returnity says:

What FrenchGuy is saying is pretty much true. However, D_S isn’t exactly wrong. This was hardly conspiracy or fascism, but nyaa staff did no good for their users or the site’s image how they handled it. I was in the chatbox for a lot of this furor, and for balance’s sake I’d like to note a few points.

SCRIPT (2 versions):
v1 Alduren script: close to unintelligible for much of dialogue. Mods rejected Shades’ original [AnimeFAGGOT] 02v0 720p offer, requesting both frankenvideo & Englibberish fixed. Reasonable, then thing get a bit lamer.

v1.5 Alduren script: more readable, but far from well-written. Some Hadena-shaming gems:
“I must take back the times that i’m not late with deliveries.”
“At this time, more than adequate footage to break the status quo is prepared.”
“At this time, your metabolism will be wounded.”

After the v1.5 script was approved to replace the original as a stand-alone upload (for people to use freely with raws that nyaa rules don’t allow), Shades made several further muxes for offers (this being the only EngSub SnG 2 available, he wanted users to be able to enjoy it). I got to grab the important ones in the moment between posting and deletion and see some of the commentary.

Timeline:
1. [AnimeFAGGOT] 02v0.5.mkv (~300mb 720p Himado upscale), deleted due to nyaa rules). Understandable, if a bit frustrating for many.
2. [AnimeSTRAIGHT] 02v0.5.mp4 (~150mb 360p re-encode, hardsubbed mp4, deleted since it wasn’t the ORIGINAL 360p webrip, also mentioned the 720 existed in its description).
This was also somewhat reasonable modding, but again, lame, because NOBODY could find the original webrip of the BD’s anywhere, and nyaa kept deleting every raw as well as these.

Then FINALLY, someone manages to dig up the original webstream, in all of it’s disastrous 37MB tragedy.
3. [AnimeFAGGOT] 02v0.7.mkv (~37MB 360p ORIGINAL webrip, meeting all of nyaa’s requirements. DELETED.)
Ok now this makes no sense. Why did they do it? Apparently Shades included a sentence in his release description that read: “If you need direct download links or more information, please use the information url.” The URL included in the post information is his anime website, which also hosts DDL’s of that compliant release, as well as the older 720p ‘upscale’. However the upscale was NOT mentioned anywhere on the nyaa post and no DDLs were linked directly from there either in this post.

Even still, it seem that the mods chose to delete this torrent for violating the rule that “Only trusted (green) accounts can post DDL links in their uploads.” However, any user can post their group’s website in the site field of their torrent, which is all that happened here. If it was really such a big deal, the offending sentence with the word DDL could just have been removed and the torrent left intact, but it was erased yet again.

Centuries later, after hours of everyone’s time was thoroughly wasted, we got the same exact 37MB webrip muxed with the same v1.5 subs, posted by alduren the subber instead of Shades:
[Alduren-Fansub]Suisei no Gargantia 02 [Webrip][640×360].mkv (Only difference: zero mention of any DDLs existing at all, no web link of ANY kind in the info or description.)

And to quash the UTW conspiracy ideas… this fifth and finally accepted release was uploaded 4 days ahead of UTW’s TV 02 torrent. So really inept conspirators, or no conspiracy.

What it really boils down to is: Does that 37MB rip really look better on my 1080p monitor than the 300MB (still shit) 720p upscale? Was this worth all the inconvenience for users, creators, and mods to follow the rules to the letter and beyond? Would it have hurt anything to keep the iffy 720p version (or at least its raw, deprecated red as a re-encode, for the 4 days until the TV air?

After all, the TV version aired with a completed ending (Commie had it at least), and fixed/improved animations, so for once the HD is actually an improvement over the BD, since the BD was a free prerelease.

Honestly it just struck me as a bunch of ridiculousness over nothing. My opinion is meaningless anyways, but I’ve just heard too much misinformation floating around, so I thought I’d post what I saw for myself so everyone could see this was a complex situation that was handled poorly, but not maliciously or conspiratorially.

So let’s calm down, and appreciate that flawed as it is, nyaa is also a great resource for us, so a constructive dialogue will benefit the community more than secessionist rage.

inb4 “TL;DR – go read up on Eotenum with Commie.”