txtor is a service that offers the possibility of downloading a torrent file that's available publicly on the internet as if it were a text file. Nothing more, nothing less. We don't host or offer any torrents itself.
Some ISPs and university campus networks force their users in using a proxy server for all http traffic. In some weird, perverted attempt to stop the distribution of "illegal material" over their networks, some of these proxies are configured to filter all torrent files. That is, the torrent files itself, not the files distributed using the Bittorrent protocol.
For a number of reasons, we oppose to these practices:
But, luckily, for most people in the civilized world, downloading torrents is no problem. If you don't have a problem, this is not for you. Happy sharing!
From a user's perspective, it's very simple: you paste the URL of a torrent file in the text box above and click the download button. The resulting text file gets downloaded, you rename the ".txt" extension to ".torrent" and fire it up in your favourite Bittorent client. Good bye, stupid filtering proxies.
From a technical point of view, it's also no rocket surgery: we download the torrent file by using the URL provided by you, we rename the file and offer it to your browser with a different mime type (a technique to identify the file type without looking at the file extension). This way, any in-between proxy servers can't recognise the file as being a torrent file anymore and just allow you to download it.
Sadly, no. If the actual torrent traffic gets filtered by your network provider, txtor won't do you any good. You can try to use different ports in your client or encrypt the traffic. Much has been written about this, Google is your friend.
txtor should work with any torrents that are publicly accessible, like stuff from isohunt, torrentspy or mininova. It doesn't help you out for private sites (i.e., where you need to login to download a torrent), because we'd have to relay your credentials and we doubt you'd want us to give your username and password.
If you find a public torrentsite that somehow doesn't play nice with txtor, please let us know, we will investigate.
Skipping on the wrong use of the word stealing (we're not taking anything, downloading never is stealing), no. We just offer an alternative way of downloading torrents, we're not increasing or decreasing data traffic or ad revenues of any site in any way. If anything, we're helping the originating torrent sites to get more peers for their torrents. Sharing is the whole idea behind Bittorrent, anyway.
We're probably not going to change anything except when something's broken. We've also decided to not support private sites. Most of them have txtor-like download solutions anyway.
Yes.
Contact us at the name of this service at the top level domain this site runs on. Try to figure that one out, spambots!