TBSource

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

TBSource is a snapshot of the source code from (the now closed) torrentbits.org. It was maintained by Redbeard, wyz and Higgins. The code itself was based upon another distribution, Bytemonsoon.

It serves as a relatively simple building block to create a new BitTorrent site and BitTorrent tracker.

There is a forum dedicated to the source code at http://www.tbdev.net/ which includes updates, modifications, bug fixes and support.

Many PHP based trackers are based on this source code, including the TBDev Source. Many private BitTorrent sites are also based on this original distribution, or one of its several variants.

[edit] Criticism

Original (if one can use such a word for a always changing subject) TBSource snapshot is notorious for having many bugs but they have been corrected in later releases. What has not been very well corrected is the code quality. Since the code has had so many developers without organized software development and coding standards the result is pretty hard to understand and follow. There are almost no comments within the code and almost none of the coders has used indentation to clarify the code.

TBSource is intended to support large number of users (10 000 - 100 000 users). This is not however implemented very well in the code. The basic flaw is that almost every page includes bittorrent.php (about 2000 lines of code) which contains library functions. bittorrent.php in turn includes (among other pages) global.php that contains globals. So on every pageload (no matter how small the page itself is) a huge amount of not used code is inluded and checked for errors. And since bittorrent.php is such a big file it is easy to make typing errors or the like, that basically put the entire site to halt.