Edit 03/01/2024: I've added our stripe URL & PayPal.me links to the donation page and this post to make it easier for users to donate via debit/credit cards & PayPal. No account is required to use stripe by the way. PayPal will require an account though.
Donation Email/Donation URL's:
Please indicate when donating if you'd like to be featured in the new donor leaderboard or to be shown as anonymous. Optionally, you can provide your discord username in the donation and we'll give you a donor role for as long as you're donating to show your support for the site (used only in the discord server.)
hi10staff@gmail.com
Stripe (No account required.)
PayPal (Account required.)
Intro:
Before I get into the important news, I'd like to wish that everyone has a happy holiday this season and that the new year is finally upon us. I don't know if Zeust will have time to create another top-tier post for the holiday season this year or not, but people can only hope that their one true God will answer their prayers in due time xD
Where We Stand Currently:
With the pleasantries out of the way, let's get to the actual reason for this post. Over the past year, donations have been dwindling compared to previous ones and that's been eating away at our savings to pay for the server each month to the point where we are almost out of funds completely to pay for the server moving forward. Some months were above our monthly goal. However, several of them were more than $100 away. With some even approaching $20 total for the entire month. While we want to avoid shutting down the site as a last resort, with the way the current donation trend is moving, we can't survive like this forever.
This is something we do entirely in our free time and we can't keep biting the bullet hoping that things will change for the better if we can't even make ends meet each month. Many of the staff, myself included, have undergone changes to ensure we're providing the best content we can for everyone, but that isn't generating enough donations to pay for the server. Playcool has decided to focus on airings moving forward and foregoing many BD releases from previous works to free up more time as he wants a version of the series on the site period, rather than replacing something that is already there. Now, that doesn't mean he won't do BD's at all, but he will be prioritizing airings vs BD's.
I retired from encoding at the beginning of the Summer since stuff IRL was becoming more hectic and I wanted to shift my focus to other things that could make my life more fulfilling as I spent most of time working on content for the site for 7-8 years. While I enjoyed my time encoding and seeing everyone enjoy it, burnout and excessiveness is a harsh mistress that can't be understated. The other problem is that many of the staff have also reached a point in their lives where our personal lives are our main priority and with the increased workload, has lead to longer delays between releases compared to years in the past.
Our Plans/Suggestions Moving Forward & All Hail The Mighty God:
I still need to work out the details with the almighty God, but I suggested we cut the 10gb connection and downgrade the speeds to 1gb with our server provider. That's our biggest expense outside of the server itself and would make payments more manageable moving forward at $160/month vs the $240/month we're paying now. That won't resolve the low donation issue, but it would allow us to stay afloat for a bit longer.
β Providing smaller size is not good enough of a value especially when internet speeds are getting better and storage is getting cheaper. Our current model is setting us up for failure. We are afloat thanks to generosity of people and staff's commitment to churn out content.
β Becoming a private torrent tracker service might be interesting. We will lose leechers but we will retain trustworthy seeders and those who understand the value will also donate. At least that's what's happening for other private trackers.
β Becoming a private Video-On-Demand (VOD) service sounds lucrative but is difficult to pull off. I can see people paying us if they can see the quality content on their phones / laptops without downloading and if we release same-day.
At some point, I was thinking of setting up a Hi10 ecosystem that can provide:
1. Streaming, which is very risky.
2. Downloads, which we are currently doing.
3. Private torrents, which will be ensured with healthy seeding.
4. Branching out to other Asian and anime-like content for 1-3.
We either need to consider this as a hobby that will eventually die, which seems to be getting closer, or we generate something out of it. I don't see all of us agreeing to the latter point, which is fine, too. However, I'd rather see it giving birth to something than to let it die. And rebirth, here, means growing to a self-sustainable entity.
We have a good opportunity where we already have a decent userbase. Many dreams die because they can't attract people in the beginning and we are somehow at a stage where we don't have to worry about that. Release "something" of a value and we'll have the money flowing, at least enough to get us somewhat standing.
Outro:
This is where we stand currently and we're doing everything we can to avoid shutting down the site as a last resort. However, we can't move into the future with everyone if donations continue the way they have been over the past year. So, if you want to support the site, drop an email at hi10staff@gmail.com and help us produce more content together!
You know, as I have written already in the past, I would not mind supporting all your efforts.
I’m using this site and all your time you spent on it for free – for years(!) now.
I would be a massive asshole to not think otherwise, than being inclined to support, no?
Sure, I’ve got the storage to “just” get the files via nyaa and could also easily buy more storage, but it is also about the stuff you do ontop, that makes it so premium.
Having said that it is still a no-no for me to use paypal to get it done.
Other payment services would therefore be nice – and no, not talking about bitcoin/crypto scamming bullshit.
Just other -real- payment providers.
I would hope you could find some arbitrary reasons to be able to use something like Stripe, if nothing better could be found – yes, even though what this website provides could be considered as.. harmful.. to get Stripe, you know! π
Scoping out a bit, I think there can still much be done with the whole setup of the website and it is still a long standing dream of mine to provide you with a whole containerized mostly automized environment… and therefor for you guys to finally get rid of WordPress.
And… in my humble opinion… the theme that is used is a nightmare for the eyes – especially at night.
There is still no dark mode available… and 2000 called: It wants its website back π
Also, I’m still haven’t looked into it if it is cheap to make the convertion of files (ffmpeg, right?) part of an external (Micro)service, or so. You should know what I mean, also knowing nothing about your tech stack.
Well, this doesn’t change the fact that I simply have not enough time to do so and -sadly- other more important stuff to do, so I’m not getting anywhere with that project.
And, in the end, at some point I would also need to reach out to you folks for so many specifics anyway.
Next, about the part of getting into “direct” contact – honestly, why do you guys use a gmail email address?
I can somewhat understand the paypal part… but gmail?
https://keys.openpgp.org/search?q=hi10staff%40gmail.com
It seems like you don’t even have a GPG key set up for it, as I see it.
Might wanna consider jumping ship and moving on to protonmail, or something similar?
I mean, they DO care about GDPR, and so on, right?
GPG and S/MIME included, no?
Or just use Session, getting rid of email “support” alltogether.
(https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android; you should use the f-droid variant, without google services, etc.)
Then it’s more or less only about how you use your smartphone, if you are truly private – and what smartphone you use.
So.. getting back to your original topic, in the end – yes, maybe only for me -, it is not about the content that is provided, I think that is more than enough and I’m finding almost all I’m interested in here already, without the need to branch out to other soruces.
It is more about how it is possible to tip the “dough” π
Finally, maybe you would like to talk about my several ideas/suggestions in more detail.
I wouldn’t mind continuing this talk elsewhere, so that I also get to better understand how your whole tech stack works, the “public” one of course.
But first, certain terms need to be met for me for this, like using Sessions, or at least some GPG email messaging, for starters..
I simply like to develop stuff.
Cheers! π
We appreciate any kind of suggestions people may have, and you can definitly reach us on a more personal level with discord, not only we have a chat there for general chat with everyone (lobby), but you can also PM active staff.
Concerning your suggestions and questions, you should really talk to xLordNoro on discord.
We already had a poll running there awhile ago to get people’s input and what would add more value from their perspective, that would lead people to want to support more.
From our PoV we are clueless on what to do (outside the response we got from the poll), because I myself have already added a lot of content to Crimson Realm over the years, branching the website in also offering a more polished and easy to download collection of Light Novels, but also Manga (with many series suffering a reencode on the picture to optmize size further).
Clearly, that doesnt seem to be what most people find the most important, and BDs dont seem to be either though.
Traffic lead us to believe airings is what will get most people interested to donate and support, yet even with a recent effort to cover most relevant anime content this year, myself going back to pick numerous titles that staff previously skipped, that was not enough.
I m pretty sure I cover well over 20+ airings this season alone, and that was to provide what we think the majority of the users wanted to see.
And that was not enough, because if anything, we kept getting less and less donations every month.
Maybe with a few more months people would see consistency going and would finally be driven to support more?
At this point we really cant put such hopes on that any longer.
I have been very adamant over the years that we do ask too much from donations, the price being too high, but I was naΓ―ve thinking eventually we would see a decrease in price, since the logic goes that storage does get cheaper with time.
Yet inflation played its role, and I m sure that most if not all of our userbase has been affected, thus for those with a job, you have to manage your money better and cutting costs is frequent reality.
The culmination of this is that in my opinion we have our hands tied, and need feedback from the users that will lead to proper results, the time for half measures has long passed.
We already have some changes planned, but please reach out to us, here, and on discord, further suggestions are appreciated.
Thanks for your fast and lengthy reply, Playcool.
Well.. the thing about Discord is.. you guessed it, I don’t use it.
Another service that’s not storing messages encrypted and its tracking like hell.
So, like Social Media, I’m also not inclined to use this.. so.. as much as I would like to chat with your guys in more detail, that’s sadly also not it.
So, let’s take another spin!
The thing about polls is that they can be a) fastly missleading, b) don’t always cover too many topics at once c) are seldomly featuring false-positives and d) are most of the time also just anwsered by about less than 10% of the audience, even less when forced, even though this is how democracy should work.. etc..
But let’s stop there, not wanna get too political – but you should know what I mean.
From my perspective, and my alone, I’m more than happy with what you provide, so I’m not the one that can even fathom to answer your guys core question.
Sure, there might be things I personally would like to see supported more, but so do others, so I think your mix is already covering all important bases.
I think it’s more about “eh? for free? sure! let’s take a bite while it lasts! why should I pay now? let others do the lifting!”.
Related to light novels and the crimson realm, I think there are already enough alternatives that are available for free as well.. so there might be no pull factor attached to this for your audience.
I mean, if it wasn’t for cloudflare cdn, it wouldn’t be an issue to download at least all of the crimson related stuff via, e.g., -app name-, and connect to the sources via TOR/Orbot.. and it would only take about few minutes.. thus concluding that this probably is no feasable USP you guys might have.
But, again, this is only my opinion as I know some of the more “free” options well enough.. hmm.
From my POV the main reason for folks to be interested in you is still the part about the quality and file size of your releases, as the episodes themselves are available for “free” on the net anyway.
A colleague of mine always spread the word about “hatsuyuki and hi10” back in the day, and I’m still with you “just” for ths solid work you guys are doing.
_Local_ storage can be considered cheap nowadays, but surely not for everyone.
One WD Ultrastar DC HC550 18TB does still go over the counter for about ~$499/300β¬, which you could easily fit into a NAS of your choice.
Others are probably happy to just be able to watch videos via Kodi / LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi, if even that.. and I can report happily that all of your releases have no issues on that end anymore for years now π
I’m -obviously- also unsure about how much and if people do keep stuff they downloaded once and have already seen.. and a download-once rule might also be quite harmful.
“Have no ideas? Cool, let’s reduce the services and make people pay for everything that can be considered a ‘bonus’. We have no innovative ideas. Please let us go bankrupt! Maybe another startup next?” – the typical capitalism approach π
So, I also would never consider you guys turning into a streaming service, because, in the end, I think folks (taking into consideration only themselves) would still be cheaper using something like crunchyroll, and stuff.
Besides all the risks included for you.. it’s not worth it, I think, tbh.
You are doing what you like, else you wouldn’t do it at all, right?
So.. it’s best to let that fish off the hook. Hmn.
I also noticed the decline in the donations and I was also wondering if the missing TLS cert/certbot/Let’s Encrypt refreshes were some kind of signal by you guys.. but only you guys do know the answer π
I appreciate your continued feedback, I hope we can get somewhere.
Though, even than, that will also probably not cover all of your existing issues, at large.
Cheers!
Discord is really the best method to keep contact with us, in the past we had Chatango integrated, but sadely it was a featured other staff removed, since it was getting annoying dealing with all the spamming and bots.
Indeed no user needs to pay to get acess as of now, but if not for the batch torrents, I dunno how would one proceed to have patience to ddl all episodes for an anime.
I like the current status quo and would not want any drastic changes, streaming doesnt seem viable at all for us IMO.
It is not just about storage, even if you have that, but like to see stuff on the go, one would not be able to do it as smoothly with the size sources for airings normally are like.
Like I said, I always saw the price we ask for donations too high per month, but I hoped that one day the prices would reduce themselves as HDDs keep getting cheaper and cheaper, but that never happened.
The HTTPS certificate expiry and fix taking multiple days twice was definitely irritating and somewhat annoying. Not that I would be angry or anything when it’s provided free and on a voluntary work basis. But it makes you consider and look at alternatives – other groups etc, and consider the administration not very or not fully professional.
I could understand it happening once, and it taking a few days because of personal time constraints of limited administrative stuff with expertise and access, but for a system that is supposed to update certificates automatically, I would not have expected it a second time.
Overall, and over time, the limited cert issues weren’t a defining issue though.
The ssl certificates weren’t automated prior to the 2nd time it expired. We’ve setup automatic renewal which I personally thought was already enabled (I don’t handle the ssl certs btw) since hsts effectively locks the site until the new certs are applied. I also fixed my discord bots code which will notify us if the expiry date of the ssl certificate is below 14 days and will continuously ping us everyday. Granted, that shouldn’t be required anymore due to the automatic renewal, but it’s better to have a safety net in place just in case things fall through the cracks.
Very nice to know, thank you! π
We do use Stripe as well as PayPal for donations. We’ve been using Stripe for many years now after people started asking about alternatives to PayPal. As for the gmail address, that’s the easiest way to get in contact with us regarding donation info. Everything else is done via PayPal or the Stripe link provided in our emails.
Regarding support, that’s typically done via the posts or the Discord server in the troubleshooting channel. Unless someone is contacting us about issues with ads still being visible on their account even after the account change.
Thanks for also reaching out fastly, XLordNoro.
So, about the GPG key thing then.. would it be possible for you guys to set that up?
If you wouldn’t like to consider switching to some more privacy focused email provider.. it can at least be considered a more user-friendly approach?
I would consider using a lengthy passphrase, though.
(general link of the project – https://gnupg.org/)
Also, setup isn’t that problematic.
It can easily be done with Thunderbird, as you probably know yourself already.
… I’m probably just repeating what you guys know about. Hmm, sorry.
Let me know what you think, thanks! π
I can ask Zeust about that as I don’t have control over the staff email. Finances are my realm of expertise versus managing the IT stuff. I do have quite a level of knowledge, but I’m always learning something new that might come in handy in the future. Never know when that one thing u learned suddenly has a use xD
Gotcha!
Will lurk for your next reply! π
So, you did also add the stripe-thingy to the post, very nice.
But with that, is the GPG topic replied to as well?
Still nothing from Zeust in 5 weeks which is the longest Zeust has been gone for this long. I’ll let u know once I find out since I have no idea when Zeust will return.
It’s sad to hear that the future of the site is at risk. Hi10 has come to be my #1 source for anime as it’s consistently great quality with great efficiency. Even with high speed connections and bigger storage, it’s impossible to keep up with the extreme bloat of nearly all encoders. As how the scene is, unless one archives, any episode is as good as forever gone after the first month of its release, speed is irrelevant with no source. And for archiving, file size creep outpaces storage technology easily. Most encoders just use the streaming source with no optimization which is for streaming consumption, not archival.
Anyways all I want to say is that your formula is extremely appreciated, I literally don’t know a second place that could replace you guys. I hope it all works out for you, best wishes for the new year.
I have tried to donate in the past, no one has responded to any of my e-mails.
I have sent another e-mail.
If the emails don’t arrive like that in the future, don’t hesitate to message us on Discord and I’ll double-check if I’ve received any new emails. Occasionally, they end up in the spam folder and I need Zeust to send some emails my way as I don’t control the hi10staff email.
I do not want to go on discord. Is there any other emails for Hi10?
That’s the only email for the site I’m afraid. I’ve replied to every email I’ve received in the last few days which was quite a bit due to the post’s popularity. If I haven’t replied back, tell me your email or if the email associated with your hi10 account is one you actively use and I can send the details there.
The e-mail associated with this account is the one I use.
Good to know. In case you didn’t check the edits in the donate post and this post. I’ve included direct links to our Stripe and PayPal accounts.
The account links are below the cover image for this post, so emails aren’t required anymore to access donation info. That should make it far easier for users to donate to us moving forward.
i’m kinda confused why the only option you people seem to see would be to downgrade your server capabilities, or switch to other methods that sound even more expensive instead of switching from a full file server to 1-click hosters, sure, it would cut down on long time reliability, especially for less popular content, but it would definitely cut down the costs to a minimum of just having a basic website.
same would apply to if you’d go completely torrent based without the web-seed.
in the past i kept seeding the torrents i loaded from here for months or even years in some cases until my move forced me to take a volume based internet option that would blow my running costs way out of proportion if i kept seeding like before.
The server downgrade is meant to delay the death of the site by making it more manageable in the long term. Or we keep the current configuration and end up shutting down the site after running out of funds in a matter of months. I’m not lying when I say that by the way as we only have 2 months of funds left. The other options are merely suggestions to gauge users and what we can do to increase their interest in donating to the site as the current model isn’t enough anymore.
Also, 1-click hosters wouldn’t work well for us. Yeah, that would cut costs, but it’s not worth it in the end. We don’t control the data as the sites can nuke files whenever they wish, meaning we’d have to deal with re-uploading links if they don’t straight-up ban the account for DMCA. Resulting in staff having to waste more time in a rat race by constantly replacing links instead of focusing on new content which would only cause more problems for us and make users leave the site when they can find what they want elsewhere due to dead links.
We need more audience to visit the site like the good ‘ol days. Please share good words about the site with your friends who also like Anime! XD
How about integrating a long term donation service (like Patreon but for non-creators)?
People might be more inclined to do an ongoing small donation through an easy to use reliable service,
rather than donate once a bigger donation through “send an Email”.
Patreon takes sizable cuts from any account, even free accounts. 5% per transaction, plus payment processing, currency conversion, payout fees, and applicable taxes. That means we’d receive less than what was given after the donation is processed.
We accept donations as low as $10. You don’t need to drop a large single donation if you don’t want to do so. Smaller donations are the most common we receive, but some users do prefer to drop larger amounts vs smaller donations.
I am OK with converting this site to a Pvt Torrent site; atleast the Leechers will be reduced
BTW I have also sent a mail for donation
HNY 2K24
I really want to donate so badly ever since i found this site in 2018 but the problem is really the method of donation. Paypal. I don’t have Paypal and I’m not even sure if Paypal can be use in my country(Philippines). I wish there are other easy methods of donation. I think you guys should prioritize and look into this matter. I believe that some people like me wants to donate but unfortunately the current method of donating just doesn’t work on our end.
I play a lot of gacha games where I always bought their monthly subscription which cause around 7-10$. Guys, i have no problem paying 10$ for a montly subscription in this site so long I can pay it without using Paypal. Here in my country we mainly use Gcash or Maya(Paymaya).
We accept payments via stripe as well which uses debit/credit cards. We integrated that into our donation workflow after we realized users wanted more options many years ago. As long as u have either card, u can donate to us.
Shoot us an email and I’ll send the donation details once I see your message.
if you have debit or credit card, use this link:-
https://hi10anime.com/site/v1/
I used PayPal before but because of my card declined by them about 5 months ago (for sure not because of my card provider), I reached these guys and get that link as alternative.. EASIER AND FASTER.. no need any other apps or programs, just your browser..
Hi10 shutting down will be the end of me
Donate, klase se XD
I’m not sure about the private torrent tracker idea, but at least a tracker that tracks your stats would be interesting.
I don’t know why but I felt more inclined to seed things for years just to rack up worthless points / stats to make it onto the top 100 leader board.
hi10 should stay the way it is.
i dont like torrents and premium accounts of one-click-hosters have also gotten pretty expensive nowadays.
reducing the download speed would be okay as long as everything else stays the same.
i sent you 50 dollars, hope it helps.
I dont like it either, but if everything done and adressed, and we still are not able to came with a solution, measures will have to be taken, for the survival of the website.
The way I see it is there are tons of users on free accounts here that can actually afford to donate, but then dont do it because they are too used to the free model and think someone else will always donation.
So one of the suggestions I have is rather than going full private, we should limit further what having a free account lets you do.
As long as free users can still get their stuff, it should be fine, but the more limited capacity would bring those that can, to actually donate for once.
If you donated 50$, that should get you many months as a donator, the problem is that most free users that can, wont do what you just did, EVEN if they can.
That is fine because we are not trying to sell anything here and dont see a penny yourselves, but servers need to be paid…
Thanks for your support btw.
As I see many of users and encoders may be Indians why not use simple UPI or similar simpler system for donation. I do not have paypal and do not know any outside payment methods just common method used in india like upi, razorpay , payu etc links .
You may also consider going telegram as many are already there.
THIS IS THE BEST WEBSITE FOR ANIME related stuff.
Whenever I click donate it just open my email app instead of direct donate link. just putting direct donate link will help a lot of users.
We accept donations via stripe which use debit/credit cards. No account is required. Just your hi10 username and email for validation and the required info on the card. I’ll be adding the link to our stripe account to the donation page and this post shortly.
An automatic monthly donation platform would probably help. Patreon, for example. That way, people only have to take action once, and then they’ll continue helping automatically until they decide to stop. This makes monthly income pretty stable and predictable. It does involve some overhead fees, but it’s usually better to get 95% of a donation every month than to get 100% of a donation only once.
Slower hosting service would probably be fine too, to reduce costs. Fast speeds are great, but does it really matter if an episode takes 3 seconds or 30 seconds? Either one is sufficient, especially with the intermediate link sites adding a fixed delay anyway. Torrents would be fine too, to further cut down on costs, as long as everything is reliably seeded. Even a very slow seed is enough to keep things going.
There’s nothing wrong with the quality and service Hi10 offers. It’s arguably the best, by such a wide margin that I barely ever even look anywhere else any more. It probably just needs a more convenient way for people to send a few bucks a month long-term without having to remember to do it and make a conscious decision each time.
I’ll have to agree with what others mentioned already: The donation method is waaay to inconvenient.
Would it not be possible to do it like e.g. Wikipedia does? There you need neither PayPal nor Stripe (nor Patreon or any other account), and ofc don’t need to send an email; you just click on it, enter your data, done!
You might be underestimating how much of a difference convenience makes: It just took me roughly 20 times as long to find my PayPal login data, update my card information there (since I only used PayPal a single time many years ago), and then also write an email to you. And the actual donation hasn’t even happened yet.
Another recommendation btw: The overlay Wikipedia uses to ask for a donation is also not a bad idea, since its less likely to be overlooked than a post (which I honestly just clicked because I thought “oh this anime title sounds interesting” lol). Also knowing how much is left until the monthly goal is reached is nice.
Its not too obnoxious either because you can just click it away once, and only appears whenever they’re low on donations.
With that being said: If possible, I’d like the site to otherwise stay the way it is now; it has slowly but surely become my main anime site, which means the current concept is good π
But yeah, make donations easier. Don’t require people to send emails, or to have specific accounts (I don’t use Patreon either). Lowering the inhibition threshold is well worth some 5% or whatever fee.
Stripe doesn’t require an account for users to donate. You just need to provide your hi10 username and email address for validation so we can make the changes to your account and then pay via debit/credit card. I’ll add the stripe url & PayPal info to the donation page and this post shortly to make that easier for users who want to go that route.
We have a low donation message similar to Wikipedia. I don’t know how to trigger it yet since Zeust handles that normally, but it’s there for that purpose.
Ok, didn’t know that Stripe needs no account.
Previously wherever I clicked I was prompted to send an email, so the change you made already helps a lot!
Donated 50$ now, hope it helps.
Thanks for the donation π
Just donated 100, I also put a request in the message. Not sure if that is the right way to do it, but I did. Let me know if you get it.
No, that is the correct way to request anime since you don’t use discord to state your donation request. I’ll have to double check, but I believe Playcool is in charge of the fruit basket series. So, it’s fairly likely he’ll do that version since he likes to include everything in one drop vs smaller ones.
I was wondering, how do you know if you have donor status?
Try to download any file from the site (ddl or torrent will work) and if it starts to download immediately, then you have donor status. I’ve caught up on all the donations so u should be good. If it still shows ads (it shouldn’t tho), logout and back in.
Rarely, WordPress doesn’t update a user’s status until a logout is triggered and grabs their status again.
I want to do BDs for S3 of FB, but I have other BDs to release first, but I have it planned, might try to release around summer, 2y after the airing.
Thanks for responding, regarding FB I was talking about the original (2001) version.
If for that, then I m not in charge of the 2001, I think J0my was, he would have to say something about that, right at the time the 2019 was airing, I addressed him, and he had plans for it, IF I recall, been too long.
I’ve been a donator every now and then,
I would be willing to pay premium/donate monthly/subscribe monthly for FTP/SFTP access.
Torrents are sometimes slow/dead/not connecting for various reasons.
Downloading an episode 1 by 1 is painful, even without ads and the way your system is setup, I can’t bulk add downloads to download managers even as a donator.
I do support the idea of going full private torrent service though, as long as all torrents would be healthy in terms of seeding.
as an additional note, some series even don’t have torrents so I am forced to download episodes 1 by 1.
I can bulk download DDL links using uget without any issues since staff are except from ads as we provide content for the site. Not sure if other downloaders will handle it properly, but they should be able to if uget can do it seamlessly.
U can download uget from here which is free to use btw: uget
If u want to integrate it into your browser, you’ll need to follow the steps here for your OS and browser of choice: Uget Integrator
first of all appreciate the reply.
thanks, will try it out
UGet worked to download with, however how do you select multiple files at once to download? I don’t need to download 5 at once, 1 by 1 is fine, but I don’t understand how you batch select the links.
If I try to select all the links with the mouse, it will mark files from all 3 sources
FC.LC SPASTE OUO.IO
disregard, figured it out… thanks π
I’ll renew my donation again once it runs out and send an extra donation on the 19th.
The problem with private tracker like BakaBT is that now in their closed community, there are too many seeders and very few leechers. To keep up the upload ratio it’s almost nearly impossible. And once you can’t maintain the ratio, you just can’t get it back up. And they implemented some weird point system and hoq you can use that to reduce the ratio. It has become unusable. That site is already facing dystopia.
I would rather we continue like this. But if we do go private, please please think everything through.
Going private would take the longest to implement if that was something we were committed to doing presently. At minimum, it would take years and we’d need to make it there for it to even be possible. Those are merely suggestions to increase value for donors besides no ads on links. Although, the speed reduction is something that we have plans to do in the near future. Thankfully, with the huge influx of donations we’ve received over the past week, we’ve already exceeded our monthly goal.
Only time will tell if the rest of this year will fare better than it did back in 2023 both in terms of donations and staff.
A speed reduction is fine than no site at all. I think we are a good community now. Let’s do our best to keep this gem alive. All your efforts are extremely appreciated.
I never understood the server upgrade when it was announced, and the continuation of its use over several announcements and years about struggling to get enough donations and paying server costs.
While it is certainly awesome and convenient to always be able to download at full speed, I don’t consider it a necessity – generally or for you to stand out as a release provider. It could still be fast or reasonably fast with less bandwidth or server performance. I don’t have to have a full season downloaded in 5 or 10 minutes.
Make the effort to collect donations, and then calculate with what you have. At least for me, with the numbers provided in the post (some months lacking $100, a downgrade saving $80), it’s obvious to me that the downgrade should be done.
We had to make the upgrade then since we were pulling upward to 100tb of data for 3-4 months and our monthly limit previously was 30tb iirc. So we ended up paying over 100-150 euros in overage fees for each month which was effectively paying for 2 months of service in 1 months time. The upgrade to 10g was part of the bandwidth option that we needed back then to ensure that we wouldn’t be getting slapped with high overage fees each month.
The downgrade is still in limbo since I need a response from Zeust about that who hasn’t been active in 5 weeks now… π While I can request the changes personally, it’s a partnership deal and I have to respect the other’s boundaries before making any drastic changes.
I see, so it was not a bandwidth but a soft-limited transfer consideration. Makes sense. I now remember that was mentioned at some point. Made me wonder if a different contract setup wouldn’t be better though.
My VPS provider offers 80 TB transfer unlimited and then limits bandwidth to 100 MBit/s. There is no over-consumption charge or complete cutoff if exceeded.
Given that release priorities and limitations were at least mentioned I’ll take this opportunity to also give feedback on the staff application process: The barrier is very high.
I don’t know if that’s deliberate, or consciously accepted, or unintentional.
I’ve been told Hi10 only needs encoders. The application form lists many questions you have to answer, and that – to me – seemed like you could answer if you were already an encoder that publishes releases – for other groups I presume.
Average encoding time of 3 specific encoding resolutions and settings means you expect applicants to already have done many, and still know their encoding times, or to do such a test run with 3*x encodes?
I wasn’t willing to invest that much time in something that I could not assess whether I could commit to it (further guidance and requirements, and what that would mean in time and effort commitment) and in question application acceptance.
Some context and intro information on prior expectations and requirements, and if-accepted expectations would reduce uncertainty and process barriers.
Both of your reasons are why the application process is setup that way (prior experience and time investment.) We don’t have the time to teach new potential staff how to encode. However, even if we did have the time to properly teach them, many new staff often don’t fully understand the time commitment to encoding and leave without any warnings whatsoever. We’ve had a large number of our fresh blood during my 8 years here who have done exacting that within months of joining and don’t answer any of our messages back.
This causes existing staff to cover their incompleted projects promptly which is becoming harder with each passing year as we’re becoming older and have less time to encode than we did years ago.
So, training people who might hightail it within a few months isn’t worth the effort, and why we want prior experience for applicants. While not an exact measurement, prior work also gives them a sense of the time investment involved for the site and if that’s something they’d be willing to commit to in the future.
My man, I have to give my two cents here… I got into (shitty) encoding by myself, in 2012, it was garbage quality but I though it looked fine, back then I needed to burn ass. subs on video (so doing hard sub), so I could play the anime on PS3, since I lacked a desktop for myself back then.
Due to that, through friends on MAL, I was able to get into contact with blacktac, which was of the OGs staff on this website, he told me and teached me about vafe, and in 2016 I applied to the website, since I needed to improve my stuff and solve all the problems I was having with vafe back then.
My encode quality was garbage, but I had been doing it for years, and joining staff helped me a ton.
So will ALWAYS be helpful to people that want to get into encoding, even if for themselves only, and did this tutorial many years ago: https://youtu.be/36NacSZq3BU?si=3mgaoUxWKcJSPJpc
ANYONE that always appeared on discord and showed interest in getting into encoding was always given aid there, and even linked to that tutorial (that will cover all necessary bases).
So if you cant encode, but are interested, rather than doing nothing, your first option should be to always come to our discord and say something about it, you will be helped, EVEN if you dont want to become staff for the website, and people like CopyCat can attest to that, since for awhile he was even sharing his own encodes on discord or by the old chatango here on the website.
He learned to encode from that tutorial, it is simple once you get used to it, the only thing you need to have is decent hardware to do so, a modern cpu will do, a modern i5 or i7 or better, great!
Anything better than a i7 7700K (that I use since 2017) will do you fine, but also proper air cooler on the desktop to tame the temps.
Wanting to join the staff, should NOT be the first though that comes to mind to you, but rather, do you want to learn to encode, or not. And if so, once you do, that become staff application would be piece of cake, since they have accepted my shitty encode back then.
The only thing we ask is people that are commited and have time, to put some effort and integrate, respect the rules we have.
So again the way the applications work, it is on point, we want people motivated, not those that just felt like trying it, to join staff.
It is only normal that you should try to encode some stuff for yourself, to see if you like and can get used to it.
Anyway reading and that is interested in learning encoding, contact us on discord, and along side that also wants to help the website, great, contact us on discord.
Ramblings aside, dont let excuses prevent you from learning encoding, if you are interested into it, this is no trade secret, and I will never turn my back to people interested in learning it.
I am interested in learning, maybe I will look into discord.
I can already encode just fine. I’ve been doing my own cutting, encoding, and muxing for myself for a few years. Learning to encode is not the issue or the barrier.
I think what you say on the final paragraph could be be improved, but outside that, if you already know how to encode, the questions we ask are not that hard, and they exist to separate the people that want to try, for the fun of it,from those that truly want to help and are committed.
The things that are important to me and that I love about Hi10 releases – your releases:
* High quality, low file size – great quality-vs-size weighing and gains through 10-bit HEVC
* MKV Chapters to be able to skip OP and ED and previews
* Separate OP and ED files so I can move them out and watch episodes with neither OP nor ED showing up at all
I’ve enjoyed many of your releases and am very thankful for them. Even if I don’t enjoy a series I appreciate your efforts in constructing releases and releasing them a lot.
I’m with Kissaki there on the points he mentioned .. bandwith and storage got more and cheaper, but that’s still no reason to waste it π
I’d be fine with a private torrent tracker too, if that is easier/cheaper to do π
Quick question:
It feels like the new donation list/widget is not automated.
Is that a fact? :S
I think it would also be nice to be more transparent, to list even annonymous donations.
In fact, I would somewhere list all donations, so that folks see how the current month’s “campaign” is going.
And -maybe- a timestamp for when the list item was added, for those that want to “battle” each other.
In terms of WordPress itself, the simplest thing you could do is just fill an empty Post with a custom widget token, define two new database relations (one to fill via Stripe API for the newest transactions, one for the mapping of entries to the users), define what your custom widget should do, and the add logic for a cronjob to execute a PHP function by itself.. or something like that.
Maybe I’m missing something, also havn’t worked with the Stipe API yet, but I would assume something like that.
Also, in your Stipe Angular (SPA), you are already doing some matching, in the end.. so.. maybe you are already doing more than meets the eye?
Hmm, just some thoughts about that.
We have had a donations bar for a long time, where you can see the monthly progress.
And you could easily see that where in December and even the monthly progress for November was almost empty.
Yeah, sure, I know.
But think about this:
Like with every donation on twitch or other similar service or just some public domain campaign that asks for donations, etc., it might be psychologically benefitial to your primary goal to add more context to it.
Similar things apply for campaigns on kickstarter, etc., I would say.
No matter if it is a tabletop or a video game, in the end.
So, what was before, in this point of view, is minimalistic.
What you have now goes more into that direction, but you could still develop further on.
I hope I made my emphasize more clear now π
It’s not automated as it’s something we’re currently testing. As for listing anonymous donations, they’ll be included in the leaderboard as anon rather than a username. Removing the name entirely from the leaderboard is for users who truly don’t want to be in the spotlight even as anon. At the very least, I’ll respect their decision if they don’t want to be included in the rankings since not everyone likes being in the limelight.
As for everything else u suggested, that would need to be done by Zeust who is still extremely busy/mia if it’s even possible as I don’t handle any of the programming. My main role is finance, not programming by trade.
Yeah, let’s wait for further feedback from him, gotcha.
Thanks for keeping me posted!
What’s your goal of embedding live Discord information on the website?
I’m hesitant to join because it shows active users and even their activity presence status.
Wouldn’t the number of online users, a general static information block, and/or channel list suffice?
The Discord widget does most of that already. It also includes our discord server invite link for users who wish to get in direct contact with staff or talk to regulars in the chat. U can change your discord status to invisible, so u won’t show up in the list of active users, and your presence status can be turned off entirely in your account settings. I don’t have presence status enabled since I don’t need it.
Channel lists are already in the Discord server with easy-to-spot titles and separated by category. Even if I listed them on the site, they would still run within Discord itself. At this point, u can easily click on the widget and join the server to find all the channels.
Meybe also spread the words what a donation will give to the user? If anything?
Is this not enough? https://hi10anime.com/donate
We create donation buttons on purpose for people to click on them.
For what it’s worth I mostly use hi10 because of the quality and convenience of aggregating most shows in one place.
Requiring a phone number for the Discord server renders Discord useless for some/many though so a better primary/secondary communication option would be nice.
But guys, dont you have phones?!?!?
https://youtu.be/ly10r6m_-n8?si=YSJ-8oo_PGupoUbR
now these much ez to donate
Hmm, what about considering something like Boosty? And I believe their counterpart in US – Planescape? If you had switched to fast releases, why not to try releasing it for paid subscribers to be available for immediate watch? It is somewhat similar to your idea of VOD, but maybe with a better financial support. And, I think, because the very same boosty allows multiple level access, you could also add some staff videos, podcasts or exclusive access to mature content (I don’t think you had ever done it, but what do I know) based on subscription model.
*Floatplane, not planescape, sorry.
I haven’t checked all the comments so I am not sure if this has been suggested yet. I would prefer it didn’t happen of course but perhaps you could put the 1080P encodes on a pay-only server and leave only the 720P ones available without a pay wall? Even the 720P encodes here so good that they are better than the 1080P encodes of sites that try to do the same thing. So true 1080P could be considered considered a premium quality level.
We appreciate the kind words about our encodes. However, that wouldn’t make a lot of sense for us when affording one server is already a daunting task. Even if the other server was weaker and cheaper, it would increase the expenses for no good reason. Not to mention, that would cause a lot of problems for people who prefer 1080p and have to pay extra to see it but don’t have the money to afford donor privileges.
Along with configuring all the backend stuff (sftp access, folders, permissions) when we don’t have enough time as it is to handle the current workload in a more timely fashion.
Fair enough. The idea also falls flat since many series these days are 1080P from the start and not only at the BD stage as in the past. But I still thought I would mention it as it’s the only idea I had concerning this predicament. So basically only providing the 720P stuff for free as it’s smaller and needs less server space/could be served from a weaker server that donations can cover easier, and then the 1080P stuff on a server that basically pays for itself with a small paywall. Could also be expanded to include older more niche series that never saw many downloads and only take up space but I’d hate that even more than the 1080P paywall since every once in a while I discover one of those older series for myself (like recently Nadia – The secret of the blue water). I’m relieved if you guys aren’t willing to go that route, but as one of those people that can’t even afford to donate I still thought I should mention a fairer option to forcefully obtain finance before everything ends up needing to be behind a paywall.
How’s it looking with the donations now? I saw at least some other posting in this thread donated as well.
I think the best thing left to do, now that donations are easier, is to make the donation bar show up. Showing a bit in advance how much is still required in the current month/year (maybe show both?) probably helps people “plan” their donations, which I believe would be a net plus.
If you find the time!
Nvm I’m blind. But maybe its a bit easy to miss, I’m using this site quite a lot and now is the first time I ever saw it. And that’s only because I actively looked for it.
While the donation goals are fulfilled this is fine (although I expected the donation bar to show up more visibly at least on the donation page), but when donations are low, I’d say the current one is missed too easily.
The donation progress bar has been around for nearly 4 years now. We implemented that after we changed to our current provider so we could show how much we earned per month in donations.
I’ve added a modified version of the progress bar to the donation page.
Actually VOD site doesn’t sound so bad if it’s to make this a self-sufficient site, but of course make it reasonably affordable with different tiers and some VIP membership stuff. I personally wouldn’t mind paying a subscription for airing content.
To prevent leechers/free users, there’s the ads, but it’s probably not enough to generate revenue, you could introduce more. Anyway, I’ve been a “paid member” so-to-speak for a number of years, and will continue to do so, because I like this space. It would be good if the site can generate enough revenue for staff to consider this as an additional revenue stream, afterall dreams don’t last on hot air and comments (you need real motivators like money etc). I’ve seen a growing interest in Novel translations in recent years, perhaps this could be another revenue stream for the site.
Let’s see if people are still going to donate this month again, as the post is not pinned anymore π
Ok, this is seemingly working well now π