Suprnova.org was a

Slovenia Slovenia, officially the Republic of Slovenia, is a country in Central Europe. It borders Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the south and southeast, and a short (46.6 km) coastline within the Adriati ...

-based

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

that distributed

BitTorrent tracker A BitTorrent tracker is a special type of server that assists in the communication between peers using the BitTorrent protocol. In peer-to-peer file sharing, a software client on an end-user PC requests a file, and portions of the requested ...

s for various music and video files,

computer programs A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...

and

games A game is a Structure, structured type of play (activity), play usually undertaken for entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an Educational game, educational tool. Many games are also considered to be Work (human activity), work (such as p ...

. Started in late 2002 by Andrej Preston (known as Slonček, Slovenian for "little elephant") and for a while considered the most popular BitTorrent search engine, Suprnova.org closed in late 2004 after legal threats. The site operators supported the development of the eXeem BitTorrent client software, deeming a fixed website too difficult to operate in the present legal climate. On 2 August 2007, the domain name was donated to

The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of Film, movies, music, video games, Pornographic film, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank , The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection ...

, which relaunched the site on 21 August 2007.

History 2002–2004

The site first ran from Slonček's (site founder) home. As it grew fast it moved to professional servers. Suprnova did not host any of the shared files, nor did it operate any

s for long. It offered the ".torrent" meta files which would tell a BitTorrent client where it could find the BitTorrent tracker. As well as the torrent files themselves, there was a set of Internet forums for visitors, where people talked about various subjects, and requested different files that they'd like to see people upload. Suprnova's popularity inspired copycat sites at Suprnova.''com'' and Suprnova.''net''. These had the same layout as Suprnova.org but requested a usage fee while Suprnova.org did not. For a brief time in 2004, and again in 2007 Suprnova partnered with an amateur internet-base radio station, Suprnova Radio. On 19 December 2004, a message was displayed on Suprnova's front page stating it had officially closed down. Some speculated it was due to its poor server and constant downtime, but others noted that Suprnova had been receiving legal warnings. Later, Slonček revealed on Suprnova's

IRC IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat ...

channel that he and the other administrators were not willing to continue fighting the legal warnings which they had received. The Suprnova page reappeared encouraging visitors to visit the eXeem project webpage. Other reasons for closure were posted by LivingWithTrolls at slyck.com:

The host of the servers advised Slonček that he should close nova and live to fight another day with Exeem, either that or face the servers being withdrawn by said host and it closing anyway. The host was not going to allow any linking to his other affairs (several other P2P associations) which would cause more casualties. Slonček decided to close nova (he didn't have much choice) and focus on Exeem.

eXeem spinoff

The admin and founder of Suprnova.org, " Slonček" along with Supermedo (Andrej's brother Marko, who took the name of the cartoon hero "Superted" in Slovenian), founded "Swarm Systems Inc" in order to avoid legal repercussions. The program was developed by Arvid Norberg the writer of

libtorrent libtorrent is an open-source implementation of the BitTorrent protocol. It is written in and has its main library interface in C++. Its most notable features are support for Mainline DHT, IPv6, HTTP seeds and μTorrent's peer exchange. libtor ...

with help from libtorrent contributor Daniel Wallin on Slonček's request and hosted at exeem.com. This was initially the subject of much debate and excitement on the internet as the eXeem beta testing forums were hosted at the Suprnova Forums (which consisted of over 250,000 users), but upon its release turned out to be a disappointment — eXeem contained the Cydoor

adware Adware, often called advertising-supported software by its developers, is software that generates revenue by automatically displaying Online advertising, online advertisements in the user interface or on a screen presented during the installatio ...

, like software such as

Kazaa Kazaa Media Desktop ( ) (once stylized as "KaZaA", but later usually written "Kazaa") was a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks. Kazaa was subsequ ...

, and escaping this adware was one of the reasons that many users joined Suprnova in the first place. A hacked version of the program, eXeem Lite, was released afterward, and upon realising the effect of this program, the adware was eventually removed from eXeem. This was not enough to save the program's tarnished reputation, and the eXeem network shut down at the end of 2005.

Reincarnations

The original Suprnova.org was reincarnated on newnova.org using a slightly modified version of the Suprnova.org codebase. In early 2005, Mininova was created as an alternative to the dying Suprnova. On 2 August 2007,

TorrentFreak __NOTOC__ TorrentFreak (TF) is a blog dedicated to reporting the latest news and trends on the BitTorrent protocol and file sharing, as well as on copyright infringement and digital rights. The website was started in November 2005 by a Dutchma ...

announced that Suprnova's former owner had donated the domain to

, which had plans to relaunch the site. The new site was said to have the old design of Suprnova but possibly have some technical updates. Suprnova went online on 21 August 2007, at 18:03:27 GMT after the website displayed a countdown timer for 20 hours prior to its relaunch. , it has been repurposed into a site that serves

infographic Infographics (a clipped compound of "information" and "graphics") are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly.Doug Newsom and Jim Haynes (2004). ''Public Relations Wr ...

References

External links

Official website

NovastreamRadio

SuprNova.org: The Story of a Legend
, by Michael Ingram, 7 May 2006
Suprnova.org: Two Years Since the Shutdown
by TorrentFreak, 19 December 2006
The Pirate Bay About To Relaunch Suprnova.org
by TorrentFreak, 2 August 2007
RadioSuprnova.org
{{BitTorrent Defunct BitTorrent websites File sharing communities Internet services shut down by a legal challenge Slovenian websites Internet properties established in 2002 Internet properties disestablished in 2004

History 2002–2004

eXeem spinoff

Reincarnations

See also

References

External links