The Pirate Bay Calls For Designs on a Brighter Future
Written by Ernesto on January 22, 2009
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-calls-for-designs-on-a-brighter-future-090122/With the trial starting in only a few weeks, some have pictured dark clouds above the world’s most popular BitTorrent tracker. The Pirate Bay team doesn’t seem to be bothered by it though, as they prefer to look ahead. For the first time in years there are plans to redo the design of the site, and it’s looking bright.
The Pirate Bay’s current design dates back to 2005, when it grew from a Swedish-only site to one that served a global audience. At the time, it was one of the first BitTorrent sites with just a search box on the frontpage, no ads or torrents.
Since then very little has changed design wise, as most of the development time has been spent on optimizing hardware, the tracker software and the site’s backend. Most recently The Pirate Bay team has added IPv6 support. Great news for BitTorrent users, as it makes port forwarding a thing of the past, and just might prevent BitTorrent from succumbing to an early death.
While The Pirate Bay team has made much progress on the backend recently, these changes were pretty much invisible and only noticed by a few. This is about to change though. For the first time in almost four years, The Pirate Bay will completely redesign the site’s looks - according to a blog post from Marcink.
The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that change is indeed coming, but that the mockup posted is far from final version. Actually, they are open to suggestions from users. “We would love users to show us their suggestions, since we’re currently looking for someone to redo the whole site,” Peter said.
One thing is certain. The new design will be more colorful than the current one, and ideally it should load faster than it does now too. “We want xhtml and a focus on css,” Peter said, while encouraging people who want to help out to send links to their ready xhtml/css mockups via email to tpb.contact[at]gmail.com.
This February, the three Pirate Bay founders have to appear before Stockholm District Court. The three are charged with facilitating copyright infringement, and several anti-piracy outfits have claimed millions of dollars for damages they allegedly suffered. Judging by the plans the Pirate Bay team have for the future, they seem to be positive that the law is on their side.
