I wanted to give a bit of a progress update of sorts on Kametsu's recovery as a community.
So far everything's been operating smoothly and most people have a clear understanding of what happened and why we took the actions we did. We've gotten the blog system back up and donations have finally reopened again.
But what bothers me is the number of people who apparently had only signed up for the downloads. See the problem here is, you forget this *SITE* is a forum. It is a DISCUSSION community. You DISCUSS things on it. That's what it's DESIGNED for. It was NOT set up only to facilitate access to downloads and nothing more. If you really weren't wanting to be a productive member of this community then why did you bother signing up if you weren't actually going to be a regular contributor? If anything, this caused more a problem for everyone than it helped people. Why? Because over time, downloads actually caused overall discussion activity to plummet.
Kametsu started out life as nothing more than a discussion forum. And it THRIVED. Because people engaged in social activity on a regular basis. There was nothing to distract people from that. None. But, as soon as downloads became a thing...over time you started to see that activity dwindle, and the majority of the "new members" signing up were only doing so for downloads, not to actually participate. Even worse, was the sharp uptick in the spam accounts as well - mostly attributed to the presence of downloads.
So on that note, if you're actually sticking around to be a regular part of this community...you have our sincerest thanks. It's people like you that we value the most above everything else, and it is a big driving reason why we decided to do what we did with the site in order to protect its most valuable asset - you.
All that aside, we've been watching the Status Quo thread for a while and I've seen a lot of subtle hinting that perhaps we're being too restrictive with the types of discussions we permit now on the site. And initially we wouldn't agree with you. But here's the thing - we've accomplished what we set out to accomplish and that is getting this site operational again along with some pretty solid plans for interesting replacements to what was lost. Because of this, the restrictions we currently have in place on what is and isn't allowable in terms of discussion topics seems a bit too overkill, and we recognize that.
I will be having a discussion with Koby over this in private to see if we can go ahead and ease many of those restrictions - to allow things such as piracy DISCUSSION topics, encoding topics, project topics, etc. Because as some people have pointed out, the key thing is not linking to pirated content - so long as people adhere to that sole policy, the rest can be eased/lifted.
We apologize for having to be this restrictive, but you have to understand, again, the first and foremost priority is this site and the people (like you) that comprise it and contribute to it. Hopefully though we can start to emerge further and really kick things back into gear. Just bear with us.
IkarosBD
Kametsu Systems Administrator