Trove torrent release V2.0 Section 1 of : Magazines. --- This is the first of a series of torrents intended to be a 'V2' - a successor to the Trove torrent v1 and v1.5. But to understand what this means, the history of the collection must be described. When the Trove vanished mysteriously - widely assumed to be due to legal action - many people attempted to recover the data. These attempts were poorly coordinated. Some people already had partial mirrors from their own crawling, others focused on recovering data via archive.org. As these people came together, they collectively produced the torrent that would become known as the 1.0: A mega-torrent of such size that it caused many torrent clients to crash. A chaotic mess that, though it contained most of the Trove data, also contained vast inefficiency and redundancy due to the haste with which it was made and the difficulty of coordinating a group lacking any kind of common communication. As this community attempted to better organise, the V1.5 was released: A partial update of the 1.0. Though just as poorly organised, this at least solved the client crashing problem by breaking the torrent into a number of smaller pieces. And then it all fell apart. This project was coordinated over Discord, and at this point the takedowns begun: As each new discord was created, it would be hit by legal notice within days. It was soon concluded that there was at least one copyright holder, or an agent acting on behalf of a copyright holder, who had a mole infiltrated into the community. Faced with the need for paranoia and the loss of any discord server that was open to more than a small community of friends, the project crumbled and any hope of a v2.0 was abandoned. One of those splinter groups did continue work on a V2.0 release, but hampered by the need for secrecy. The group withdrew into the underground of the internet: The collections by which this group coordinates are tor hidden services, run by people who never reveal their identity. Their central hub of coordination is a very small discord server, with only the most trusted people allowed. Even their name is too secret to state here. The need for secrecy greatly slowed the effort - but through perseverence and technological skill, the project continued: To produce a torrent that would be more efficient, better organised, and more comprehensive than even the original trove. --- This torrent is the first product of their work to be made public. It contains only the magazines. More will follow. The sections for assets (maps, tokens, etc) and for books are still under processing. There is no decision yet on what to do about 3D models, or what to do with removed material that is only indirectly related to tabletop gaming such as novels, history books and music. There will be, at a minimum, three more torrents to complete this set. This collection here is a composite created from multiple sources. Many individuals donated their collections - most via Mega shares, two via Tor services. More were collected from a splinter community with a focus on historical gaming material. These were combined with the magazines from the torrent 1.0 and 1.5, and the resulting folder subjected to automated deduplication. Finally, all of these PDFs were then passed through a lossless PDF optimisation process in order to reduce the file size. Even after this effort, it is far from perfect: The automated deduplication catches only identical scans, so many duplicates do still remain. Many files have not been OCRed, or contain scanned images in an excessively high resolution that bloat the file size. To correct all of these would be impractical - such a project could take years to complete. This will have to do. It is, at the very least, superior to the 1.5 torrent.