Concertos News : The future of Concertos

[F4DeLeSS]

How we got here.

We started Concertos back in 2018 with the idea of creating an accessible private tracker for several underserved niches, including live concerts, music videos, and more, with a focus on quality over quantity. What initially started as a project between Ryuu and me was soon joined by Anon, followed not much later by Blauchat.

We began building Concertos using the UNIT3D codebase as our foundation. Ryuu was already familiar with this project and had made several commits to its GitHub repository. Even back then, UNIT3D offered the most features out-of-the-box compared to other private tracker-oriented codebases and was by far the most well-maintained, with updates still happening to this day. However, at that time, it wasn’t as compatible with our vision for Concertos in terms of functionality and design. So, a decision was made by Ryuu to fork the codebase and modify it to our specific needs. This meant we would no longer be following the main UNIT3D branch, thus excluding ourselves from any future updates.

While Ryuu made great progress on our own forked version of the codebase, which we still run to this day, it became apparent that this project would consume an amount of resources that a single developer could not realistically provide. I should give credit to a handful of people who tried to help with this project, but at the end of the day, it was mostly just Ryuu pushing things forward. At some point, we realized that the vision we had for Concertos would work better with a Gazelle codebase as the foundation. In hindsight, it’s debatable if this held any truth or was rather an attempt to get out of a situation we did not want to be in. Nevertheless, the forked codebase was abandoned to focus on a new Gazelle-based codebase instead. Somewhere along this path, we lost Ryuu as a developer due to his real-world obligations and loss of interest in the project, which I could only respect.

The departure of Ryuu has left the development of Concertos in a state of suspended animation for the last couple of years. While the website and tracker function (mostly) as they should, we realize that it is missing several features that would allow us to improve and potentially grow. One important aspect of that is the means to manage the ratio economy better than we can right now and, for example, grouping torrents based on an artist name/id.

How we want to continue.

We have researched and even installed several alternative codebases, some of which are based on the original Gazelle codebase. Long story short, we do not consider these alternatives viable due to a number of reasons, including, but not limited to, the lack of regular updates and missing features that we would need to implement ourselves, which, in all honesty, just isn’t realistic at this point.

In the end, after long consideration, we have decided that rebranching with the official UNIT3D codebase is the best way forward for Concertos. This will allow us to make a significant leap forward in terms of functionality and will give us access to future updates once again. UNIT3D is still the best-maintained private tracker codebase available, and we believe it will allow us to get Concertos to the point where we want it to be.

This undertaking of rebranching with the official UNIT3D repository will not be as easy as simply updating to the latest version, as we have made several breaking changes. However, our research has shown that it should be possible without any major disruptions or loss of any torrents or user stats. We cannot provide an ETA yet, but we will try to keep you all updated on the progress.

We realize that this may disappoint some people who were waiting for a migration to a Gazelle-based codebase, but at the end of the day, we need to choose what is best for Concertos, all things considered.

Finally, I would like to thank all of our staff and long-term active users for sticking with us all these years. Without you, Concertos would have gone offline a long time ago. Let’s take Concertos to the next level together!

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