What happened to the torrent listings?
 

hi

been using animesuki for years as my source for unlicensed subs, but as of the last month or so iv not been seeing any torrent releases or any of the old torrent lists. What happened??

Thanks

Hey, hia31.

Over the last few months, pretty much the biggest part of the whole activity on AnimeSuki was focused on the Forums, not on its original purpose: Unlicensed Anime Series Torrent Listing.
There are multiple reasons for it, from more anime series getting licensed, to the quantity of the releases, even to the will for maintenance, that the Torrent Listing is the way as it is.

In any way, I would like to let you know that the whole focus might change in the future, as it was discussed with the owner of AS, GHDpro.

Something might be done about the Wiki as well while we are at it. Reason behind that is that AS runs on three Databases - The Site's, The Forum's, and the Wiki's.
Now, as we may see, the Wiki is even more of a dead wilderness that the unlicensed torrent listing, however, the forums are a completely different story.

So, keeping things rounded up, I'm sorry to hear that you cannot find all of the unlicensed anime series, but as there is not much of an activity regarding that, the owner was thinking about making a rather big move in order to change AS's main purpose.
I can send you a Personal Message and quote the main/important parts about the change that he discussed, if you interested in reading more about it.

Probably three out of four series are licensed immediately for streaming these days on either Crunchyroll or Funimation. There's also the occasional series licensed by Sentai that appears on theanimenetwork.com. As a result there are many, many fewer unlicensed series that might be listed here.

This is unfortunate for members outside North America, where some of these services may not be available. However there are other anime torrent listing sites that you can use which include subs for shows licensed in North America; nyaa.eu is probably the best choice.

There are several excellent torrent sites still running like banshees on the prowl. Unfortunately, forum rules prohibit listing them since they do not constrain on the basis of licensing. And yeah, the whole balkanized Internet (country X can't view something from country Y) can be a massive annoyance -- globalization is only for the Big Guys it seems.

Yeah, but I think... They were backlogged with many projects to add.

Is AnimeSuki ifself dead or something?

The Forum is still very much alive. But, the need for the torrent listing site and thus the interest in maintaining it has dwindled given that the vast majority of anime released these days are streaming or licensed and so can't be listed on the site. For the same reason, most people won't be coming to the site looking for anime any more. It's mostly an archive of older shows that will probably never be licensed or released.

Why so few releases lately?
 

I've seen so very few releases in July, even less in Aug, and Sept only had 1 release???
What's going on???

See this thread:
http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=121357

[mod edit: thread now merged into above-linked thread]

There only one uploaded this month.

Read up a few posts for more answers to your querries.

It appears that many subbers for OLD anime, that has never even been given a thought of being licensed in N.A., just aren't submitting to AnimeSuki. This isn't because they are banned, is it?

Every two weeks I have to go in search of these gems, since they are not actually listed on ANY torrent site... ALL of the groups/shows used to be posted here, but it seems only Luurah is currently following through. At the rate I am pulling things up, AS could still be getting 60 or so shows each month, all still considered unlicensed in N.A.

Could we entice some of these fansubbers by hosting their torrents or something? A few of the shows I get, aren't even updated on the groups' websites, and must be found with some rather god-awful searching, are only available via XDCC, or some unheard-of DDL service.

It really is very sad to keep visiting the site, only to see NO listings at all for several months.

Where to look for older series?
 

I've never been interested in the forum (having lots of other places to discuss anime). Seeing that you don't publish torrents anymore, Animesuki is close to a dead place as I'm concerned. I dearly hope fansubbing isn't going to die, as Animesuki has been such a great place getting updates about WMT series et al for the past couple of years. Now there are other places, but they are scattered around the Internet. Personally, nowadays I'm often at a place with a name starting with baka (but they only publish completed series).

As for the Internet getting transformed into a new sort of TV… Well, I don't like it, as little as I like balkanization. :-(

I think that fansubbing as we all knew it ~10 years ago is basically already dead. There are still a few people who want to sub old/obscure anime that has never seen a license or release, but the vast majority of the focus is on new arrivals, and nearly 100% of those (easily 90%+ anyway) are licensed right out of the gate (whether for streaming, disc release, or both). I don't think there are any other active listing sites that I'm aware of on the Internet that have our site's original philosophy about licensing any more, because there simply wouldn't be enough content to list, nor the motivation for people to maintain such a list.

So... I think it's pretty safe to say that the AnimeSuki torrent listing site is essentially at end-of-life, and isn't going to be actively maintained any more due to a lack of content to list that conforms to the original philosophy/ideals. People who are looking for "fansubs" nowadays will find them on sites that make little-to-no distinction about how we used to define "licensing", and I think they'll have to define for themselves what sort of ethical policy they want to abide by in terms of the content they download. As far as this Forum goes, given the increasing obscurity of the licensing concept, our Rules are going to be shifting towards a blanket "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding downloads/streams of any kind, excepting only officially-approved/sanctioned sources. This should be much more straightforward in an environment where the vast majority of the viewers don't care at all about physical media or have any idea how or why you'd buy it.

Anyway, I guess you can consider this post to be "spoilers" for policy changes that are incoming... but I think most people probably would have seen it coming anyway. It's sad in a way, but the fact that anime is so much more accessible than it was 10 years ago really means that many of the original goals of fansubbing have largely been achieved.

Does this mean that links to fansubs will no longer be permitted? What about series that were never licensed? Or ones that were once licensed but have since gone fallow?

Usually I link to licensed streams whenever possible, but how can I direct people to the sequels to Nodame Cantabile, or to older, unlicensed shows like Shion no Ou or Moshidora? Are you saying it's okay to list titles, but no longer okay to point to where those titles might be found?

The exact details of the policy change are still being finalized, so I don't know for sure how it'll land. I can say that the general direction when it was last discussed was that having a special exception just for those off cases is too confusing to most people, because it's likely that the place they'll link to will list everything anyway. It's cleaner to say "no links to downloads/streams, or mentioning sites that provide them". Obviously there are ways to search for things on the Internet...

It's a break from tradition, but I think the old ethics are basically lost to the new generation already. If someone is encouraged to watch something, they'll likely find it in the same way they find whatever else they want to watch.