Karyl

To all members, After some discussion with Koby, a preliminary decision has been made regarding the future of this website. The good news, is that we'll be keeping the forums around for now. To that end we'll be sprucing up the forums and underlying software. This is expected to occur over the next couple of weeks or so. Ultimately, we still may decide to fully wind it down at some point in 2023 but this is not definitive at this point. We'll post more details on these plans if and when we decide to do so. The Discord and IRC communities will remain as they are, in fact we may work on tighter integration with the website! Stay tuned... Rest assured, that if we do ultimately decide to "retire" the forums, they will likely be archived (though some "cleaning up" will occur as part of that process) as Koby and I are in agreement that a lot of the topics and subforums should be preserved rather than deleted. For those of you still sticking around, thanks for being a part of the community, as always! We greatly appreciate you!

UPDATE 8/30/2022: We are continuing to monitor the situation with the current Kametsu Discord server. As of this update it is still functioning. We are considering the option to sunset the old server and migrate everyone to the new server. For your reference, links to BOTH servers are below. If you are *NOT* joined to both, *PLEASE* join both! YOU CAN FIND THE LINKS TO BOTH OUR DISCORD SERVERS HERE: https://discord.kametsu.com/ Please stay tuned to the forums and IRC for more updates. --------------- ORIGINAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Due to Discord's unfair and unjust treatment of Kametsu's owner, as well as their total refusal to provide proof of any sort of wrongdoing committed by him, we were forced to create a backup Kametsu Discord server. Right now, the *NEW* Kametsu Discord server is EMPTY as we have not yet activated it. There will be no activity on it at the present time. However, if Discord's mods attempt to delete the current Discord server, it will become necessary to migrate to it. Therefore, please use the invite link at the bottom of this announcement to join the backup server. PLEASE NOTE: There will not be any current activity yet, as the backup Kametsu Discord server has NOT YET been activated. We only request you to join the backup server via the invite link in this post, and idle there just in case we do end up losing the current Discord server. SHOULD THE WORST COME TO PASS AND THIS ACTUALLY OCCURS - we will make a further announcement on our Facebook page as well as on the forums, and we will activate the backup server at that time with an @everyone announcement on the new server. We feel it's really unfortunate that the entire community has to suffer a punishment when they had done nothing wrong and the server itself was not even involved in the alleged violation. We will continue to stand by and support our community fully as we always have, and we thank you for sticking with us through these tough times. NEW DISCORD SERVER LINK CAN BE FOUND HERE: https://discord.kametsu.com/ - tAGAIN, the new Kametsu Discord server (Kametsu v2) *IS NOT YET ACTIVE*, we are only asking you to place yourself there for the time being just in case we do lose the current Kametsu Discord server!

This evening, multiple issues were brought to my attention by @Koby: Remote image loading appeared broken Some users were not receiving their usual emails (password reset, post notifications, digests [if you enabled that], etc) This issue was due to a configuration error upstream of the website that affected the server's ability to reach the internet - it was not allowing any traffic to flow out of the server to make the above things actually work. As a result, the backend image proxy system cached bad data due to it being unable to reach remote image URLs, breaking all remotely referenced images. On top of this, email system was broken because it was unable to contact DNS to resolve email hostnames. This one was on me, sadly - I was performing some upstream maintenance and left a faulty configuration in place that I had intended to remove. The issue has since been fixed, and emails should be flowing normally again though anything received for the past few weeks, up until tonight, will not be received. Remote image loading should also now function again. I'm sincerely sorry for any inconvenience that caused!

Good afternoon everyone! A bug was reported to me by @Koby wherein the redirect from http:// to https:// was not occurring automatically as it should have been, instead placing visitors to the http:// version of kametsu.com on a "default" page, the "It works!" page for the entire server. This was caused by a parsing issue with our webserver configuration files where it was not correctly interpreting the settings for the plaintext http:// version - it had believed that there was no configuration for the http:// version of kametsu.com and thus was placing visitors to this on the default configuration host instead of redirecting visitors to the secure https:// version of the site. An updated configuration file was uploaded with a corrected host configuration with a full proper URL defined within +the web server restarted. This appears to have fixed the issue. Moving forward we will likely be employing HSTS rules to force browsers to unconditionally use HTTPS mode by default even when http:// is entered in the address bar, which should help further reduce or even completely eliminate any other possible occurrence of this issue. My apologies for any inconvenience this issue caused!

Hi everyone! Few things to cover, first off - this is IkarosBD...but I have decided to change personas after 5-6 years. I'm still me, still the same ol' admin I always was. Just a different name, different avatar, etc. If you do not know where this name came from, see this link and this link. There, now with that out of the way - I finally have some news! Towards the end of this year, we will be making the move primarily to a blog-based website with the community refocused on our Discord and IRC channels. We will still retain the forums, of course, but they will probably take a backseat likely in an archived state at some point. Koby and I agreed that it's just too hard to completely let go of the forums so we settled on keeping them around for now. There is no definitive date yet for making the switch, the only thing I can say is it'll likely be towards the holiday season, likely between Thanksgiving and Christmas. My work will be transitioning back to the office in mid to late October so I may have to make some adjustments to that plan but that's what I'm aiming for at this time. For those of you that stuck with us - we thank you sincerely from the bottom of our hearts. Your loyalty and dedication to the community is greatly appreciated and without you we just wouldn't have one anymore! That being said, please, PLEASE get into our IRC and/or Discord servers! Links to Discord are in the menu bar up top and I'll try and publish up-to-date IRC information within the next few weeks or so. Our core community resides in those two locales - so please join us if you haven't already. Lurkers welcome, but feel free to start up a convo! Note that due to differing hours, there'll be lulls in activity. Look for more updates in this space soon!

Hey everyone! Sorry that took so long but the migration of the site to its new server is now complete! There exists a possibility of a few glitches here and there and maybe a hiccup or two - I'll be sorting those out if any over the coming days. In the meantime, if you notice anything out of the ordinary please don't hesitate to let myself or Koby know! Thanks again for your patience! We'll have more details about where we're going from here sometime in the middle of July most likely - stay tuned!

Hi @DemonTatsuya I'm unsure of who set your ban or why since the server's not providing this information to me at this time. In addition, the last record we have of the ban 'existing' was on January 22nd. Given this + the time frame that's passed, I have removed the ban. Again though since I don't know why you were banned in the first place, there's no way to ensure it wouldn't occur again so please reach out to me directly via private message if it does, so that I can investigate further. Apologies for the inconvenience.

@sniper23 yes, the sections were removed, but due to an error on my part, most (but not all) of the threads and posts within remained. I had incorrectly assumed that removing the sections would take all the threads and posts with it but this failed to occur. Since these threads/posts lost their parent forum, they also lost their permission sets, resulting in a default "deny all" when what should have been appearing is a "not found". Not even us admins could view them. We only became aware of it very recently when people began dropping us PMs asking what that was all about, and it was then that Koby discovered the issue and ran a more thorough cleanup, removing the orphaned threads properly this time.

Hey everyone! It has come to my attention that many people were coming across bookmarked/linked threads that led to a 'no permission' message. Let me take the time to clarify this for you. As you may or may not have been aware, quite some time ago Kametsu was the victim of copyright trolls - we were forced to make a very difficult decision. Do we care more for keeping the download sections? Or do we prioritize the site and its members? Ultimately, to protect the site's members, we made the difficult decision to remove all the download sections from the site. Unfortunately, there was no right or wrong decision here, as there would have been highly negative consequences with either decision. We were stuck between a rock and a hard place with no other way out. As it would turn out, though, the initial purge of those sections didn't exactly go as I planned. While the vast majority of those threads were indeed purged...what ended up happening in the end was, many of the old download threads were somehow missed in the initial round, and thus ended up "orphaned" when their parent forum/content they were attached to were purged. Thus, there were no longer any parent permissions to inherit - which resulted in the "No permission" message. Koby discovered this only recently and executed a more thorough cleanup, which now should correctly result in a "Not found" message instead. This does not change anything - we are not in any position to "go back" to the way things were. We have instead asked repeatedly what sort of site you'd like to see Kametsu become. To that end, we are most certainly open to ideas as to format change. That aside, please stop asking us about downloads. There's nothing we can tell you that hasn't already been said. We want to refocus the site, so if you have something constructive to contribute to that, you are more than welcome to send us a PM. Thanks for taking the time to read and understand this. As we've said many times in the past, we know this is a heartbreaking thing, we didn't want to have to do it but there was just little alternative left. We care more about the site, and of course the people that make up its community, than any 'downloads'.

Heads up to everyone, During the course of the next week or so, I will be tweaking and testing some things on the server backend - mainly to optimize it for resource usage but also to see if I can't speed it up a little bit more. This activity will be done sporadically, not consecutively, and could possibly result in periods of time where the site slows down or perhaps even goes unavailable briefly from time to time. There will also be a time where I'll carry out the usual slew of regular backend software updates. Date(s): Between July 6th, 2020 and July 16th, 2020 Time(s): Sporadically, for an hour or two at a time. No actual set specific times. For: Backend adjustments/tweaking+testing, software updates and adjustments. Downtime: None expected, but could be brief periods of slowness and/or brief moments of unreachability. Rest assured that, at any point I'm carrying out work on the site, I will be available to fix any errors that occur quickly. Most people probably won't notice much going on at any point - this is just to make everyone aware in case you do. Thanks for your understanding!

Another big reason our initial plans fell through is mainly due to my own schedule and life crises. I've transitioned to full-time work 40 hours a week, and that just hasn't left me the sort of time I'd like to have to do things for the site. But never fear, I still fully intend to follow through, I just have to find some good, decent, solid time to do it. It'll come eventually but I'm not giving up on things here and I've zero intent to do so in the future. That, I promise.

This is where Koby and I kinda diverged. I started playing Trails in the Sky, he started with Trails of Cold Steel. Technically, I followed the in-game timelines, if I'm not mistaken. I'm probably not as well-versed in the whole timeline as Koby is though. I do know that the timelines do intertwine between each different series.

Truth be told, this is another one of Sweeney's underhanded tactics against Steam. Nothing new here. Epic really isn't gonna get anywhere the way they're going with this, Steam already has too much a solid foothold for Epic to overtake them that easily. As far as I'm concerned, now that I know about this...should I ever install Epic's client, all Epic's launcher is gonna get when it tries to read Steam files on my system, is a big ol' nasty Windows "Access is denied" message. A clever Windows admin such as myself also knows the tricks to prevent program installation detection and process listing. And there's not a damn thing they can do about any of it.

@Beave even if those aspects already exist, there's always room to expand upon them. The idea we had really was to just do a complete reorganization of things. Move some things around, expand some of the existing topical forums, things like that. There are gaps to fill, but we can't really think of any better way to fill those gaps than to ask the community. The idea we wanted to go with is to do a refocus onto gaming while keeping our love for anime and cartoons alive, we just didn't feel right "just doing" that without asking people first. As far as anime discussion goes...the loss of downloads was a major blow, but we also recognize that the community absolutely loves their anime and their cartoons. To that end, we've been planning on doing a lot more expansion upon that very topic, perhaps adding in some special 'prizes' for perhaps randomly picked winners from time to time Really we can do some similar things for other topical areas like gaming, think you already saw an example of what we attempted to do with that. The same idea might be expandable to other topical areas, for example maybe some music-related giveaways from time to time. You get where I'm going with that. At this stage it's more about finding a direction we want to take the site in, given Kametsu can no longer do what it used to do, because Koby and I are both still very much willing and able to keep things open. We just want you guys to decide which direction the site should be taken. The control is being placed firmly in your hands. Thanks for your reply!

@diarma86 there's a good reason we decided not to just 'pack up'. The site did start out as just a discussion forum. The download stuff was just an 'addon' to it and of course people just flocked to it...but it ended up also creating a lot of problems for the site as well - namely people that just sign up to do nothing but spam or cause trouble (mostly the former). This played a large part into Koby's decision, and by extension, mine. It was very difficult to do what we had to do. We knew the impacts of either decision. But I've said this a million times already - there is only one thing we care about more than anything else, and that's every single one of you. Even downloads being there couldn't hold a candle to how much we cared about our members. In the end we did what we had to do...not just to protect ourselves or this site, but also to protect each and every one of you. Because we just care that deeply. We realized that making this sort of call would mean the site would never be the same. It was not an easy sacrifice, believe us. But we'd rather keep the site and its members, than lose everything. You guys are why we keep doing this. No other reason. None. We'll be cooking up some stuff this summer, hopefully when I've got more time. Look forward to that!

@dealvidit are you sure it's also not the fact that I'm operating it on a much quicker server (mine!), or that my server administration skills played a part in it? LOL I mean ever since we migrated the site over here, it pretty much gave the site access to vastly more resources than it previously had available on its older server, namely because virtually nothing else runs on this server to consume its resource - like literally there's only one other low-end process running on this server and that's it. Other processes on the other server were consistently consuming resources and while for the most part that didn't hurt the site's performance too terribly much, it still had a noticeable negative impact. Mind you it's not the reason we migrated though, the reasoning there was more or less the fact that Koby didn't feel like we needed to be paying for server resources we're hardly using, and me (being my generous self) graciously stepped in and offered to host free of charge. All that aside though I'm very happy to see there are those that remain loyal to the community. They recognize the fact that, first and foremost, that is precisely what Kametsu is, what it started as, and what it will always continue to be. Thank you so much!

@Vaux I completely agree with all of that. This puts us in a good position to do so much more for people. Heck, if interest is high enough, we might actually give away physical copies of anime in events we might hold, say a tournament we might hold in an online game for example. Our position now might actually allow us to work out such deals with production companies like Funimation at some point down the line. But even if such deals never materialize, we would still quite easily be able to run these contests for you from our own pockets. Heck, we might even also give away gift subscriptions to streaming services like VRV, FunimationNow, etc as prizes. You get my point. One door closes. Another opens to potentially more possibilities.

@LeonVIII Koby and I were considering easing up on discussion restrictions, in fact. The key thing really is just keeping to our "no facilitating downloads" rule that we had to implement. Some of our own staff made the same suggestion internally, and we can see the benefit of doing so, so we think that the rest of the restrictions we set after the DMCA incident can go. We'll announce something when this is decided 100% for sure but for now that's where we're leaning.

The site migration was completed, albeit with a few bumps along the way that made it take like 6 hours instead of 2 and a half, lol. Really sorry about that, but things should be working properly again. Notice - Site Migration When: February 26, 2019 at 7:30 PM Duration: Approximately 2.5 hours What: Site migration to a different server Sorry for the short notice on this one, but it's important. I will be migrating the forums off of the current server onto my own servers. This is because, at this point, we're essentially paying for server hardware resources we're not even really using, and this is due in large part to the removal of downloads from the site. It simply doesn't make any sense to continue to pay for the server the forums are on because of this, so I have instead made an offer to Koby to host the forums on my own server, free of charge. To facilitate this move, I will be deactivating the forum website right around 7:30 PM CST this evening. I've set aside 2.5 hours to perform the move, but if things go as planned it'll not take the entire window to do. The gameplan is as follows: At or around 7:30 PM CST, deactivate the forum website in the webserver configuration, redirect all traffic to a static page Perform full database dump (expected time: about 15-30 minutes maximum) After confirming dump integrity, migrate the dump file to the new server and import it (expected time: about 15-30 minutes maximum) Begin transferring website-related files to the new server (expected time: about 45 min to an hour maximum) Migrate webserver configuration files to the new server, and locally test configuration (expected time: about 10 minutes or so) Make the necessary changes within DNS (expected time: will vary depending on various ISP's DNS caching policies and refreshes) Obviously, since I have offered to host the forums completely free of charge, this raises the question for many of you: should I still donate? The answer to that is, absolutely! Even though I will be hosting the site itself free of charge, Koby still has to pay the licensing costs of the forum software itself as well as the themes. So yes, continue to donate. The only change is that money will just be used to keep the forum software license current as well as pay for these wonderfully designed themes we have. Oh and, of course, @Koby is still insistent upon compensating me for the trouble even though I said I'd do it for free (stubborn guy, LOL), so a portion might also be used for that as well. As always, IRC and Discord will both remain available. Again sorry for the short notice, but this move is that important and we feel that it's the best way to move forward from here. Thank you for your understanding!

I see a lot of misunderstanding here so let me try to clear this up, mainly to clarify some things that @Scyrous brought up previously. First and foremost is this - yes, initially, we wanted to start out with a clean environment, at least while we built up the rest of the site. You have to realize the first and foremost focus was getting the forums back up and going again. Which we did, and we're working on the little things now. But really, if I had to be completely honest, with the ultimate goal of getting the site going again accomplished...I don't see a need to completely stifle all talk of piracy. Piracy in of itself is a perfectly fine discussion topic so long as people aren't actually linking to pirated content. Things like the A/V section for example I saw as beneficial (much like @Catar did), and as people like Scyrous like to do, they like to discuss their projects and such and I do not see any problem with any of this. The key thing from all of it is that pirated content can't be linked to anywhere on the site. Discussion topics surrounding it should be fine. So @Koby perhaps now we should reconsider site policies towards these things and loosen up a bit. The worst is behind, I don't really think being this strict about it is necessary anymore so long as we keep actual linkage to pirated content off the site.

Fair point, but you still have to understand where we're coming from here. The existence of downloads from Koby's perspective was slowly starting to cause the community participation itself to decline. As more and more came, they went straight after the downloads and didn't bother to actually post around and get involved with the community. I can straight up tell you now that, we have a REALLY huge number of 0-post accounts - these are the people who cared nothing for participating and only wanted downloads. This is what we're talking about. On that same token, there were also those that signed up and did nothing but spam in the hopes of ranking up. They didn't care for the community, either. All they wanted was the top-level stuff. It's these specific types of people I'm referring to.

By all means though, participate. And don't forget about IRC and Discord. We still have both! Even if you're not much a forum person, if you feel more comfortable on IRC and/or Discord (especially IRC, hint hint) then by all means use 'em!