Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Yeah, in my experience private trackers are a bunch of petty tyrants with control issues. My experience is very limited as I've never been part of one on account of me telling them to fuck off.

Whether you like it or not, that's more or less what happens. You can/will lose a bunch of accounts for causing trouble. Sometimes I think it's a bit over the top. Instead of keeping out toxic or non-contributing folks it becomes a personal vendetta or innocent violation.

Overall, I'm a fan of banning known bad users, but restraint should be used and collected personal information should be minimized.

The implication seems like, “we all talk to each other and if you lie to me you lose all of your accounts”.

Well uh, yes, in some cases, that's exactly the correct interpretation.

A lot of tracker admins DO talk to each other, because this is a fairly small world, and yeah, nobody wants a shithead around so they'll definitely let other people know who their shitheads are so they can be handled before they become a problem.

Nothing inherently wrong with that, imo.

Call me paranoid but why do the staff on a lot of private trackers seem so interested in what other trackers you have accounts with?

Because they want to know if you're an abusive user / good seeder or if you're not really worth the time. Running a tracker is hard enough without having to deal with people's shit.

It's more of a "we want to make sure that this user we're inviting would be a good member i.e. good ratio/not selling invites"

why do the staff on a lot of private trackers seem so interested in what other trackers you have accounts with?

They want to know if you seed well or not, and probably which trackers you use in case some are (more) questionable legal content.