Dattebayo Feedback Forum, Volume 8
2008/06/02
Welcome to Volume 8 of Dattebayo’s Feedback Forum, wherein we answer more of the most frequently asked questions sent to us via our contact form. Although it defies belief, and common sense, people still manage to come up with more questions/comments that we haven’t addressed.
First, as a follow up to timecop’s special edition feedback forum, I would just like to say so far I’ve pointed well over 200 people who’ve written in with playback issues to the howto page. The majority of these people have written back to say the information there solved their playback issues (imagine that). Only one person has written back to say that the howto page did not solve his playback problem, and this is only because he did not bother to scroll down to the Playback FAQ portion of the page (apparently scrolling down is really, really hard.). The conclusion that I hope you are all drawing from this is the information on that page is there for a reason. Please read it before sending us questions, thanks.
Now on to a few of the stupid questions people have been asking us.
Please change format back to AVI. I can't play your MKV files!
I realize the DB Switches to MKV press release may have confused people. But if people can’t figure out that that if the file extension still reads .avi it means that we are still releasing AVI files, they are beyond any help that I can give.
What happened to the chat?
Nothing, in fact, happened to the chat. The chat button that used to be on our site was simply a link to a web-based IRC interface. The button has been removed, however the IRC channel it once brought you to still exists, most likely much happier without the flood of ignorant fools that the link was funneling into it. However, for those who are truly interested, the channel can still be reached using any IRC client at #db on irc.animenfo.com.
Why are you delaying episodes?
Every time one of our shows takes a week off, several dozen people write to us to complain that we are “delaying” the episodes. It blows my mind that it never occurs to these people that TV show in Japan, like US TV shows, or I would imagine, TV shows in whatever country they are from, occasionally take weeks off. Since this is unthinkable, the delay must be our fault. People even occasionally point out that since we have so often delayed the episodes, we must have a significant backlog of episodes, and therefore we should definitely start releasing more than one a week to start catching up! Mind you, this is in spite of the information in our FAQ that explains our Bleach and Naruto episodes generally have a less than a 20-hour turnaround time. In short, one of the many reasons we do not post air dates on our site is because we refuse to contribute to rampant stupidity by insisting that people, occasionally, use their brains, just a little bit. We have never delayed an episode for any reason other than we were unable to release it.
Your torrents have no seeds!
Before you write in complaining that the torrent you are trying to download has no seeds, you should really take a look at the listing on the torrent page (which, for most episodes, you have to do when downloading the torrent, but people still manage to miss it, somehow). If the torrent listing shows seeds but your client does not, your client is having problems connecting to the seeds. This almost certainly has to do with your network settings, and is not something we can fix for you, unless you invite us to your homes and bribe us with pizza. Even then we probably won’t come.
The only time people can be excused for making this mistake is with the Naruto and Bleach movies that are hosted on scarywater. Because they are not hosted on our own tracker, you have to visit DB’s scarywater page to see the torrent stats.
I can’t download from your tracker, but I can download via torrent from other sites, so I know it’s not a problem on my end! Fix it!
It’s actually still a problem on your end. The most likely cause of this issue is the client you are using has some kind of distributed tracking system enabled. Our torrents are written so that they do not work with distributed tracking, so you have to disable this in your client in order to download from our tracker. Please do not write to us asking how to disable distributed tracking in whatever random client you use. The proper place to direct such questions is to the web site of that particular client.
Why don’t you just stream your episodes yourselves? Then people wouldn’t put them up on YouTube!
Somehow people have missed the idea that we do not want our episodes streamed. We are not upset because people are not downloading from our web site (we fully support people offering free direct downloads of our unaltered files for people who cannot use BitTorrent). We do not have a personal vendetta against YouTube/Veoh/crunchyroll. We do not want our episodes streamed, period. So, as you can see, streaming them ourselves would completely fail to solve the problem.
I saw a typo in one of your episodes, so naturally I thought I’d write and point it out to you.
Please do not write to us to point out typos. Typos are, by definition, accidents. The fact is, you may occasionally see a typo in our episodes. We know it happens. We don’t need you to point it out. Typos are NOT a good enough reason for us to release a v2, so there is actually no point in you telling us about them other than to annoy us, or perhaps, because you very much want to be banned. In fact, consider this your warning. From now on, writing to point out typos will result in a ban.
I have a great suggestion for you about fansubbing! (Followed by useless suggestion.)
Listen, people, DB has subbing for nearly 4 years now. Several of our members were fansubbing years before DB existed. Now, I’m not saying it’s impossible for you to come up with a suggestion that would be of use to us. I’m just saying it’s very, very, very, very unlikely. Is your suggestion really so creative and original that we never would have thought of it ourselves? Do you know ANYTHING about fansubbing? The vast majority of suggestions we receive from people have either been considered and discarded, or are so ridiculous that we didn’t even consider them. Please, think before you submit. Think long and hard.
Here are a few examples of suggestions you don’t need to send us because we’ve already received them 1000 times:
You should have a mailing list to notify people when episodes are released.
You should list the date episodes were released. (Just look on the BitTorrent page, dumbasses.)
You should have a forum.
You should list Bleach and Naruto air dates on your site.
You should post where you are in your fansubbing process so people won’t write to ask when the next episode will be out.
In case it wasn’t obvious, the answer to all of these is NO.
When will the fillers end?
As has been pointed out many, many times, DB does not know anything about Bleach or Naruto that you can’t find out with Google. If you don’t know, chances are we don’t know.
(Long string of senseless insults that is a sad attempt to be funny and/or to get published in a Feedback Forum.)
Most of these get deleted before most of the staff even looks at them. None of them actually get read. We aren’t going to publish them. And, as you can see, your entire country may get banned as a result. It’s probably not worth it.
"btw I'm a girl"
Occasionally people feel the need to sign their messages with this line. Neither pretending to be nor actually being female will garner you any favor with DB Staff. Since approximately half of DB’s staff is female (yes I know this contradicts the FAQ, writing to point this out will result in a ban), we aren’t impressed by your vagina (fictional or otherwise). Please don’t be a ridiculous attention whore. This goes double if you actually happen to be a female on the internet. You’re giving the rest of us a bad reputation.
"I love you guys (in a non-homosexual way)"
Dattebayo is even less interested in your sexual preferences than we are in your sex and gender. You might as well sign your message, “I love you guys, also I am extremely insecure.”
“I’m sorry about my spelling and grammer (sic).”
Chances are if you are intelligent enough to feel you should apologize for your spelling and grammar, you don’t need to. Despite what some people think, we are not actually grammar nazis. We just prefer that people write to us in understandable language. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any point in writing to us in incomprehensible gibberish, unless your aim is to get us to go “wah?” and then delete your message. We are not sitting at our computer screens snickering at every spelling error each of you makes, so unless your writing is really bad, don’t feel the need to apologize.
That’s it for the latest volume of the Feedback Forum. If you got nothing else out of reading it, please remember to THINK BEFORE YOU SUBMIT.