Bring Back Torrent Download Links On The Piratebay

If you are on the Piratebay website from time to time, you may have noticed that the people behind the site have moved away from torrent files to magnet links in the recent past. When you open a page on the site, you still see a get this torrent link published there, but it is a magnet link and not a torrent file link.

While not true for all indexed files yet, it is likely that the site will eventually remove all torrent download links and rely solely on magnet links instead. The core reason for this is bandwidth, as torrent files are much larger than magnet links.

Piratebay users on the other hand may experience issues with magnet links. While most modern Bittorrent clients support them, they may slow down the downloading of the needed data, especially during the beginning and if a torrent is not well seeded. They can also not be used for services that turn torrents into direct http downloads.

The free userscript ThePirateBay: Magnet to Torrent brings back torrent download links on the Piratebay website. When you visit a torrent page on the Piratebay website without it, you may notice that the Get This Torrent link on it links to the magnet link only, and not a torrent file. With the userscript installed, you will notice that magnet links are now displayed as such, and that the Get Torrent File link links to the torrent download.

The biggest advantage of this userscript is that it retrieves the torrent file information in the background, and displays them instantly on the screen without any user interaction. Piratebay users who prefer torrents over magnet links will surely find this a useful userscript to install on their computer.

The userscript has been tested in Firefox, with Greasemonkey installed, and in the Google Chrome web browser, and it worked as intended in both browsers.