TorrentSpy (software)

TorrentSpy was an open-source software application for the Microsoft Windows platform, originally written in March of 2003 in Perl, but quickly rewritten in Delphi and released for general use the following April. Regular updates to the application were released until January 2004 when the author considered the application to be "feature complete" and discontinued development. Currently, there are some projects (e.g. [http://projects.arieltm.net/projects/torrentloader/ Torrent Loader] ) which are based on the same idea as TorrentSpy, and that are still actively developed.

The application was written to provide a more comprehensive listing of the attributes for torrent files, as the BitTorrent GUI's at the time were still very primitive. It also was the first application to use the "scrape" functionality that most BitTorrent trackers published to show the current active user count for each torrent. Most of the application's features were integrated into BitTorrent clients over time and are now considered essential by most BitTorrent users.