2009 was a big year for Lifehacker, and we spent December looking back at the most popular posts of the year covering all our favorite topics. Here’s a quick look back at the best of 2009 in case you missed anything.

• Most Popular DIY Projects of 2009
  We love DIY projects here at Lifehacker. Whether we’re building computers, backyard projects, or turning office supplies into artillery, we’re always tinkering. Here’s a peek at the most popular DIY projects of 2009.
• Most Popular Free Windows Downloads of 2009
  We’ve featured hundreds of free Windows applications over the course of 2009 that we hoped might bolster your productivity, workflow, or your PC usefulness in one form or another.
• Most Popular Featured Workspaces of 2009
  Every week we bring you fresh workspaces from the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell pool, all supplied by you—the awesome Lifehacker readership. Today we’re highlighting the 25 most popular workspaces of 2009.
• Most Popular Photography Hacks of 2009
  Whether making your own lens hood to create custom bokeh, breathing like a sniper to get a blur-free photo, or angling your body to look the best in pictures, we shared some great photography hacks in ‘09.
• Most Popular Free Mac Downloads of 2009
  Nothing beats finding just the right application to fill a common need, fix a problem, or boost your productivity. Treat yourself with 15 of the most popular Mac downloads of 2009.
• Most Popular Top 10s of 2009
  Every weekend, we comb our memories and archives to compile 10 useful items addressing a specific topic you may have forgotten about, or just happen to be excellent. These 20 list(icle)s proved most popular in 2009.
• Most Popular Featured Desktops of 2009
  Our readers have submitted thousands of screenshots of their best desktop configurations, and over the year we’ve featured some truly impressive and unique desktops with you.
• Most Popular Repurposing Tricks of 2009
  We’re huge fans of repurposing here at Lifehacker—squeezing extra and usually clever uses out of every day objects.
• Most Popular Free iPhone Apps (and Posts) of 2009
  The iPhone is the most popular cellphone in the country, and with good reason. Despite occasionally awful choices by Apple, it still has the most—and best—applications around.
• Most Popular How-To Features of 2009
  We cover a lot of tips every day on Lifehacker, but we get our greatest pleasure from putting together in-depth, step-by-step guides.
• Most Popular Firefox Extensions and Themes of 2009
  This year’s release of Firefox 3.5 gave us a lot of reasons to like it, but its extensibility remains everyone’s favorite feature.
• Most Popular Linux Posts of 2009
  A new browser, two new Ubuntu releases, and more than one new netbook OS—2009 was a big year for open-source software.

Stream America’s favorite radio stations to your Droid — free!

Go to www.iheartradio.com/droid from your Android phones browser or download it from the Android Marketplace under Multimedia.

Version 2.2 Includes:

* More than 350 of America’s favorite stations

* Artist-hosted stations from Christina Aguilera, Eagles and Weezer featuring their stories and favorite music

* Frequently updated traffic reports available for several major markets including New York, L.A., Chicago, San Francisco and Houston

* Now set a station to play automatically when you launch the App

* Tag songs for purchase in iTunes

* Lyrics, album art and more!

Your iPhone & BlackBerry & Droid are Now Radios – iheartradio.com 350+ Radio Stations, Videos & More.

Nobody likes staring at a boring desktop when they fire up their computer every morning. Keep your wallpaper fresh with the five most popular sites Lifehacker readers use to satisfy their wallpaper needs.

Photo by goincase. Wallpaper on monitor available here.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite wallpaper site. We quickly learned that—while not everyone has a strong opinion about Linux distributions or encryption software—everyone has a favorite wallpaper site; readers logged nearly 500 votes for their favorite wallpaper sites. Now we’re back to share the five most popular sites used by Lifehacker readers to dress up their monitors with fresh wallpaper.

VladStudio

Vlad Studio features the work of Russian wallpaper artist Vlad Gerasimov. He cranks out hundreds of great wallpapers, ranging from holiday themes to abstract art. Vlad Studio has wallpaper in a wide range of sizes suited for everything from your mobile phone to a multi-monitor setup. Mobile wallpaper and desktop resolutions at 1600×1200 and below are available for free. Images larger than that are available only to registered users. If you want access to the larger resolutions, now is a great time to pick up a subscription. Vlad is running a Christmas-special where the $30 lifetime membership is available for $20.

4Chan Wallpapers/General/

4Chan is an image-based forum where anyone can anonymously post and share images and comments. It’s divided into sub-boards devoted to all sorts of topics like Anime, video games, etc., but has gained notoriety for some of its more unsavory sub-boards. The /Wallpaper/ board, nonetheless, is bustling and updated nearly 24/7 with images from around the web. Since the 4Chan boards are a bit kludgy to use if you’re not trying to comment and just looking for images, a variety of scrapers have sprung up to help you pick through all the images in /Wallpaper/. You can visit 4Chan directly at the link above or you can use services like Nik.Bot and 4Walled to browse through the wallpapers available through 4Chan. Be strongly forewarned, however: although the /Wallpaper/ forum is much tamer than other areas of 4Chan, you’ll still find a large number of Maxim-level NSFW wallpaper images and the occasional Playboy-level NSFW images when you’re browsing. If you’re not prepared to explain some really awkward internet memes to your boss, you’d better save 4Chan /Wallpaper/ for home.

Social Wallpapering

Social Wallpapering borrows the vote up/down model used by many social aggregators (Reddit, Digg, etc.) and applies it to desktop wallpaper. Users vote up their favorite, vote down their least favorites, and upload their own images to be ranked by other users. You can browse by rank, category, view random images, and sort by screen size to help you drill down through the huge collection to find the wallpaper you want. Prefer to grab everything and sort it out later? Social Wallpaper makes their entire wallpaper collection available for download via BitTorrent. If you’re looking for a site where you can not only find fresh wallpaper but participate in helping your fellow wallpaper lovers find the best images, Social Wallpapering is a solid choice.

Interfacelift

Interfacelift is an enormous repository of wallpaper images. Thanks to the button-based layout at the top of the screen, you can easily drill down through wallpapers using factors like rating, number of comments, screen type, and so on. Once you select your screen type—widescreen, full screen, dual monitors, etc.—you can pick from available resolutions so you never end up clicking on an image and finding out it’s not available in the resolution you want. Every search result gives you information about the image plus a drop down menu for size selection and a quick download. Interfacelift has recently added a feature called “The Loupe” which allows users to vote on incoming submissions to accelerator the process of new materials being added to the database.

DeviantART Wallpaper

If you’ve visited your fair share of wallpaper sites and gotten tired of the endless stream of glowing line-art and video-game wallpapers, then you’ll enjoy browsing the wallpaper archives of DeviantART—a subdivision of the artist-centric site. You’ll find everything at DeviantART from the more common to glow-lines variety of abstract wallpaper to quirky paintings, photographs, and computer-rendered images. Most of the users at DeviantART are prolific contributors, so if you find a wallpaper you really like, make sure to check out the user’s gallery to see if they have any other gems to share. DeviantART doesn’t have the advanced wallpaper-oriented search features that many of the other wallpaper sites have, but you can still search by image size and sort by popularity.

Anti-malware testing group AV-Comparatives.org not only gave Microsoft Security Essentials a top rating for malware removal, but now they’ve given it their best ranking in their performance test as well.

AV-Comparatives.org ran a series of real-world tests running through common scenarios like downloading, extracting, copying, and encoding files, installing and launching applications, and they also ran through an automated testing suite as well. Once the dust had settled, it became clear that not only is MSE one of only three products that both blocks and removes malware well, but it’s also very light on system resources.

Out of all the products tested, Microsoft Security Essentials was the best-performing free antivirus solution, and one of only two that received “very fast” on each of the real-world tests, earning it their top award: an “advanced+” ranking. We’ve been telling you for a while that you don’t need to pay for Windows security, and now with MSE ranked alongside the top paid apps in both malware removal and performance, you might want to consider making the switch.

Hit the AV-Comparatives link for the full report in PDF form, or check out the PC Mag story for the overview—if you can deal with some irritating in-text ads.

Windows/Mac/Linux: Previously mentioned Songbird, the open source, Mozilla-powered, supposedly iTunes-killing media player has updated to 1.4.2, bringing a host of new features, including AAC metadata support, a new feather (skin), CD ripping, and support for many mass storage devices.

Apart from the snazzy new purple feather, the biggest features in this release are definitely CD ripping and mass storage syncing (both available as add-ons for 1.4.2 by the Songbird team). The CD ripping tool can look up metadata information on Gracenote (or other services if you prefer, via other add-ons) and can rip songs as FLAC, OGG, or, if you’re using Windows, as WMA as well. In addition, Songbird can now sync to more than just iPods—you can now sync any MSC (Mass Storage Class) device, as well as manage firmware on certain devices. Both CD ripping and MSC support, though, are currently only available for Windows users—Linux and Mac users will have to wait until at least the next release to test them out.

While Windows users will be very happy to see this feature-filled update, Mac and Linux users will still find Songbird more pleasant to use, especially if migrating from iTunes—1.4.2 finally allows you to write metadata to WMA and AAC files, meaning all those songs bought or imported in iTunes can have their information edited. However, a bug that still exists in 1.4.2 is that this information will not be transferred back to iTunes for some reason—but don’t worry, it’s still there in the file.

There are still a host of other bugs in the software (see the release notes for more information), not to mention missing features—but it’s definitely one step closer to being the iTunes killer that everyone wants it to be, and despite these bugs, I’ve found that for the first time, it’s usable enough to make a full switch from iTunes—so don’t let the bugs scare you away from giving it a test run.

Note that the release notes linked above are labeled as 1.4.1; Songbird was updated again yesterday to 1.4.2 to fix a minor bug with the new feather. In addition, some features are in the 1.3 release notes, even though 1.3 was never released, so be sure to check those too for the full list of new features.

Songbird is free and open source, and is available for Windows XP/Vista, Mac, and Linux. Currently, Windows 7 is not officially supported, though some users have reported no problems running it on their system—just be aware that it’s at your own risk if you decide to try it on Windows 7.

Specs:

• Free, independent service
• Use of multiple antivirus engines
• Real-time automatic updates of virus signatures
• Detailed results from each antivirus engine
• Real time global statistics

For more information or for sending your comments, please write to info@virustotal.com

Credits

VirusTotal is a service developed by Hispasec Sistemas, an independent IT Security laboratory, that uses several command line versions of antivirus engines, updated regularly with official signature files published by their respective developers.

This is a list of the companies that participate in VirusTotal with their antivirus engines.

• AhnLab (V3)
• Antiy Labs (Antiy-AVL)
• Aladdin (eSafe)
• ALWIL (Avast! Antivirus)
• Authentium (Command Antivirus)
• AVG Technologies (AVG)
• Avira (AntiVir)
• Cat Computer Services (Quick Heal)
• ClamAV (ClamAV)
• Comodo (Comodo)
• CA Inc. (Vet)
• Doctor Web, Ltd. (DrWeb)
• Emsi Software GmbH (a-squared)
• Eset Software (ESET NOD32)
• Fortinet (Fortinet)
• FRISK Software (F-Prot)
• F-Secure (F-Secure)
• G DATA Software (GData)
• Hacksoft (The Hacker)
• Hauri (ViRobot)
• Ikarus Software (Ikarus)
• INCA Internet (nProtect)
• K7 Computing (K7AntiVirus)
• Kaspersky Lab (AVP)
• McAfee (VirusScan)
• Microsoft (Malware Protection)
• Norman (Norman Antivirus)
• Panda Security (Panda Platinum)
• PC Tools (PCTools)
• Prevx (Prevx1)
• Rising Antivirus (Rising)
• Secure Computing (SecureWeb)
• BitDefender GmbH (BitDefender)
• Sophos (SAV)
• Sunbelt Software (Antivirus)
• Symantec (Norton Antivirus)
• VirusBlokAda (VBA32)
• Trend Micro (TrendMicro)
• VirusBuster (VirusBuster)

Tools

• PEiD (PEiD)
• pefile (pefile)
• TrID (Marco Pontello)
• PDFiD (Didier Stevens)

Translators:

• Polski: Pawel & Michael
• Cesky: Strongy!
• Deutsch: Moritz Konstantin Meurer
• Magyar: István Csizmazia
• : LinHongJun
• Italiano: Mario Dedè
• Português: Daniel Henrique Tsuha
• Svenska: Charlie Krogars
• Français: Gérard Mélone
• Ελληνικά: Alexander Filos
• Nederlands: Croonen Martijn
• Türkçe: Uður BOZDAÐ
• Română: Căruntu Radu
• Русский: Konstantin Potemichev
• Dansk: Peter Ørsted
• Slovenšèina: Sašo Badovinac
• : Iso-G
• : JaeHyung Lee
• ihMdI: P`aSaaMt kamadar
• Suomi: Jari Rinta-Korkeamäki
• Arabic: بلال محمد عبدالكريم الزيتاوي
• Македонски: Joleh Woo
• Srpski: Rados Kovac

Warning:

VirusTotal is not substitute any antivirus software installed in a PC, as it only scans individual files on demand. It does not offer permanent protection for the user’s system either.

Although the detection rate afforded by the use of multiple antivirus engines is far superior to that offered by just one product, these results DO NOT guarantee the harmlessness of a file.

Currently, there is not any solution that offers a 100% effectiveness rate for detecting viruses and malware. You may become a victim of misleading advertising, if you buy such a product under those premises.

VirusTotal – Free Online Virus and Malware Scan – Email/Uploader.

Our Hive Five asks readers to identify five of the best tools for any job, then vote for the absolute best. Here’s a look back at the winners from each week in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Every week we pose a question to you, the computer savvy readers of Lifehacker. Tirelessly we search for the next “Which is best?” question and through the hive mind we distill down your thousands of nominations into a list of the top five candidates. You vote on the best of the best and we return the next week to declare a champion.

The following list showcases the winners in each of the categories we covered in the fourth quarter of 2009. If a particular category catches your eye and you’d like to see the other contenders, click on the name of the category to jump to the original Hive Five post, clicking on the name of the winner will take you directly to the winner’s web site.

Best Twitter Client: TweetDeck

TweetDeck boasts the ability to monitor multiple social-networking services, in this case Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. You can fight Twitter spam with a built-in spam monitor, follow topics with saved searches, and preview shortened URLs from within TweetDeck. You can use TweetDeck to manage multiple Twitter accounts from one interface and thanks to web-based TweetDeck accounts you can back up and sync your TweetDeck profile across multiple machines.

Best Weight-Management Tool: SparkPeople

SparkPeople is a comprehensive weight-loss web site. A free membership gives you access to a variety of nutritional information and calorie-tracking tools, weight-tracking tools, and the enormous SparkPeople community. Personal pages, like mini-blogs within the SparkPeople site, help you publish your progress and connect with other users who have similar goals. You’ll find no shortage of ways to track and analyze everything from the types of food you eat to the amount of weight you lift-and lose!-in the reports section of the site. SparkPeople is available in a scaled-down mobile version for use on your web-enabled phone or as an iPhone/iPod touch application.

Best Windows Task Manager Alternative: Process Explorer

Process Explorer is the free and portable offering from Microsoft. Process Explorer is like the standard task manager on steroids. You still get a list of processes, you still see charts of your usage, but both give you significantly more information and control over the information. Unlike the default manager, Process Explorer makes it easy to track down which file is being held by which program and get to the bottom of computer mysteries like why a certain DLL or DOC file simply cannot be deleted. It also shows which service is performing which function so you’ll never look at a long and repetitive list of Windows system executables that are indistinguishable from each other-every one will be associated with its function.

Best Software Update Tool: Synaptic/APT

The Advanced Packaging Tool, a.k.a. APT, is a free tool built into most Linux distributions and many variants that handles the installation, removal, and updating of software packages. APT is a tool that went a long way toward making Linux a bit friendlier to the masses who aren’t comfortable installing or compiling software packages on Linux, but it runs from the command line, so it’s still not all that friendly to folks joining Linux from the Windows or Mac worlds. That’s where Synaptic comes in. Synaptic is a graphical front end to APT that makes the tool wildly more user-friendly, and-yes-it handles checking for and updating software with aplomb. (Folks using Ubuntu, <a href=”most popular Linux distribution“>the most popular Linux distribution among Lifehacker readers, take note: Synaptic will be replaced by the Ubuntu Software Center-another APT-powered update tool-in April of 2010.)

Best Portable Apps Suite: PortableApps Suite

PortableApps is the Grand Daddy of portable application sites. Between John Haller-the founder of the site-and the dozens of developers, packagers, translators, and the hundreds of people that participate in the forums, the sheer number of people working to polish the PortableApps suite has resulted in a very comprehensive package. The PortableApps suite includes basics like Firefox for browsing and Pidgin for instant messaging but also includes-in the full package-Open Office. You could download all the individual portable components separately of course, but what really ties everything together is the PortableApps menu system. Seen in the screenshot above, the menu system is clean, includes a backup utility, and makes organizing your portable apps and documents simple.

Best Application Dock: Windows 7 Taskbar

A long time coming, Windows finally enhanced the standard taskbar, creating a swanky dock system to call its own. Windows users trying out Windows 7 for the first time are in for an extra big treat-the change from the old taskbar system to the new dock is huge. You can drag and drop to pin shortcuts to the taskbar, Win+# (where the # is the numerical position of the pinned icon) launches the application, and icons also have jump lists associated with them-quick access to routine features and commands for that particular application. Hovering over the icon of a running application gives you a quick peek and the ability to jump to the application or close it. Microsoft was late to the dock party, but at least when they finally rolled it out, they remembered to decorate with streamers and bring a cake.

Best Antivirus Application: AVG

The free offering from AVG is one of the lightest, feature-wise, among the nominations in the anti-virus Hive Five. That said, if you’re looking for a basic antivirus application that will scan your computer, keep an eye out for spyware, and keep you from visiting malware and virus laden websites (via their LinkScanner protection), AVG is a solid free offering.

Best Online Backup Tool: Dropbox

Once you install Dropbox, a folder, appropriately called “My Dropbox”, is placed in the Documents area of your computer. Anything you put into this folder will be synced with your Dropbox account. You can sync files, share files by making the folder they are in public, and restore a previous version of your file-Dropbox keeps a change log going back 30 days. All your files are also accessible via the Dropbox web site, which is great for those times you’re at a computer where you don’t have Dropbox installed, but you still want to access a document. If you want to sync a folder without putting it directly inside the main My Dropbox folder, you can do that with a little elbow grease, too. Dropbox doesn’t have an unlimited option like the rest, but if all you want to back up is your most important documents, it certainly works as off-site backup, and it provides data redundancy on every computer you install it on.

Best Screencasting Tool: CamStudio

CamStudio is a free and open-source offering for the screencasting market. You can record all or part of your screen, customize cursors and text annotations, adjust the quality of the video output, and save screencasts as AVI or SWF files. The interface is easy to understand, and you won’t be overwhelmed with extensive options. In a nutshell, it’s a free and effective tool for creating screencasts without a lot of bulk or expense.

Best Wishlist Tool: Amazon.com Universal Wishlist

Amazon’s wishlist system used to only support items that Amazon or affiliates carried—which, while limited, still gave you access to a large stable of items. When they rolled out the Universal Wishlist and its accompanying Wishlist Button, however, you got the ease of use of the Amazon wishlist system plus the ability to add items to your list that Amazon.com doesn’t carry. Anything from any web site can now be added to your Amazon wishlists, both private and public, using the Wishlist Button. Creating and managing your Amazon wishlist is free.

Best Outlining Tool: Microsoft OneNote

OneNote is a note-taking and organization tool that many Lifehacker readers have called Microsoft’s best product. It’s versatile—it’s made appearances here, in the best note-taking tools and journaling Hive Fives—and the outlining functionality is well integrated and easy to use. One of the strong points of outlining in OneNote is the way outlines support the same drag and drop rearranging found throughout OneNote. Almost every single element in a OneNote page can be dragged, dropped, or easily manipulated with a context menu—the screenshot above shows an element in the outline right before being dragged into a new slot. Note: If you’re curious about the GTD context in the screenshot, read our guide to getting things done with Microsoft OneNote.

Best Startup Management Tool: CCleaner

CCleaner isn’t strictly a startup management tool. Most people use it to clean out cookies and other undesirable elements and to tidy up the registry. A secondary but helpful tool in CCleaner: it also allows you to delete entries from the startup file—hence its inclusion here. It’s a bit of a one trick pony, though; you can’t alter, tweak, or insert entries. You can only delete them. Still, it gets the job done if the task you want isn’t advanced tweaking, but just to get that annoying program to stop popping up every time you reboot.

Best of the Best: Hive Five Winners, October through December 2009 – Hive Five Winners – Lifehacker.

Just a few weeks remain in 2009, so it’s time to publish the list of the top 25 BitTorrent sites that pulled in the most traffic this year. The Pirate Bay leads by a wide margin, followed up by Torrentz and isoHunt. KickassTorrents is the highest ranked newcomer in 11th place.

2009 has been an eventful year for several well-established torrent sites, with The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and Mininova all battling in court against the entertainment industries. For the latter, this legal action has resulted in a partial shutdown of the site, a painful decision after years of loyal service.

Understandably, Mininova’s traffic took a huge hit in the last week which is likely to continue in the months to come. For most other torrent sites, however, 2009 has been a successful year with growing visitor numbers all around.

We have compiled below a list of the 25 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.

#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG - Daily Visitors: 4,467,074 - Pageviews: 26,177,054 (5.86 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #104 - Compete Rank: #787 Visit Site | Full Report
#2 TORRENTZ.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,656,483 - Pageviews: 12,963,637 (4.88 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #180 - Compete Rank: Currently Not Available Visit Site | Full Report
#3 ISOHUNT.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,461,643 - Pageviews: 16,566,857 (6.73 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #186 - Compete Rank: #1,226 Visit Site | Full Report
#4 MININOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,406,653 - Pageviews: 6,597,203 (4.69 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #96 - Compete Rank: #1,123 Visit Site | Full Report
#5 BTJUNKIE.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,321,113 - Pageviews: 6,143,175 (4.65 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #403 - Compete Rank: #2,286 Visit Site | Full Report
#6 TORRENTREACTOR.NET - Daily Visitors: 898,167 - Pageviews: 1,796,334 (2 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #391 - Compete Rank: #1,500 Visit Site | Full Report
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET - Daily Visitors: 888,663 - Pageviews: 1,581,820 (1.78 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,086 - Compete Rank: #3,477 Visit Site | Full Report
#8 MONOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 622,539 - Pageviews: 1,512,770 (2.43 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,736 - Compete Rank: #11,068 Visit Site | Full Report
#9 EXTRATORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 594,026 - Pageviews: 2,952,309 (4.97 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,199 - Compete Rank: #5,760 Visit Site | Full Report
#10 BTMON.COM - Daily Visitors: 551,256 - Pageviews: 1,025,336 (1.86 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,754 - Compete Rank: #7,009 Visit Site | Full Report
#11 KICKASSTORRENTS.COM - Daily Visitors: 489,477 - Pageviews: 1,830,644 (3.74 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,129 - Compete Rank: #6,178 Visit Site | Full Report
#12 VERTOR.COM - Daily Visitors: 418,194 - Pageviews: 857,298 (2.05 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,365 - Compete Rank: #6,821 Visit Site | Full Report
#13 EZTV.IT - Daily Visitors: 408,690 - Pageviews: 948,161 (2.32 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,751 - Compete Rank: #16,064 Visit Site | Full Report
#14 SUMOTORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 384,929 - Pageviews: 869,940 (2.26 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,737 - Compete Rank: #6,039 Visit Site | Full Report
#15 ALIVETORRENTS.COM - Daily Visitors: 361,168 - Pageviews: 664,549 (1.84 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,555 - Compete Rank: #8,391 Visit Site | Full Report
#16 FENOPY.COM - Daily Visitors: 346,911 - Pageviews: 655,662 (1.89 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,494 - Compete Rank: #6,825 Visit Site | Full Report
#17 TORRENTPUMP.COM - Daily Visitors: 342,159 - Pageviews: 1,064,114 (3.11 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,880 - Compete Rank: #10,954 Visit Site | Full Report
#18 TORRENTHOUND.COM - Daily Visitors: 270,876 - Pageviews: 436,110 (1.61 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #3,108 - Compete Rank: #9,589 Visit Site | Full Report
#19 TORRENTPORTAL.COM - Daily Visitors: 266,124 - Pageviews: 548,215 (2.06 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,878 - Compete Rank: #8,045 Visit Site | Full Report
#20 DEMONOID.COM - Daily Visitors: 247,115 - Pageviews: 274,298 (1.11 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,728 - Compete Rank: #5,927 Visit Site | Full Report
#21 ZOOZLE.NET - Daily Visitors: 218,601 - Pageviews: 655,803 (3,459 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #3,144 - Compete Rank: #71,461 Visit Site | Full Report
#22 SEEDPEER.COM - Daily Visitors: 218,601 - Pageviews: 375,994 (1.72 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,912 - Compete Rank: #7,548 Visit Site | Full Report
#23 TORRENTZAP.COM - Daily Visitors: 194,840 - Pageviews: 490,997 (2.52 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #5,252 - Compete Rank: #22,348 Visit Site | Full Report
#24 YOURBITTORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 190,088 - Pageviews: 321,249 (1.69 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #8,541 - Compete Rank: #20,391 Visit Site | Full Report
#25 SEARCH-TORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 171,079 - Pageviews: 501,261 (2.93 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #4,831 - Compete Rank: #132,233 Visit Site | Full Report

Top 25 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2009 | TorrentFreak.

In September, Demonoid, one of the world’s most important and well-loved trackers, went down with overwhelming hardware problems.

An update on the situation was not good, with the site owners forecasting severe data loss. Some user data and torrent files were predicted to be lost forever and the site’s code had been seriously damaged.

Then, on November 5th, Demonoid’s tracker began to function again, which was followed by another announcement by the site owners. None of the negative rumors and speculation were true – Demonoid would soon return.

“The parts of the site code that got deleted are being rewritten and should be ready soon. We are also working to try and minimize the data loss as much as possible,” they announced.

Since then, nothing much has happened, but a few hours ago Demonoid users discovered they are to get an early Christmas present.

At around 1:30am EST, Demonoid reappeared and started accepting logins from registered users.

“Hello! We are currently testing the newly written code. More downtime is hopefully not necessary, but might be a possibility. Welcome back, we missed you!” the admins said in an announcement.

In respect of the concerns over data loss, it appears that the latest database entries run to Friday September 11th 2009, but of course, Demonoid users are already uploading new torrents, reported to be as many as 150 thus far.

A TorrentFreak reader who as been following the situation since the site’s return told us: “Some users on the IRC channel (which still is active) report not being able to log in. Those that can log in have all noticed that their ratios were pretty much what they remembered them to be before the long downtime. I was able to log in just fine on my first attempt with correct ratio as well.”

As the site deals with various issues, it became a little unstable around 2 to 3 hours after its initial return and then went down again around 4:00am EST.

Although Demonoid’s RSS feeds aren’t functioning, at the time of writing the site appears to be running again, and displaying their famous demon logo all decked out in a santa hat.

Christmas really has come early for Demonoid fans. All that is need now is a gift for everyone in the community – a period of open registrations.

Christmas Comes Early For BitTorrent – Demonoid is Back | TorrentFreak.