Hi Siddiq,

Thanks for your mail/request. Below you'll find the answers on your questions.

English is not my mother language, so you may find some spelling or grammar errors. Feel free to correct those, but please give me a "proofread" URL before you put the interview online. Thanks!

Before I start with the answers, I'd like to give a short introduction.
I'm Niek, one of the co-founders of Mininova.org. Mininova is a big torrent search engine. In fact, Mininova is the most popular torrent site, according to Alexa. The site is managed by 5 administrators (of which I am one) and a handful moderators. Of course we couldn't do anything without our users, who provide the content of our site (torrent
uploads) and help us to spot wrong content.

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...?
We're regular guys with regular lives. We started this site for fun, and that's still the main reason we're running this whole thing. So fame and girls? Definitely not, or it would be "virtual" fame. In fact, nobody will recognize us on the street. And I like to keep it that way :)


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?
I don't know the exact amount of time we spend on managing the site, but it surely takes a lot of hours a week. We have a huge blocklist of user IP addresses and trackers which are banned. Among the almost 1000 torrents which are uploaded daily by our visitors, some of them are fake/trojans/spam/adult content which need to be taken care of.

Fortunately, we're not alone. Our great group of moderators helps us to take care of these torrents. Also, quite some users help us to spot such torrents via the forum or the "report a problem" page.


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?
It is quite complex, yes. You start with a small site on a single server, and then it grows, you need multiple servers, you need to optimize the databases and your scripting code, caching becomes important, you need even more servers, load balancing is gonna be an issue, etc. It never stops, and over the years you learn how to deal with this stuff.

I had quite some experience with coding and running websites, but never as big as Mininova. When you run a website of this scale, you have to deal with a whole lot of other issues than running an average website.


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?
The biggest thing that's currently going on is certainly the lawsuits of the entertainment industry against BitTorrent sites. Fortunately we don't have these problems, since we always had a copyright policy and an open mind regarding copyright issues.


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?
The majority of our users are very loyal to our site, I love that. We have had some problems in the past, like downtime, hacked servers, capacity problems, etc. But our users are what keep us running this site.

Of course we also get quite weird mails, for a compilation of these mails, check http://blog.mininova.org/articles/category/reports-mails/

OK, that's it Siddiq, thanks for the interview, and let me know if you miss something.

Cheers,

--
Niek
Co-founder mininova.org