More than half a year has passed since Demonoid went offline but many of its former users still haven't lost faith. They cling on to every string of hope and this has led some to believe that the site returned as a meta-search engine under the new domain Demonoid.mk. While most people who are familiar with the old Demonoid know that the new site just trades on the brand of the famous torrent tracker, quite a few believe it's a legit incarnation.

After the popular BitTorrent tracker Demonoid suffered a DDoS and hacker attack July last year, the site’s servers in Ukraine were pulled offline.

Local authorities explained that Interpol asked them to take action as part of an investigation into the site’s alleged owners in Mexico. An arrested Demonoid admin has since been released and the case was stalled, but the BitTorrent tracker remains offline.

With more than half a year of downtime Demonoid has already broken the previous record it set in 2007/2008. But with a reputation as a “comeback kid” many of the site’s former users haven’t lost hope that it may one day return. This also leads some to see things are aren’t there.

Over the past weeks TorrentFreak has received dozens of tips about a “new” Demonoid that is believed to have thousands of daily visitors. The site in question, Demonoid.mk, uses the Demonoid logo and favicon, which leads some to believe that this may indeed be a legit successor.

However, Demonoid.mk is nothing like the old Demonoid. The new site functions as a meta-search engine and unlike the real thing is not a semi-private tracker where users can upload content. There are absolutely no signs that there’s a connection between the two, other than the name and logo.

Those who look closely will see that the new site isn’t very original either, to say the least. It is built using the fairly popular Torrentify X script through which anybody can easily setup their own torrent search engine in just a few clicks.

There are hundreds of other sites that run on the same script, with several carrying names of popular sites. Thepiratebay.mk, h33t.im, btjunkie.mk, isohunt.me, isohunt.mk 1337x.us, i-torrent.net, torrentformac.com, axxotorrent.com, torrentcenter.us, exatorrent.org, sharingtorrent.com, to name just a few.

We don’t know who’s behind the Demonoid.mk, but the site appears to be operated by the same people who run thepiratebay.mk, isohunt.mk and btjunkie.mk. All these sites use the same Google analytics code.

The Pirate Bay version appears to be the most popular, with tens of thousands of visitors a day, which is not bad for a cheap script.

Bottom line is, however, that the sites are simply trading on the names of popular torrent sites to get more traffic. Those waiting for the real Demonoid to return will have to wait a little longer.