Thread: Boxtorrents now BakaBT

First off, I have to make something clear: I will not link either site, since they host Licensed material, and neither should any of you, if someone does in this thread, they will get an automatic infraction, no warnings, regardless of how long you've been a member here.

Do your own Google searching.

Now, on to the news story (In spoiler tags since its quite long) :

 click to show spoiler

Dear BakaBT Community (aka ex-Boxtorrents Community),

I can imagine the emotions going through you right now, including confusion and anger, but before you judge anything, I want you to know the explanation for all of this. This post will be somewhat long, so bear with me here and please read to the very end.

As you may recall, some time ago Box removed the ads from Boxtorrents because of some spyware/virus issues that some users were reporting and Boxtorrents became supported by donations only. Well, we've always been concerned about whether there were enough donations to keep the site afloat and whether we need to come up with alternative ways of paying for the site (for those of you who were aware, the site was barely staying afloat a couple of years back). And so we've voiced this concern to Box several times. However, each time, he failed to give us a straight answer as to exactly how much we've been getting in donations, and only inferred that it was enough to pay the bills every month with a little extra over. Which we were fine with, since we figured that little bit of extra could be used in emergencies or for any necessary upgrades.

After a while though, curiosity got the best of us, and so Jarudin wrote a script to get an idea of just how much money we were getting from donations. Note that this was based entirely on how much upload credit donators have gotten, since we have no access to the Paypal account the donations went to. When Jarudin and I saw the results, we were shocked, to say the least. We won't say how much exactly, but let's just say that based on the numbers (after double/triple/quadruple-checking the numbers, even adding them up manually), we haven't really needed any donations to keep the site operaable for a long time now.

You can imagine the betrayal we felt after seeing this. We had always believed that donations were for paying for operating the site only. If this was so, then what were all the extra donations going to be used for? Even considering how much work and sacrifice Box put in the past to keep Boxtorrents afloat, we couldn't exactly ignore what we saw. We had believed in the spirit of Boxtorrents and don't believe in profiting from operating an Anime torrent site. We considered confronting Box about this, but considering his evasiveness about donations, we felt that that was all the answers we needed.

And so Jarudin and I thought long and hard about what to do about this. Eventually, we decided to do what we did. There were three things we wanted to accomplish: Keep the Boxtorrents community and site alive (after all the hard work that staff and members put into it), stop the unnecessary donations, and to correct the mistakes that we made (i.e. for not realizing this sooner). And this was the best method we could think of to accomplish all three (As an aside, before you take anything out on the other staff, they didn't know anything about this either).

So we saved all the site/tracker/forum/wiki/etc. code and databases and brought it over here to BakaBT. We felt fine with doing this since most of the work was done by the staff and not Box, so we felt it belonged to the community and not Box himself. Plus, as many of you may know, Box had little impact on day-to-day operations since it has all be handled by the staff (save donations and contact with our provider) for a while now, which only reinforced our feelings about re-using the code from Boxtorrents. And that is basically how BakaBT came to be and Boxtorrents ceased to be.

I will say this now: we did NOT do this to profit from it, nor will we profit from it. We will be transparent about the donations that we receive, including something similar to the donation meters you've seen at various fansubber/ripper sites. All donations will only be used to pay for operational costs and any hardware upgrades. Extra money will only be used to pay for the site in advance/roll over to the next month. If we get a lot of donations, we'll even disable the donation button to prevent us from having too much extra. We understand that much trust has been lost through this incident and so we want to earn it back again and then to keep your trust moving forward.

Finally, as you can see, we've saved everything from Boxtorrents, so you should see little lost from the transition over. For the most part, we plan to run the site similarly to how Boxtorrents was run with a few exceptions, which you will find out soon. We fully realize that there will be a fallout from all of this, and we're prepared to face it. But hopefully, BakaBT will continue to go strong and truly continue in the spirit that we all believed Boxtorrents was founded upon.

Yours Truly,
Malus.

Big news, considering that Boxtorrents (now BakaBT) was/is one of the largest Trackers (and arguably the place to go to get complete sets of any anime/manga/ost) for Anime out there (With the exception of maybe AnimeSUKI and Hongfire).

I've been with the community there just about as much time as I have been here, so when I saw the site change and noticing that none of my torrents were working, I did a double take, then promptly changed my bookmarks and re downloaded my torrents.

If you don't want to read the story above, here's whats happened in a nutshell:

Boxtorrents was once supported by Advertisments. Those ads got infected by spyware and viruses, so they were taken down and the site was supported by donations only, and you could even increase your ratios by doing so. Box (Site founder) said that the donations would only go towards site upkeep.

Curiosity of the staff, who have little contact with Box (Box did very little to maintain the site itself as well), got the better of them, and ran a script to see just how many donations were received (Based on ratio changes from donations, they don't have access to the paypal account that was used, only Box did).

This ammount 'shocked' them, and the realization that Box was making a profit of their work lead to the creation of BakaBT.

Thoughts? Reactions?

I for one am glad that people are no longer being deceived out of their money.