Friday, May 5, 2017

Panic in Anime Park

In the past couple of weeks, nyaatorrents - the most popular Japanese media torrent site - has disappeared, apparently taken down by its owner. BakaBT - the best archiving torrent site for translated anime - has gone private. Further, it is down for maintenance right now. As a result, all of Orphan's releases are currently unavailable.

The fansubbing community is still trying to adjust to this new reality. Some teams are hoping for a "nyaa replacement." Others have moved to other torrent sites. Because of the uncertainty, I don't intend to retorrent Orphan's releases until the situation is clearer. You can find magnet links to prior Orphan releases at the so-called nyaa archive, but they may or may not be seeded.

However, all is not lost. Thanks to the generous help of net colleagues, Orphan, for the first time, has an archive bot on IRC, in irc.rizon.net. The bot is called Orphan|Arutha, and it can be found in channels #news and #nibl. As of 07-May-2017, the bot is fully populated. New releases will also be put there. While the nyaa situation sorts itself, we'll create torrents on an alternate tracker (minglong for now) and list them on TokyoTosho as well.

The whole episode shows just how rickety and fragile the digital fansub distribution infrastructure actually was. Let's hope the community remembers this lesson going forward.

In the meantime, you can fire up your IRC client and head on over to #news or #nibl on irc.rizon.net to get your Orphan anime fix.


3 comments:

  1. I am also still reeling from this loss and never thought this day would come. A good lesson. I am using animetosho.org atm to find cached magnet links for nyaa torrents. A search for "orphan" shows your releases as well and probably all is not lost for the time being. Anyway we need a solid replacement that is hopefully more distributed and resilient. One idea might be a distributed database locally cached, like of which Perfect Dark and Bit Coin protocol employs. In the meantime, I will definitely come by your IRC channel to checkout the releases. I hope the smartest minds among anime fans are working on a solution and the dust will settle soon.

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  2. "we'll create torrents on an alternate tracker (minglong for now) and list them on TokyoTosho as well."

    Minglong has no single search indexer (only static group page) and TT's server is often unresponsive. What about using AniDex? Over-Time/LUURAH posts there.

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    Replies
    1. Anidex and Anirena have also had their problems in the past. The only reliable solution is IRC; so come to irc.rizon.net, channels #news or #nibl, and use Orphan|Arutha. Or you can get magnet links for old releases at the nyaa archive http://nyaarchive.moe, but they may not be seeded.

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