How does Suprnova.org gather BT statistics?
Suprnova.org itself is a sort of reversed spider when it seeks out statistics. Instead of searching for trackers itself, users feed it torrent files. It dissects the torrent file and stores the tracker that the torrent uses. It then asks that tracker for a \’scrape\’ list of all torrents it tracks, if the tracker supports this feature (all advanced trackers do) and if the feature is enabled (less and less these days), Suprnova.org receives a list of torrent hashes and accompanying stats (minimum is number of seeds and number of non-seed peers) and it stores this list. Then if a torrent is fed to Suprnova.org with a known tracker, it can look the torrent up by its hash and gets stats without having to immediately request a new list. A side effect of this \’caching of hashes\’ by Surpnova.org is that it has general info about all torrents on the trackers it can poll, and not only the ones that the users feed it. Can these stats be used for a global BT peer estimate? Since the birth of su
