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The Future of MATV

MU etc
As many of you may already know, MegaUpload was shutdown recently, and most of the large file shareing sites are on a mass delete mission. This makes times a little more awkward for us, and makes us more than a little nervious. We don't need to use such sites of course, but its still a concern where this crackdown is heading.

Nyaa
Nyaa have closed down their public BitTorrent trackers, apparently due to the Pirate Bay loosing its court case in Sweden, meaning that running a Tracker is now considered illegal in Sweden, it would appear that is where Nyaa is based. The result is that many groups have now switched to openbittorrent's UDP tracker. The problem is our server side system dosnt support UDP trackers on BitTorrent. Further, FTV use the same client, so they are out of luck as well.

So...?
Just to re-cap - loss of the file share sites / cyber lockers, loss of the main anime tracker with the alternative being one we can't read.
The tracker issue kinda kills off our ability to operate about 80% of our DDLs, and then we don't have anywhere (except our servers) to put stuff, and theres a chance someone will come after us if we host it all ourselves.
Furthermore, FTV who we share our DDL server with, will likly drop their DDLs entirely as well.

This dosnt leave us in a good position at all, at this moment we have no idea what we're going to do, but being honest here, its starting to look like a good time to make an exit.
Comments and suggestions welcome in the forum and on irc - #matv on irc.rizon.net
 
DDLs Are Down Back/up

10:24 GMT
We appear to have an issue with our downloads server, it is currently down, therefore most of the DDLs are currently down.

No eta at present.

10:44 GMT
Server is accessable again, deciding to do some updates while its down, then we'll reboot it.
eta ~15-30 mins.

12:04 GMT
Server is back up. Slightly longer due to getting distracted by something else half way through :/

Everything should now be working fine.
 
Future Plans #2

The debate on what we're going to do long-term with MATV continues, FTV hasn't really got much further since the last update so nothing to report there.
The current proposal for MATV is that while we figure out what the long-term future plans are we're going to start a slow transition away from listing DDLs. AnimeSuki stopped providing data for all stream licenses some time ago, and with Crunchyroll's Anime membership a mere $6 a month, theres no real need to be watching these shows via fansub / ddls (those now screaming at your monitor 'region restriction!!' / 'NOT in the US!!!' - theres a simple solution, its called a VPN and it dosnt cost much more than CR's anime membership).

The other side of this debate is, 'Have we gone off course?' MATV was set up to help bring attention to the older classic animes that were forgotton by the R1 anime companies. Somwhere down the line we seemed to have drifted into trying to do everything (or anything) without much thought on where that was heading. I don't want this site to turn into some sort of anime cross between Megaupload and the Pirate Bay, and if we keep going in the current direction thats we're it will end up.

Therefore, MATV will start changing direction again, back to what we were set up to do - be a place to help Anime fans find good Animes (and with a preference for fully licensed methods where available). The goal will be a hybrid mix of current season animes via licensed streams and anime info for any series, and we'll keep our DDLs for those old forgotton animes no one bothered to license. I think thats a fair compromise, it supports the translated anime industry (R1 etc) and still helps people find the old forgotton animes no one bothered to license.

Thats our current plan, we welcome comments on the forum or come and talk to us in #matv on irc.rizon.net
 
Site Changes

So for anyone whos now wondering around the site with a big 'WTF?' on their face or thinking there in some sort of nightmare, well its not.
As of today, I have made some rather big changes, and naturally if I said what they are then it would kinda make it a bit pointless, but I will go as far as to say if your trying to find a certain type of content and can no longer find it, then well yes *that* is the change. I would therefore suggest using a streaming service such as Crunchyroll for your Anime viewing needs, something which I am hoping to be able to integrate more of on the site in the future.

What caused this? Well reading the news, seeing Lolipower close down (loli grew up), and our friends over at FTV looking to go the same sort of way as us, its about time we grew up as well. But unlike some other sites, we're not closing down, we're just going to evolve into something better, something thats actually useful and that you want to visit often. And something that helps you find good anime (in legitimate ways).

We'd like to thank everyone whos vistied us or used the site or been a part of the projects and all the fun times (and the bad times) over the years, and we hope that you will stick with us as we 'grow up' to be something better, but if you don't, then we understand. We really wish we could just keep on going like old times, but the risk is too high, and its not realistic anymore.

Remember, we're not going anywhere, we're just changing direction a little.
 
Update 8/3/12
So all the downloads are back on for the moment, we also have a potential new torrenter that works with UDP trackers, its not quite finished yet and we have an issue with it not running on Chihaya.
We're still looking at switching to streams, so we will be updating our listing policy with regard streamed shows, it might take a bit longer for us to integrate them in fully as it requires some more code changes.
I also now have the time frame for what FTV are doing, so it looks like we might as well continue on for one more season.

Rules - Updated
We have updated our terms of use policy to take into account releases with subs not in the US and stream licenses, as well as made our rules on DMCA notices more strict.
New terms are highlighted in red, rules in white are the existing ones.

No videos for any series that is licensed in the US/Canada/UK.
No videos for any series that has any license to Funimation (including streams).
No videos for any series that has its Japanese release imported and re-sold in the US officially with English subs (such as what Aniplex is doing with Fate/Zero etc).
Any account with content that causes us to recieve a DMCA notice will have the offending content deleted, the series will be banned (marked as licensed) and the user warned.
Any account that causes us to recieve a second DMCA notice will have all content deleted and the user perm banned.
Any user who is banned will be banned and blocked based on all available account details, anyone trying to bypass a ban will simply find more details are added to the ban profile, and again be deleted.
Any user who attempts to re-upload any file which is associated to either a licensed or removed series will be banned.

We honor and action all DMCA requests on a 'per series' basis, an IP holder need only submit a single notice for a series to have that permantly removed and banned, unlike many 'file lockers' we do not re-list files or require a notice per file. That has always been our policy.

In addition to the above, we are considering several new rules that cover stream licenses, the current plan is that we will not take on any more series that are available to US and Europe via Crunchyroll, and will go through and remove any already on the site as well. We may also go for not hosting anything if its available on Crunchyroll at all (ie including the US-only ones) Part of the issue is how to manage all these extra checks, so we might just go and drop anything with a stream license altogether, which will probably be easier anyway. We'll post an update when thats decided.
 
Update 19/03/12

Squid Girl Season 2 (Shinryaku!? Ika Musume II) has been marked as licensed as Media Blasters has revealed plans for a R1 release.

We havn't managed to fix the issue with the torrenter not running on Chihaya, or make enough space on an alternative server yet.
The reason is due to some issues with both an ISP and one of our hosts - nothing serious but they got in the way and slowed us down a fair bit, we're still kinda stalled until middle of this week, therefore its fairly obvious we're not going to catch up on this season before it ends.
 
Site News for 25/03/12

I've abandoned trying to get the new torrenter working on Chihaya, Miki was a lot better but theres an issue with reading the status output, and as my level of paitence < my level of code writing (which is also quite poor) I have given up on that as well for now. My level of motivation is at a record low at the moment, and has been for a while, therefore any progress on the site is almost non-existant, therefore I don't know when or even IF the new torrenter will be finsihed.

Without a working torrenter or any of the stream update code it means the site dosn't get any updates, and again due to lack of motivation, I don't see either getting done any time soon. It would be nice to have something in place ready for next season, be that streaming updates or downloads or just anime info - something - but I don't know right now, all of those require a lot of code and so back to motivation again. For the moment, the site will just sit here as is, if thats useful then great, if not, sorry, but thats kinda how it is right now.
 
News for 2nd April 12

Well some how I managed to get the new torrenter working on Miki, its a bit of a cludge/hack but it works fine, all the stuff around it like the queue manager etc were done as well so its taking jobs from the main queue properly. The only issue is that Miki was only meant for old stuff and backups, so its got limited bw. Depending on how it goes with clearing out the old stuff from the servers, we might have enough free space to be able to move Chihaya's data off of it so we can re-install it and get the torrenter working on that...its a bit of a long job and a lot of effort just for the ddls tho.
 
News for April 22nd 2012

Some bad news, our server Haruka got hacked and a load of the sites had some scripts embeded in them to attack visitors.
Unfortunatly this included our forum and several of the blogs that happen to be hosted on here as well.

We strongly advise checking your virus scanner is upto date, and do a full scan of your PC with it.
Most AV should protect you from it, its one of those web script type of things, and we've seen its blocked by Norton and Kapersky reliably.

Note: The Anime downloads are not affected, they are not hosted on here anyway.

Update 1 - 22-04-12
While we're messing around with the problem server, we've brought up a backup to take over.
There might be some little issues as its running on code that pre-dates the database, so this could be fun lol.

Update 2 - 23-04-12
We've now switched the backup server over with the compromised one, so the backup server is now the live/main server and the compromised one has been shutdown.
This means that everything is now running off a clean server, we're keeping the other one around for a bit just in case its needed.
We're still running on the old code, but we have completed a full code comparision, so now we know exactly what needs to be pushed back in to bring it upto date, the problem is we had no backup of the latest code due to various reasons, so the code will need to be copied off the compromised server, but we can't just copy it over in case its been tampered with, therefore we're doing a full code review of the update to ensure its 100% ok before its copied in. Theres not that much when compared to the size of the site, but it still going to take a while to ensure theres no mistakes - its not the kinda thing you want to be doing over night while half asleep.

Update 3 - 25-04-12
Code review completed and updates pushed to the site. We're now back to normal running. If you have any issues, please report it via the forum or on IRC.
 
Site News 28/04/12

Following the issues last weekend ( see here ) we have been doing some final cleaning up, such as imageing the compromised server, deleting its node and cloneing the clean running one over it, in other words we moved the running server from the backup slot back to the original slot, just makes things easier, to do that we had to take it down for a few minutes, we were on 'cached only' mode for about 10-15 mins. During the testing after bringing it backup, the forum stopped being able to identify the IP of the connecting users, some further investigation revealed that the backup forum didn't have our IPv6 mod we had added. This means anyone who didnt leave themselves logged in would not have been able to use the site since Thursday, as that was when we re-enabled IPv6. Sorry about that. Its now fixed, and should be working fine. Even a bit better than fine, as I also modified it to get the address better, so no more quad 0 IPs either.
 
The site and forum will be down for a period of around 12 minutes within the next 24 hours, this is for some free upgrades our host is giving us. The main web server will be moving hosts and getting a 2x RAM upgrade and 2x the amount of CPU cores. The hardware is newer and we have also been given an increase in network bandwidth. This post will be updated when its complete. Upgrade complete.
 
The DDL server has been fixed, sorry for the delay/epic fail. It appears to have been down for a while, sorry about that. We were kinda wondering why the traffic was low.
Also fixed the problem of several browsers trying to open/play the files instead of offering up a 'Save' box. Chrome still miss-behaves, but thats a Chrome issue.
 
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