It's tracker sites that often look like ass.

Gazelle is awful, and far too many private trackers use it.

Gazelle really is bad. Is there an alternative? Maybe Ruby or Python?

There are different projects in the works by different trackers. Check back in a few months.

Is there anything better?

At the moment, no. However, several trackers are working on replacements.

what's so awful about it?

  - Custom wrapper around MySQLi, which doesn't support parametrized queries
  - No separation of Model, View and Controller (in 10 lines, there's SQL, HTML, JS, PHP and if you get lucky, PHP generating JS or piecing together HTML)
  - Their idea of IRC integration is to write a bot in PHP, where different pages send it raw IRC commands to execute
  - is_numeric used for most SQL injection checks
  - User information stored in two tables (users_main, users_info), for no apparent reason
  - About 1/3 of the code is in a file named script_start.php, which defines a mess of global variables and functions
  - They store PHP-serialized data in MySQL TEXT fields
  - They store pipe-separated data in MySQL TEXT fields

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Interestingly, movies.ioi is a relatively clean rails app.

Sure, we still have to refactor our TMDb client into a separate lib, stuff like that. But otherwise good clean MVC.

once upon a time, I thought it might be fun to hack on the gazelle project and give back to the community. so I grabbed the source from svn, opened one file, and promptly rm -fr'd.

I have nothing against the UX of gazelle, but the code is very, very bad PHP