Updated as of 12/07/2014

The hardest part about writing a post, for me, is the opening. I can’t seem to come up with opening lines that don’t sound recycled out of last year’s or another season’s post. Once I do get the opening line out of the way though, the rest of the post just comes really naturally and quickly. But yes, on to the content people care about instead of my complaints. Spring is over, we’re halfway through the year and melting due to stupidly high temperatures that really suck to live in. Anime still continues, and Japan continues to deliver the shows we’re not waiting for.

Over the past season, we’ve continued to be haunted by backlog from Winter, and sadly have not finished all of it. There’re four episodes to go, and we fully intend to finish them up. peeps, something we started again in Winter, has slowed down to a crawl because I’ve been rather busy as of late. I’m thinking of discontinuing peeps and leaving it to other re-encoders to cater to the peeps audiences. I realise some people will be disappointed, but I apologise, I really don’t have much time to spend in front of the computer during my final year.

The DDL is something we’ve revamped the last season and have gotten feedback on. The general concensus is that the new server is a lot faster, and satisfies most of the users. This is expected, because we’re paying double for the current server compared to what we had in the past. Perhaps due to the better server, our userbase has increased as well, and we’re getting more than double the load we expected three months ago. This has come at a rather bad time, considering our paypal was shut down six weeks ago, and we’re behind on donations. This has thankfully been solved thanks to generous donators who’ve gave us around $180 USD the past week. Special thanks to girlcelly of the anime-share community for the generous $100 donation.

I would also like to clarify some of the questions raised in the comments regarding the DDL. Most of the DDL’s bandwidth goes towards Blurays and not TV releases. Removing the TV releases would indeed save us some bandwidth, but it wouldn’t save us nearly as much as if we removed Blurays. We’re also not on an unmetered host, because unmetered gbits in USA cost upwards of $300 a month for the cheaper best-effort hosts. Assuming we constantly max the unmetered gbit, we’ll get 330TB worth of upload bandwidth a month. We currently only use 100TB a month, and would be seeing 120TB if we didn’t throttle the speeds the whole of last week to avoid hitting the limit. Our traffic is usually between 200-300mbit, and spikes to 900-1000mbit whenever we release Blurays.

We’ll be monitoring the DDL usage and making changes if they’re necessary. We’ll also not be implementing advertisement as a form of getting revenue. We started FFFddl because we didn’t like how traditional DDL hosts dump a bucketload of advertisements and waiting time onto its users, and we don’t intend to follow in their footsteps. We’ve did inhouse discussion based on feedback from donors, and we see a few possible options of dealing with the increased usage.

A: We limit download speeds to 20mbit per IP and offer an unthrottled option for donors. We use that money to buy more bandwidth.
B: We rent an EU server and direct some of the traffic there. This should be cheaper than buying more bandwidth from the current host, because EU bandwidth is a lot cheaper than US bandwidth. Some people might get slower download speeds, but it can’t be helped.
C: We buy more bandwidth from the current host. This is the most expensive option.

Let me know what you think of the options. Nothing is set in stone yet. Personally, I think option B would be the best for everyone. It also scales better than the other two options over time.

Let’s move on to talking about the actual pickup plans. I’ll begin with Blurays, because that’s where we actually can confirm what we’re doing for sure. We’re on 76 volumes of Blurays released so far, and I’d consider that to be quite in line with our goal of 150 this year. Some of the shows that we’ve picked up have not been uploaded at all, and we sadly do not have enough donation headroom to be buying them. We’re out of the red for now, so anything after this week’s gittip payout will go into Blurays. We’re looking at buying Galilei Donna, Kakumeiki Valvrave 2 and Super Sonico. We have info that Nourin will get uploaded in the future, so we’ll not be spending money on that. We’ve also totally given up on recruiting staff for Blurays. Our current staff lineup of archdeco, Juular/myself and a QC is too OTP and we’ll be going with that forever!

Spring Bluray Plans
Atelier Escha & Logy – Alchemists of the Dusk Sky – Underwater
Black Bullet – Underwater
Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou – Commie
DATE A LIVE II – FFF
Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka? – Vivid-Taku
Hitsugi no Chaika – Anime-Koi
Isshukan Friends – Vivid
Love Live! S2 – FFF
Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei – FBI
No Game No Life – Underwater-FFF
Ryuugajou Nanana no Maizoukin – FFF
Seikoku no Dragonar – FFF
selector infected WIXOSS – Asenshi

Summer TV Plans
Futsuu no Joshikousei ga [Locodol] Yatte Mita.
Himegoto
Jinsei
Momokyun Sword
Rail Wars
Rokujouma no Shinryakusha!
Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance
Sword Art Online II
Tokyo ESP
Zankyou no Terror

Also, to preempt the incoming waves of recruitment questions, since we always recruit along with these posts, no, we’re not recruiting this season. Unless you’re a translator. We always take translators, and you’re welcome to join us to pick up a specific show that you really like. We’ve had someone do that so far, and other translators are welcome to do the same.