “bad luck Brian” was I got on that site after years of trying…. For it to be shut down a month later.

I never had to interview... I got into OiNK from a friend who got invited and then got his own invites.

For some reason that I cannot explain, I took a screenshot of the top of the page once where it shows the user name and ratio info. So once it got shut down, and wcd rose from the ashes, I was able to get an invite from a friendly reddit stranger after showing him the screenshot to prove I was on OiNK, and know how to act.

Anyway, I don't think I'm interested in getting back into it, but I appreciate the info. Haven't thought about those sites in years. I had a wcd hoodie that I wore for like a decade after it shut down.