How It Works
One may interact with the API by passing commands to it in the URL. What is returned should be customized to fit your needs. There are two basic ways to customize the results: Using CSS, or using a dynamic web language such as PHP or ASP. Here we will discus the basics of the command system. The commands you use are know as the API's Syntax.
Basic Commands
The first two commands implimented into the system are the most basic: Query and Type. Query is used to send a search query or to specify the selected torrent ID. Type comes into play by helping to define what type of information the query contains. By default, if type is not defined, we assume you are going to be making a search.
Basic Examples
Clicking an example link will open the results in a new window.
This will perform a Torrent Search and return an HTML list of the
results. When this list comes back, the torrent names will be linked. Currently
the links are slightly buggy, this will be fixed with the next release. These
links will contain the ID's of the search results:
http://api.theghostbay.org/?query=south+park
This will request an HTML list of all the information we have on a torrent, This example is for Torrent ID 735:
http://api.theghostbay.org/?query=735&type=info
And lastly this example shows you how to download the torrent file for the torrent ID 735:
http://api.theghostbay.org/?query=735&type=file
Cool Beans, What Else Do I Need To Know?
You need to know a few things:
- This is BRAND NEW and has plenty of errors in it :D This is more experimental than anything.
- Due to the limitations of the server, too much traffic can (and probably will) cause the server to stall, lag and eventually crash. Please don't make any extra queries.
- Because of the server limitations, all search results will be limited by about 30 results, organized by highest seed count at the top. In the future, you will be able to customize this.
- As this system becomes more developed there will be a few rules here and there to keep the system stable, but we will try really hard to make them not interfere with what you want to do!
- We scrape our torrents from around the internet and have no guarantee what you may get back in results. After we start to categorize the torrent files you will be able to filter them a lot better.
- There are some PORNOGRAPHIC torrents in our index. You have been warned. In the future, these will be protected so you can filter them out.
- This system is worked on in spare time or when ever we are up to it, BUT, if you find an error please report it immediately to theghostbay@gmail.com
- All search results and torrent information's returned will contain one (1) Google Adsense Advertisement, or link to another website or something like that....at least, there will be soon. It's a small price to pay. Please don't block the ads or links.
- We will not relay any harmful code through this system. If you find something that is potentially harmful to any user, please notify us ASAP at theghostbay@gmail.com.
- In order to help keep track of certain stuff we may put a <div> with an attribute 'display;none;' information returned. No one will ever see it so if you notice it don't be alarmed.
- Give us your opinions, feed back and even donate some code to share with others! We'd Love it!
- Also, we are in the process of caching the seeders, leechers, torrent file contents, file sizes, etc. They may come back empty until we get that all figured out.
- order - How to organize the results. seeders, leechers, alphabetically, etc etc
- limit - How many results to return per page.
- page - What page #.
- return_format - What format to return the data. HTML, JSON, PHP etc.
- search_name - Search torrent name true/false. Default: true.
- search_description - Search description of torrent true/false. Default: no.
- search_comments - Search comments true/false. Default: no.