NNTT.ORG — a Nizhny Novgorod torrent tracker that operated under the domain nntt.org from approximately 2007 to 2025. By early 2013, it had nearly 280,000 registered users — comparable to the population of Avtozavodsky District — and its forum counted 3.8 million posts[1]. In the aggregate rankings of Counter.nn.ru, the tracker appeared consistently in snapshots from 2010–2016, rising as high as second place among all websites in the city[2].

What it was

A torrent tracker does not store files: it maintains a catalogue of torrents and connects people who exchange data directly with one another. Russia-wide trackers did this for the whole country; NNTT was a city-level one — with a local forum, a local classifieds board, and a community whose members recognized each other by their usernames.

The domain nntt.org had existed earlier: the first archived snapshot dates to April 13, 2004, but it showed only a placeholder page, and in February 2005 the address hosted a link to an unrelated organization[3]. The tracker appeared there later: a snapshot from November 22, 2007 already shows a functioning forum with sections on film, games, and music — along with an announcement that "today until 9 p.m. registration on the tracker will be free"[4].

How many people were there

The forum displayed its own statistics, and they show clear growth. January 7, 2011: 221,555 users, 203,645 threads, 2,822,969 posts[5]. Two years later, on January 5, 2013: 279,469 users, 281,899 threads, 3,806,392 posts[1].

Hundreds were online simultaneously: the record for November 2012 was 1,429 users, and by November 2014 it had risen to 1,585[6]. From there the counter moved into the thousands; the final record entry, which hung on the forum right up until the very end, was 8,327 visitors on 21 June 2016[7].

The full scope of the tracker's activity is visible in the last snapshot, taken on 5 December 2025: 331,996 torrents had passed through it with a combined size of 841 terabytes, the total number of seeders over the site's history reached 22 million, leechers seven million, and the total data distributed came to 50.8 exabytes — fifty million terabytes[8].

Who ran it

The public faces of the tracker were administrators known by the handles Bulldozer and Dosart — both are listed in the administration section on a screenshot of the homepage dated 9 January 2010[9].

Their roles were clearly divided. Bulldozer handled the technical side and wrote the engine himself: in February 2009 he reported that optimizing the announcer had yielded no results and that he had begun developing a tracker in C++ based on XBTT[10], and in March 2010 he announced the switch to a new engine — "based on phpbb3, and its code was written entirely by me, which means the tracker will have no equals on the internet"[11]. Dosart handled public communications: his were the terse status updates about outages and server maintenance — "Down until at least 22:00. In progress. Server crashed. Rebooting"[11].

Alongside them worked a technical support team whose contact details were posted publicly: in 2008, on the Nizhny Novgorod "Forum of Friends," Guitarist, miron_ex, trexan, Hannibal61, and durashki were on duty — with their ICQ numbers and a shared mailbox, nntt.support[12]. In 2013, the same field on the homepage listed alexg, miron_ex, and trexan[1]. Separate release groups with their own leaders also existed: Cartoons R.G., Game's R.G., PRON R.G., and Auto & Moto Release Group[1].

The administrators never revealed their real names: online they remained nicknames. On Twitter, where tracker news was posted, Dosart was listed simply as "administrator of NNPortal.ORG" — the city resource to which part of the audience later migrated.

More than just files

The tracker fairly quickly ceased to be a mere catalog of torrents. It hosted biathlon prediction contests, a Spengler Cup totalizator, a weekly QUIZ-night every Tuesday, a winter Counter-Strike tournament, a "Miss NNTT" contest, and blood-donation announcements[1].

The most resilient part turned out to be the flea market — a classifieds forum with its own rules and a separate code defining what counted as commercial activity. When the tracker went down for several days in 2010, city residents on nn.ru debated it as though a public institution had closed, and one participant remarked: "The flea market there is more or less lively"[13].

The tracker also had its own space on the city portal — the nn.ru/community/gorod/nntt community, where the administration posted maintenance announcements[13].

The Register of Prohibited Websites

On May 24, 2014, users of city forums discovered that access to the tracker had been blocked: "our beloved torrent tracker nntt.org was blocked by Roskomnadzor"[14].

The formal reason was described by CNews on August 1, 2014. The Moscow City Court had issued preliminary injunctive measures under the "anti-piracy" law in force since August 2013, and the tracker was added to the Register of Prohibited Websites due to torrents of the films The Thief and Russian Rebellion, as well as the series Burzhuys' Birthday and Steep Turns. By the time of publication, the disputed torrents had been removed and the site had been delisted from the register[15].

How it ended

After the block, the tracker underwent a relaunch: the forum was started fresh, and a line reading "We're open again!!!" appeared on the front page. The previous 280,000 accounts remained in the old database — by December 2025, the new forum had 110,618 registered users, 339,303 threads, and 377,044 posts[8].

There was no longer any life in it, however. The last archived snapshot of the working site, dated December 5, 2025, shows twenty-five visitors over a twenty-four-hour period; the most recent post in the torrent-client troubleshooting section dates to January 2024; and the top thread in the "flood" section is "Is anyone alive?" with a reply from December 1, 2025[8]. Part of the audience had by then migrated to another city resource — nnportal.

In total, the web archive preserved 1,123 snapshots of this address over twenty-one years.

The tracker's place among other city websites, along with an analysis of its rankings by year, can be found in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Web Archive — NNTT.ORG, snapshot of January 5, 2013: forum statistics, technical support, contests (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Web Archive — counter.nn.ru ratings, measurements from 2010–2016 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Web Archive — nntt.org, snapshot of February 6, 2005 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Web Archive — NNTT.ORG, snapshot of November 22, 2007 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Web Archive — NNTT.ORG, snapshot of January 7, 2011: forum statistics (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Web Archive — NNTT.ORG, snapshot of January 6, 2015: traffic record (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Web Archive — NNTT.ORG, snapshot of January 11, 2020 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — Web Archive — NNTT.ORG, last copy of the working site, December 5, 2025: final forum and tracker statistics (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — Web Archive — NNTT.ORG, snapshot of January 9, 2010: administration roster (archive)
  10. forum.nnov.org — Nizhny Novgorod Friends Forum — Bulldozer's post about developing a tracker in C++, February 2009 (archive)
  11. forum.nnov.org — Nizhny Novgorod Friends Forum — Bulldozer's posts about the new phpBB3 engine (March 2010) and dosart's posts about server work (October 2010) (archive)
  12. forum.nnov.org — Nizhny Novgorod Friends Forum — Thread "nntt.org": tracker technical support contacts, from September 17, 2008 (archive)
  13. web.archive.org — "Where did the Nizhny Novgorod torrent tracker nntt.org go??", discussion of October 15–16, 2010 (archived copy) (archive)
  14. nnov.org — "Nizhny Novgorod torrent tracker nntt.org blocked by Roskomnadzor", May 24, 2014 (archive)
  15. ict-online.ru — CNews — Igor Korolev. Torrent tracker wasn't allowed to steal "The Thief", August 1, 2014