Hey Siddiq,

interesting idea to make something like this, I haven't seen many interviews with admins of torrent sites, although I know a lot of them. I'm little sorry because I'm little out of time today, but here are some short answers to your questions:

1) My first question is the one I think most people have when they look at BitTorrent sites and see all the files that are one them; What do you get out of running the site? Money, fame, girls...?

Hehe, girls - I can't imagine a girl who would like to date with me just because I'm admin of some torrent site, even that we have all The Sims 2 expansions on the site :-) The main reason is the community, which is pretty awesome in my case. I met many wonderfull people through my site and I can rely on them almost every time. I've built NewTorrents.info like 2 years ago just for few university friends of me on some shared webshoting not even on my own domain, but it became quickly very popular, so I just upgraded to own domain, better hosting, own server and better site.

The fact I'm still only one behind the whole thing make it little difficult and also simplier at once - you must solve every problem on your own which takes a lot of time and work, but you also don't have to rely on someone else, who can overtake all your "empire" one day (yeah, it happened to me in past already). Many people think that all torrent sites are here only for money, but this is not so true in case of NewTorrents. Of course that it earns something, but if you count the price for bandwith, server and all these hours you spend updating and administrating it every day, it's not so good business. You would have to be slightly bigger player to earn millions...

2) When I look at the forums on most BitTorrent sites they are full of errors to be fixed, files to be recovered, request and complaints. In a normal week, how much time would you say you put into keeping the site running?

It's not only forums in case of NewTorrents. Unlike many other websites, we aren't fully automated, but rather carefully choosing top quality scene releases on public trackers. So you will not find any passworded torrent, viruses, malware and other crap on NewTorrents, but it takes a lot of time everyday to keep it updated. The forum itself
(http://www.versuspictures.com/nt) doesn't require so much attention, we have a great group of moderators and also the visitors are quite polite and respectfull.

There are also some other sites which keep me busy, like Releaselog, informing about new scene releases (http://www.rlslog.net), so I can't really afford a lot of vacations and weekends out of the internet.

3) Most people think of file servers and the like as a fairly complex technology to understand and operate. What kinds of experience did you have with running software or servers before this? 3a) Are you a technical guru, hacker extraordinaire, script kiddie or newbie? 3b) Do you know how to program software?

Yeah, they are. It's not easy to configure the servers well to handle all these thousands of visitors every hour and you can make just a small mistake which will kill your server in few seconds. For big site is neccessary to have own servers, because they will hate you on some shared hosting just when you get over your first few thousands of visitors a day. And own servers have to be usually configured on your own, so there's some knowledge required for sure. You also need a top coding skills, at least for PHP/MySQL - there are some very complicated and advanced pieces of code, remote updating, file snatching, bots etc. Some experience from software programming is always welcomed, and I've been coding some win32 applications in history as well.

4) With all thats going on in the world of media, what are the things that keep you awake at night? What are the biggest issues facing BitTorrent operators today?

I sleep well. I really don't have to fear about something so hard to keep awake at night, but there may be some issues. Software companies and movie studios will keep you busy with their request for immediate takedown of some files. In worse case, your server may be raided by police or feds, but this is still not so common, you would have to have some private dump with terabytes of warez on the server too. The United States are by far more dangerous for running such a thing than other countries, but because you don't store anything illegal on the server, I still think there are no so big issues about it.

5) As an operator of the site you have a unique perspective on what has made Torrent sites so successful with consumers. What are some of the things that have shocked, surprised or amazed you about the people that use your site?

I'm amazed by overall popularity of torrent files - new sites are popping in every day and they are often getting their audience without bigger problems, so there is probably still some little place for newcomers. BitTorrent made a revolution between filesharing protocols and there's probably nothing which could stop this service. As the ideal way of distributing new files among thousands of peers, it will always find some people interested in it.

Thanks and bye,

Martin, admin of www.NewTorrents.info