Status Quo

[blubbso]

20 hours ago, IkarosBD said:

Yes, it sucks Kametsu can't offer downloads...but if all someone was doing was joining for downloads, you have to ask - were they ever going to really participate in the community? Were they ever really going to mingle with other like-minded users, discussing whatever comes to their mind, like a forum was intended to be?

Well... it's totally anecdotal evidence, but in all anime forums I'm active in, I came for the downloads and stayed for the community.

[Nekone]

1 hour ago, blubbso said:

Well... it's totally anecdotal evidence, but in all anime forums I'm active in, I came for the downloads and stayed for the community.

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.

 

[Pikanet128]

I’ve been wondering how many people are still being active now that we’re back up.

(of course we probably still need to wait a bit for some people who haven’t noticed yet)

 

[Cryptic]

before all this, I wasn't all that active. the majority of my posts were release threads and replies to them, and mirror posts. to me, anime is one of those things you discuss in an IM. I dunno why exactly, but I'm hardly active on the MAL forums as well

 

buut, this doesn't mean I'm not coming back. I did originally come for the downloads, and have since stayed for the community (more so on the IRC/discord side). I just probably won't post much here

 

overall, good job working everything out. coming back from a dmca isn't easy. hope it's smooth sailing now

[oxyros]

I think it is unfortunate that the release posts are now lost along with the download sections. As much as I understand the need for removing DDL sections of the forum I think it is disingenuous to say that everyone was only coming here to leech off of DDL links and not participate in any fashion to the community, particularly the anime ones. I am a video encoding geek, audiophile, and general AV nerd and I enjoyed some of the detailed information included in release posts, particularly from CTR. Mostly notably to me is the Cowboy Bebop release, which had extra effort put into the encoding side with more advanced techniques to remove noise, interlacing artifacts, and some other quirks with the raw BD to bring forth a 1080p release that is arguably better in every way to its raw source. Now that release post is lost and for some reason the anime "scene" doesn't like NFO files, and all the torrent copies I see of CTR releases just link back to a now dead Kametsu link in their descriptions. People who like to know how the sausage gets made now have no way of knowing what went into a CTR release, not to mention now the raws and subs groups are not being highlighted (except in the MKV metadata I guess).

 

Ultimately I believe the sharing of media does itself create a community as many anime can't be streamed or purchased in the West in anyway. Not that I expect Kametsu to return to what it was before but at this point CTR, deanzel, LostYears, ShadyCrabs, Scyrous, etc are kind of homeless. Even though everything they ever posted here is easily found via other public websites, they all used Kametsu as a home base. I hope they continue to provide insight and detail about their releases for the side of the community that are able to join discussions thanks to the media they share in some form or another.

Edited January 31, 2019 by oxyros

[Pikanet128]

2 hours ago, oxyros said:

I think it is unfortunate that the release posts are now lost along with the download sections. As much as I understand the need for removing DDL sections of the forum I think it is disingenuous to say that everyone was only coming here to leech off of DDL links and not participate in any fashion to the community, particularly the anime ones. I am a video encoding geek, audiophile, and general AV nerd and I enjoyed some of the detailed information included in release posts, particularly from CTR. Mostly notably to me is the Cowboy Bebop release, which had extra effort put into the encoding side with more advanced techniques to remove noise, interlacing artifacts, and some other quirks with the raw BD to bring forth a 1080p release that is arguably better in every way to its raw source. Now that release post is lost and for some reason the anime "scene" doesn't like NFO files, and all the torrent copies I see of CTR releases just link back to a now dead Kametsu link in their descriptions. People who like to know how the sausage gets made now have no way of knowing what went into a CTR release, not to mention now the raws and subs groups are not being highlighted (except in the MKV metadata I guess).

 

Ultimately I believe the sharing of media does itself create a community as many anime can't be streamed or purchased in the West in anyway. Not that I expect Kametsu to return to what it was before but at this point CTR, deanzel, LostYears, ShadyCrabs, Scyrous, etc are kind of homeless. Even though everything they ever posted here is easily found via other public websites, they all used Kametsu as a home base. I hope they continue to provide insight and detail about their releases for the side of the community that are able to join discussions thanks to the media they share in some form or another.

I see your point 

what I would say is if I found a page of info important I would archive it with the release (by saving the page). 

I know it’s to late and there is a lot lost

but that’s just how things go.

i just suggest if you find something that important in the future archive the page.

 

 

[PannenkoekenNL]

No offense but this forum will probably nearly be dead in a few weeks/months. There will surely be an alternative site that does have downloads, for which almost all people came here.

[Scyrous]

4 hours ago, oxyros said:

Not that I expect Kametsu to return to what it was before but at this point CTR, deanzel, LostYears, ShadyCrabs, Scyrous, etc are kind of homeless. Even though everything they ever posted here is easily found via other public websites, they all used Kametsu as a home base. I hope they continue to provide insight and detail about their releases for the side of the community that are able to join discussions thanks to the media they share in some form or another.

What bothers me the most is that a significant portion of the site seems to have been lost for no reason. I get how removing all links might have been necessary to comply with all the DMCA crap Kametsu had to face. But I find it very hard to believe the mere discussion of piracy/releases (without any sort of links being shared) also puts Kametsu in some kind of serious danger. I would have been fine with a text-only index where I could continue to post updates about my current/future projects and where others could ask questions (and in the same vein, I personally believe project topics without actual download links would have been totally fine). But even that seems to be out of the question now. Or perhaps I'm just looking in the wrong places. In any case, I can't find any sort of place on the site dedicated to piracy anymore. And I think that's overkill.

 

4 hours ago, oxyros said:

As much as I understand the need for removing DDL sections of the forum I think it is disingenuous to say that everyone was only coming here to leech off of DDL links and not participate in any fashion to the community, particularly the anime ones.

I agree. I initially came here specifically for the downloads and didn't start putting out my own releases until over half a year later. I stayed because of the community. I rather enjoyed the community aspect and being able to discuss my own and other's releases. Now that all of that's gone, there just isn't much to do here for me anymore.

Edited January 31, 2019 by Scyrous

[Koby]

2 hours ago, PannenkoekenNL said:

No offense but this forum will probably nearly be dead in a few weeks/months. There will surely be an alternative site that does have downloads, for which almost all people came here.

I think it's beyond silly to act like every website on the internet can only live if it's a pirate site. There are way more legitimate sites than pirate sites and they do just fine.

Even Kametsu spent 1/3 of it's life without downloads and was actually way more active during that time than it ever was during the "prime of content distro".

 

Back in the days prior to downloads, the forum averaged 2,000+ posts a day. During the time of downloads, it averaged maybe 3,000 a month.

 

So while visitor numbers and content soared, the actual participation in the community dwindled. I'm sure it didn't help that a lot of interaction moved away from the forum into IRC and Discord either, but many of our old staff members left as the Distro section gained momentum, because they didn't want to be apart of such a site or because interest in the sections they were interested in were being bombarded by spam and the members they liked to interact with moved on. We saw the death of our once extremely active roleplay and graphics sections once Distro hit it big. My good friend Koga, a co-admin who came from the Kametsu x YGO Underground merger also decided to step down.

 

As IkarosBD said earlier, the content distro killed legitimate discussion as those wanting to do so were bombarded by 1-post leechers spamming random threads, people lost the desire to even bother, and most of them vanished.

 

Again, people who never bothered to post or interact with absolutely anything or anyone past their initial "Hi" post added nothing to the community, so their loss takes nothing away.

 

To say a forum lives or dies on 1-time posters who never participated in anything is a very silly viewpoint.

 

I'm not naive. I know a vast portion of the users will move on. I know some of them were big contributors to the site and community. I know them leaving is a big loss. Though at the same time, it is what it is, and there is nothing that can be done about it.

 

Harping on it does nothing but kill the spirit of those who want to try their damnedest to make the community thrive by other means.

 

I do however feel that there are plenty of users that will stick around or visit in some capacity from time to time, and those friends are worth maintaining a home away from home for them to visit. And I whole-heartedly believe we can build the community up again with time, patience, and a lot of hard work.

 

I'm very experienced in these kinds of things. I ran very successful communities for nearly a decade prior and during Kametsu and even ran Kametsu for nearly 5 years prior to ever having "downloads".

 

Only reason those other communities don't exist today is because I felt the desire to merge them into Kametsu to have one userbase rather than multiple split communities; so it lessened my work load and brought everyone to one place (it's possible I might revive some of those old sites, even though I no longer own the domain names they once resided on, I still have the site files for them).

 

There is zero reason why the community must "die" just because one thing is taken away. The "Content Distro" was not what made Kametsu, it was only but a part of the site, and the site will continue on down other avenues; breathing new life into the community. Drawing users in with other things, old members who left cause they didn't want to be on a pirate site may return or they may not, who knows; but I'll say this much, the forum has been more active discussion-wise this last week than it had been in quite some time.

 

IRC and Discord are still thriving as much as they ever did too.

 

As long as the core groups of friends stick around, Kametsu will live. We'll be cutting costs since we won't likely need as beefy a server, and we may be looking into other means to fund the site or get it within manageable means. I'm sure advertising will help, especially with the Steam key Giveaways, and if the stuff with FUNimation comes to fruition we may even be able to have giveaways with various anime swag and merchandise. And we have many other features we plan to roll out in regards to "epeen" features for active users, hiring staff to maintain various aspects, and with a new networking offer we may be able to bring in legitimate youtube game/anime reviewers and bloggers, etc. Thanks to some new friends I've recently made.

[Pikanet128]

2 minutes ago, Koby said:

I think it's beyond silly to act like every website on the internet can only live if it's a pirate site. There are way more legitimate sites than pirate sites and they do just fine.

Even Kametsu spent 1/3 of it's life without downloads and was actually way more active during that time than it ever was during the "prime of content distro".

Back in the days prior to downloads, the forum averaged 2,000 posts a day. During the time of downloads, it averaged maybe 3,000 a month.

It’s probably just going to take a bit of time but in the end the Kamunity will Live.

 

Heck I’ve been more active this month because I can talk without being hounded for releases.

its why my activity went pretty much to nill in the last year was because I had no time to actively release or keep links working but would have had time to chat a bit every once in a while.

but I stayed away because I kept being asked for stuff.

 

[Jaan]

It's a real shame about what went down. There were a lot of high quality releases and discussions around these releases that were unique to Kametsu and that was a nice thing I'm sure many users enjoyed. I do understand though that the admins were in a tough position and had to do what they did.

Hopefully something like what @Scyrous said can still happen, where no links are distributed or posted but information and discussion about releases can still be posted and updated for those who wish to look further elsewhere to find them. I really don't think doing that would cause any (legitimate) legal problems. I wish this could be done as sort of a compromise between the security of the forum/admins and for those releasers/users who called Kametsu home.

[PhoenixPress]

"Pointing people in the direction of" piracy is not going to help keep Koby's nose clean in the eyes of the copyright owners who're already scrutinizing his every move.

[Scyrous]

3 hours ago, PhoenixPress said:

"Pointing people in the direction of" piracy

Let me stop you right there. No one ever said this.

 

Discussing a release (for example: Death.Note.S01.540p-Hi10p.BluRay.FLAC2.0.x264-CTR) doesn't tell anyone where to get it. I talked about the discussion of releases. Not vaguely pointing users towards said releases. I didn't say anything about ''oh by the way, you can find it on <website> or <XDCC bot>''. Nothing of the sort.

 

If the word CTR here (I can't think of any other plausible word) is somehow meant to point people towards piracy, you might as well ban the words Kametsu, Koby or SCY then. Or any word that could be vaguely connected to piracy.

 

There's this subreddit named /r/piracy with over 300k subscribers. Thousands of users discussing piracy every single day, with no illegal links being shared (and those who do and disregard the rules get banned). The mere discussion of piracy isn't going to get anyone in jail or put them at risk, lol.

Edited February 2, 2019 by Scyrous

[Hark0n]

On 1/31/2019 at 9:55 PM, Scyrous said:

I agree. I initially came here specifically for the downloads and didn't start putting out my own releases until over half a year later. I stayed because of the community. I rather enjoyed the community aspect and being able to discuss my own and other's releases. Now that all of that's gone, there just isn't much to do here for me anymore.

^This.

 

I found this community from AniPas and I joined there for the downloads, but over time I started to participate in some discussions and "moved" my focus away from getting the content and discussing it instead.

When I joined Kametsu, I was hoping to have similarly enjoyable experience discussing more technical aspects of the content (anime mostly) and I did. But with the change in direction I am no longer sure what I will be doing on the site - probably just reduce my activity to "lurking".

 

I am not blaming anyone from the staff for the changes, but it is still sad to lose all those posts.

[Deleted]

Plenty of users who received rep points and rank upgrade because of Download Section will have benefit over any future users.

 

  I joined this site after the C-W shutdown, and that's what's sad for me is that we just lost hundreds of collection of vintage cartoon shows that was posted/rescued on Kametsu. What a shame...

 

On 2/3/2019 at 12:18 AM, Koby said:

For another thing I created Kametsu in 2004, when I was only 14 or 15 years old, and I registered the domain publicly because it was never intended to become the "pirate haven" it became.

Should've taken action before everyone decided it would be good to merge with C-W. It was obvious as to what would happen when a release site like C-W was being taken over by Kametsu.

Edited July 19, 2019 by Deleted

[Koby]

10 hours ago, Scyrous said:

There's this subreddit named /r/piracy with over 300k subscribers. Thousands of users discussing piracy every single day, with no illegal links being shared (and those who do and disregard the rules get banned). The mere discussion of piracy isn't going to get anyone in jail or put them at risk, lol.

You make a good point; and there is the likelihood we restructure some of those boards you're talking about into a single "Piracy Talk" board in order to discuss the on-goings of the piracy world, while not offering anything of the sort. It depends on a few things falling into place and we still have plenty of other things to take care of regarding getting some other things operational and other changes we've yet to implement.

[slick1109]

5 hours ago, Koby said:

You make a good point; and there is the likelihood we restructure some of those boards you're talking about into a single "Piracy Talk" board in order to discuss the on-goings of the piracy world, while not offering anything of the sort. It depends on a few things falling into place and we still have plenty of other things to take care of regarding getting some other things operational and other changes we've yet to implement.

Speaking of ...... It appears that the downloads section is not the only part of the forum that was removed.  Parts of the Tantalus Hideout also seem to be missing, especially all threads that discussed downloading from various streaming services.  Wouldn't that be considered "Piracy Talk"?  If so, what was your motivation behind removing them?  I assume with everything that was going on, you just wanted to remove anything at all that could be deemed Questionable (which I can certainly understand).

[Koby]

1 hour ago, slick1109 said:

Speaking of ...... It appears that the downloads section is not the only part of the forum that was removed.  Parts of the Tantalus Hideout also seem to be missing, especially all threads that discussed downloading from various streaming services.  Wouldn't that be considered "Piracy Talk"?  If so, what was your motivation behind removing them?  I assume with everything that was going on, you just wanted to remove anything at all that could be deemed Questionable (which I can certainly understand).

Speaking about the existence of piracy and discussing releases out there isn't the same as posting DRM cracks for illegally ripping stream services, which is what I think you're asking about? Technically explaining exactly how to rip something and giving the tools to do so would fall under illegal activity. Kind of like the loophole with emulators, where they could legally give you everything the emulator needed to work, but supplying you with a bios is somehow what makes it illegal and causes them to be get C&D. So I believe saying something like x-program allows you to rip this service might be okay, but giving a step-by-step tutorial about how to utilize said script would be questionable.

 

But yeah, initially we wanted to ensure absolutely anything that could possibly be questionable was removed. As you're probably aware, even using character art in avatars and signatures would be infringement if not for the fair-use clause for example. So the way the law works can easily be twisted against a website. There were claims that because we had a download section we were labeled a pirate site and a pirate site somehow isn't privy to the fair-use clause and thus we were being DMCA'd on all sorts of things such as the background wallpapers, etc. before hand. In any case, in our current state, everything has been dropped and an official "cease-fire" claimed and we've been in a great many "friendly" talks, even after the board was brought online to ensure things are good on both sides and and anything we possibly missed in our initial sweeps are being flagged/reported directly to us to handle by removal rather than additional DMCA's issued. So I want to ensure what we do going forward isn't going to sour that relation.

[Ligroso]

29 minutes ago, Koby said:

Speaking about the existence of piracy and discussing releases out there isn't the same as posting DRM cracks for illegally ripping stream services, which is what I think you're asking about? Technically explaining exactly how to rip something and giving the tools to do so would fall under illegal activity. Kind of like the loophole with emulators, where they could legally give you everything the emulator needed to work, but supplying you with a bios is somehow what makes it illegal and causes them to be get C&D. So I believe saying something like x-program allows you to rip this service might be okay, but giving a step-by-step tutorial about how to utilize said script would be questionable.

 

But yeah, initially we wanted to ensure absolutely anything that could possibly be questionable was removed. As you're probably aware, even using character art in avatars and signatures would be infringement if not for the fair-use clause for example. So the way the law works can easily be twisted against a website. There were claims that because we had a download section we were labeled a pirate site and a pirate site somehow isn't privy to the fair-use clause and thus we were being DMCA'd on all sorts of things such as the background wallpapers, etc. before hand. In any case, in our current state, everything has been dropped and an official "cease-fire" claimed and we've been in a great many "friendly" talks, even after the board was brought online to ensure things are good on both sides and and anything we possibly missed in our initial sweeps are being flagged/reported directly to us to handle by removal rather than additional DMCA's issued. So I want to ensure what we do going forward isn't going to sour that relation.

 

I do not want to be inconvenient, but I would like to ask some questions, were you as an administrator aware that this could happen? If the answer is yes, why did not you do something about it long before it happened? I hope not to be metiche or bother with these simple questions, because I know that kametsu would have been saved if they had taken some measures, since I have seen sites that have lasted years with their downloads, some of them are private sites or private forums.
I think if you, as administrator, knew that the downloads might not comply with the DMCA, you could have done something before it happened, but I wonder why you did not.

[Koby]

20 minutes ago, Ligroso said:

 

I do not want to be inconvenient, but I would like to ask some questions, were you as an administrator aware that this could happen? If the answer is yes, why did not you do something about it long before it happened? I hope not to be metiche or bother with these simple questions, because I know that kametsu would have been saved if they had taken some measures, since I have seen sites that have lasted years with their downloads, some of them are private sites or private forums.
I think if you, as administrator, knew that the downloads might not comply with the DMCA, you could have done something before it happened, but I wonder why you did not.

Because the loophole would be either erasing my existence from the internet (so that my real identity isn't traceable), changing domain name to something new with private registration from the start (so my real identity isn't searchable via domain info) and removing anything that would link it back to Kametsu or me, putting the server behind reverse proxy (so the server provider and location isn't known), killing off all social media accounts for the site (so they can't be DMCA'd separately on random things), or for me to move out of the country and to some other country where they don't comply with copyright laws etc. When it comes down to it, the issue was less to do with the actual site and more to do with the fact that I myself became a big known target all around the anime scene (shoot I was one of the few anime fansubbers still active that had been active more than 10 years ago, pretty much everyone in the anime scene knows of Koby and Kametsu) and my real identity was out there because I made very little effort to conceal who I was. For one thing my username 'Koby' is actually my real name. For another thing I created Kametsu in 2004, when I was only 14 or 15 years old, and I registered the domain publicly because it was never intended to become the "pirate haven" it became. My personal email address is easily reverse searchable on various social medias too. So when it comes down to it, any possible action I could have made in the last few years would have just simply been too late. I would have had to start a brand new community and a brand new online identity in order to have prevented such things.