Where does a PRE come from?
The following article will describe the process of distributing a preannouncement from the site it was issued on to the prechan it ended up.
As with every scene there will always be sub scenes. Even in the world of filesharing the definitions of being a “scener” widely vary. A scener might be someone who’s on a ranked site or he who’s part of a releasegroup where a racer on unranked sites is considered a “site-scener”. This also goes for the pre scene. Those with access to sitepre are considered elite while those on prenets are the average and those who are afiliated with p2p/public or echo are considered noobs.
This article is split in three sections matching above mentioned groups.
SitePRE
When a release is pred the directory containing the files is first uploaded to an FTP by a member of the releasegroup. The FTP uses a set of scripts (zipscript) to verify and index the release. A set of these scripts is called a sitebot. This bot will for example index the name, size and filecount of the release.
Next is issueing the actual !pre command where the release is made public and announced by an eggdrop bot which queries the sitebot and announces it in the site’s IRC channel, sitechan, and addpre chan. The term addpre chan gives away that it’s a channel where pre’s are added and uses a uniform style. This makes it easier for bots to understand the information that passes by.
Example of a release that was pred being announced in the sitechan:
<SITEBOT> [PRE-RELEASE] ==] MiSTAKE PRE [== Met.Het.Mes.Op.Tafel.S03E13.DUTCH.WS.PDTV.x264-MiSTAKE – (with 245MB in 20 Files) – [TV]
Example of the release being announced in the addpre chan:
<BOT1> !addpre Met.Het.Mes.Op.Tafel.S03E13.DUTCH.WS.PDTV.x264-MiSTAKE TV
<BOT2> !info Met.Het.Mes.Op.Tafel.S03E13.DUTCH.WS.PDTV.x264-MiSTAKE 245MB 20F
At this point the members of the site have noticed the announcement of the bot in the sitechan and the bots in the addpre chan have picked up the addpre signal.
PreNet
A PreNet is an IRC network that operates as a central hub where announcements relayed from above mentioned sites come together. Since each site has a couple affils it takes access to a lot of sites to make up the amount of releases you see passing by in the average prechan.
A PreNet is also the place where nukes are issued and rules are debated.
If you’re on a PreNet you have access to a feed which carries about every preannouncement made globally. Next up is the local part. The term local is used because owners of prebots relay the feed from a prenet to a local, private channel where they are alone with their prebot. This is where the prebot gets the info from which he outputs in a fancy way in the prechan you have access to.
P2P-Pre-Scene
Getting into sites and prenets takes some skill and especially the right contacts. People who don’t have these assets but still want to run a prebot can resort to echoing. Echoing is simply copying information from one chan or another. This behaviour is against the etiquette and will get you in trouble.
WebPreDB’s often use these sources which isn’t a real problem just that they contain more spam than the pure feed and are a bit slower. Sites like OrlyDB are known for echoing prechannels run by private trackers.
This can be best shown by a real life Example
