Thursday, October 25, 2007

OP ED: Why OiNK worked

Just some simple thoughts:

It had a good design.

Great search features.

A user moderated and created community.

Strict rules to keep it's "products" high quality.

Great branding. It was pegged as elite and hard to get into. Who wants to belong to a club that will have them?

Unique content - Hard to find vinyl rips, out of print records, stuff you couldn't get legally.

Did I miss anything?

41 comments:

Anonymous said...

You miss the security. No backup host. No forum on a different server, No IRC on a different server. :(

oink.cx.la claim to have all that.

Anonymous said...

Don't most torrent sites have the same design?

Anonymous said...

Yeah it was based on the torrentbits code, although it was more heavily modified than most other versions out there.

Anonymous said...

I liked the top50 (top100?)

Something that softmp3.org KIND OF has on their startpage....

Shiny said...

How about the mandatory cute avatars? That always made me feel kinda good

Anonymous said...

"Great branding. It was pegged as elite and hard to get into. Who wants to belong to a club that will have them?"

are you kidding me? I'm still looking for an invitation.

So... when you'll be able to send invitations, please send one to suntunporc#yah00*c0m

Anonymous said...

I miss the requests system. I miss the OiNKPlus userscript written by Indieana for Greasemonkey. THAT was great.

Anonymous said...

It wasn't about OiNK that much. It was about the community primarily. Whatever site this community goes, will be the next place to be. Now, you may ask why the community chose OiNK out of the other alternatives? I'd say: better technology, a more usable design, invite only policy and a very cute piggy. :)

Anonymous said...

"How about the mandatory cute avatars? That always made me feel kinda good"

YES! That's was one of the best things. It made it such a nice place.

Evert said...

the "official" OiNK blog has been suspended : http://az-network.com/suspended.page/?blog=2

(also : 1 new Q&A on this site : http://dot-slash-csc.iblogger.org/oinkfaq.html)

keep it up coming man!, you're great!
(if not, I'm glad to help out!)

Anonymous said...

I love this blog here, over there at the "other" blog they censor comments and delete a lot of comments...




It`s funny this blog gets censored. It`s in the public so it shouldn`t get censored.right?


>Because you douche, they have no >server, they only have OiNK and >he is not doing anything and >that's fine.

So if OiNK isnt doing anything, the mods are just dumb sheep who cant act on their own? PirateBay was only 2 days off, why does it take the oink team so long?


>Yeah, I miss OiNK too, amazing >how "addicted" one gets to sites >like these and the community >around them, but for now it's >gone.

It`s back at oink.cx.la (or their real site that they dont announce yet to the public where only the donators and some old team members are on now.)

>And yeah, the oink.cx.la is a >scam, if they really wanted to get >all the old members back they >could use the email address >everybody used to sign up to get >in touch with them.

1. They have said countless times they deleted all emails for security reasons and people will have to remember their login/pw to login or name who invited them so they can reset the password manually.

2. The ex-OInk mods who nowadays only troll in blogs and on irc ENVY oink.cx.la thats why they spread rumours & lies :(

OiNK would jump out of his grave if he knew how sad his former team has become.

Anonymous said...

stop making posts about other servers..


you are hurting the community.

Anonymous said...

I donated $100 US to .cx.la and havent recieved my email yet :-(

cx.la = fail

SalmonGod said...

I loved Oink for the quality and the rarity. I knew that 99% of the time I was getting a great package out of every torrent. I discovered so much new music and rare/obscure stuff for bands I thought I had already collected to death. The vast majority would never be played on the radio.

The comics, books, and e-learning materials were great as well. I would not be where I am today as an artist without ZBrush, and I never would have gotten into ZBrush without Oink. It was there that I downloaded the software to try out and the training DVD which sparked my love and understanding of the program. Notably, I went out and bought both items later.

SalmonGod said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

A real OPP admin has written:

edit: In case I wasn't painfully clear, nobody but the admins had access to the databases and code. There is no way for a site like .cx.la to have them. The reason why they're saying they won't give a URL until November 1st? They don't have one. They're taking in as much money as possible.

Anonymous said...

who is this lame troll paine? wasnt he banned from oink?

he just posted oink is flying to sweden and he risks oinks safety in uk by this. what a dumb cow that paine is :)

Anonymous said...

well,the lame troll then removed the post again.

i love THIS blog here it really is the best, thanks.

freeeeeeeeeeee mp3 + freeeeeeeeeeee speech xD

Anonymous said...

the former oink mods are so lazy,they prefer to waste the whole day in irc over making a new oink.sad!

Anonymous said...

^^^
Stop making dumb posts. Use your head dumbo .....
OINK will stay OINK and nobody will or can copy that.

FOOentes said...

whats wrong with the irc channel? is it down? i cannot get in!

Anonymous said...

"Hard to find vinyl rips, out of print records, stuff you couldn't get legally."

sounds like soulseek. why double that with crappy upload/hashing system? i've got 40k+ mp3s neatly organized in folders named they way I LIKE IT. making 5000 torrent releases is just a waste of time. if you're looking for the best place for music, try soulseek.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, it was a wonderful community. The whole concept (oink name, the pink interface, cute avatar -rule) was cute, sure a bit silly but very memorable.
And of course, the main thing, it had a lot of people and files.
Perhaps these music associations and record companies should invent a concept like Oink, where people can share their files legally and pay a monthly fee (perhaps a credit system or something?), insttead of moaning about losses.

Anonymous said...

Oh, you mean SLOWseek?

Anonymous said...

What is this oink everyone keeps talking about, was it like a site with pigs or something.

Anonymous said...

"sounds like soulseek. why double that with crappy upload/hashing system? i've got 40k+ mp3s neatly organized in folders named they way I LIKE IT. making 5000 torrent releases is just a waste of time. if you're looking for the best place for music, try soulseek."

Is this guy joking?

Unknown said...

the fact that it was invite only with upload requirements

Anonymous said...

Soulseek sucks for lossless music and especially classical music (only eMule connected to eDonkey network and Demonoid are any good for lossless classical music...).

Anonymous said...

i wasn't talking about lossless classical music but "Hard to find vinyl rips, out of print records, stuff you couldn't get legally."

speaking about that, oing was crap. there's still MUCH more hard to find, experimental music on slsk than has ever been on oink. mainly because when i wanna join oink and start sharing my collection, i have to make 5000 releases. when i wanna share my collection on slsk, i just turn it on.

as for lossless (c'mon, who can tell the difference between lossless flac or ape and 256 kbps mp3? maybe 1% of ppl) - true.

Anonymous said...

Damn, is that guy from soulseek kidding me... i swear to god, if you've ever had OiNK you'll never want anything different. And all that stuff about other servers really has to stop, can't a mod delete the messages with oink.cx.la?
The part I liked was the request option and ofcouuuurse the cute avatar must :D

Anonymous said...

The design? Don't get me wrong I liked oink but every time i saw that page my eyes bled. Design was the worst part of the site.

Anonymous said...

"The design? Don't get me wrong I liked oink but every time i saw that page my eyes bled. Design was the worst part of the site."

Well good thing they had different theme colors to choose from. I liked the green.

Anonymous said...

I credit OiNK's success to the huge user base and the rewards given for keeping a good ratio. It assured that there was a wide amount of content available to be put up and effectively rewarded people for being the first to get it up. It's part of the reason OiNK was such a good place for pre-releases. There was such a strong incentive system for putting stuff up quickly.

The high quality standards and strict enforcement didn't hurt either.

Anonymous said...

not just music, ebooks and apps as well. this might be a problem in addition to the music downloads.

Anonymous said...

Not to forget the Firefox plug-in.
BTW has anyone the Oinkbar code?

I also miss the great Forum, it covered everything and you got immediately answered your questions - at least with a OiNK for Dummies link.

Holland Oats said...

oink was great for rare and oop releases - really fun upping torrents with images, blurbs, oh man so much fun, spreading the word about this or that unknown record. arrgh!!!!

Anonymous said...

Oink was the livest mufucking site on the planet.

Why you ask? ofcourse a couple of reasons where already mentioned in the previous posts but i'll give you guys a little summary:

- fresh music, the rarest and the newest in the best quality and album packages.
- it was fast as hell
- great searchfunction
- lots and lots of users
- a great and dope design and simple, with some cool avatars.
- the forum
- the other stuff like apps, e-books e-learning videos (almost couldn't do without)
- the invitation system
- overall the great quality, because of the strict rules.

Man I sure miss OiNK.cd. The other day I went back to soulseek again. Found out I didn't even had the app installed anymore. What a pain downloading song for song in 10 kb/s. A lot of em not even available.

Conclusion: there is nothing out there like oink.

Anonymous said...

I'm on libble now, but ya, not even close to the same. There are also wait periods, which sucks.

I had to use irc to track down a newly released album. Don't forget, for now, there's always packetnews.com if you don't have other sources.

Also, I have the OiNK foobar skin. Good memories.. If anyone wants, let me know and I'll upload it somewhere... yousendit or something.. anyone know of somewhere better?

Anonymous said...

> sounds like soulseek...

apart from what others already and correctly stated, i'd like to add this

> i've got 40k+ mp3s neatly organized
> in folders named they way I LIKE IT.

Listen, nobody gives a fuck about that.
To be precise, that is EXACTLY the point why - even if you would - you couldn't have created those 5000 torrents on opp.

that is - precisely - the diff between soleshit and the beauty of opp.

but just continue to do that.
i personally can live without knowing what probably amazingly cool way you name your folders.

jeez.

Anonymous said...

the problem with oink is that it is no more. and soulseek is alive an kicking. and yes, i have my folders organized in the way I want it. renaming folders after downloading an album form oink meant not sharing it with others. that's why bittorrent is and will be not efficient protocol for sharing thousands of albums.

how would you find your favourite axolotl relese, when folders are named like this:

axolotl - prophetic ass [chocolate monk, 2007]

[chocolate monk, 2007] axolotl - prophetic ass

2007 axolotl - prophetic ass

---chocolate monk---axolotl---prophetic ass

imagine hundreds of other ways of naming your folders. i wish you good luck with 5500 folders named in 189 different ways.

speaking about "rarity" - well, i could't find most of rare albums on oink. i'd say it was mainly for pseudorarities. i missed those black metal casette demos, avant folk form new zealand, new wave singles from brazil, exotica, obscure mexican jazz rock, etc. i searched for lots of things on oink and i couldn't find most of them. but hey, if the most experimetal music you've ever come across is radiohead, well...

speakin about community - soulseek seem to be kind of low profile. that's why it's not dead yet. i like it's user forum, i like chat rooms. i don't need fancy ratio bars and other shit. i come there for rare music and i have never had problems with finding it.


"that is - precisely - the diff between soleshit and the beauty of opp."

if i get you right: the beauty is that you CANNOT share most of your stuff. great. that's why oink resources could never be compared to soulseek resources. they always sucked and were for less demanding users.

in the meantime, try soulseek, bro cause your favorite server is dead.

Anonymous said...

OiNKv2 works too.

its where to go instead of oink

oinkv2