We’ve finally hit our fifth anniversary milestone! I think our Spring 2015 plans really shouldn’t be a surprise, with the amount of second seasons, but you’ll see!

Traditionally, Spring posts have always been our longest posts, as we reflect on what we’ve done the previous years and write about our plans for the future. This year will not be any different, though it’ll be longer than usual. I’ve teased that this post will be a little more special than usual on various forms of media and it indeed will be. The original intention was to finally do a full write-up on the various events that happened from when FFF first started till the day of our fifth anniversary, but I decided to not go ahead with that. You see, while writing that long article, I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter in the end. What’s happened has happened, we can’t change it. All the drama over the years, all the staff who’ve been asked to leave, and all the staff who’ve disappeared without a word, while being a part of FFF’s history, are not people who will directly influence what FFF is today.

Bearing that in mind, I’m going to write about what will happen from now onwards and what you can expect from FFF in 2015 and beyond. To meet expectations from the vast majority of our followers, I will have to begin with what’s happening with me. Last Winter, I wrote that Spring would be the last time I’ll be the one writing these boring long posts that people look forward to and incited a lot of questions from our followers. I don’t think the short answers I’ve given in the comments are enough, but didn’t want to write about it yet. What will be happening is that I, Eien, will be stepping down as leader of FFF and Naine will be taking over as leader. “Why is this the case?”, you might ask. I’m going to be serving my mandatory military service over the next two years and will have little to no time for fansubbing, especially not for weekly shows. A leader who is not around five days of the week wouldn’t be an effective leader, and as such, I’ll be stepping down after Spring 2015. I do not expect this change to affect how FFF carries itself as a group, but I do think some of you will be much happier you won’t have to deal with my choice of best girls, or boring posts. Good for you, except that I will still be sharing my perfect taste when making Bluray releases, which I will still be a part of.

Leadership changes aside, the more noticeable issue is one that deals with servers. Last year, we made a switch to the current server on FFFddl, one that uses premium bandwidth instead of the cheaper options we used to go with, and one that has been very stable over its lifetime, as compared to our previous hosts. As the group grows, so does the amount of people and files we serve. I’ve observed record highs in bandwidth usage the past few months and we need to do something about it. This month has been twice as high. Our logs show that this is due to the massive amount of DxD followers, which doesn’t really come as a surprise to us. It is a very popular show, after all. To continue serving content at the speeds we’ve been providing, I would like to appeal to FFFddl users to consider making a small donation through our gratipay account. FFFddl serves over half a million downloads every season and this costs us a lot of money. If each user gave us ten cents each week, we’d have more than enough to pay for additional bandwidth overage charges from our host. If enough users chip in, we will be able to go ahead with our plan of expanding onto a European host to cater to European users.

Next, let us talk about Bluray backlogs, which many of you have been giving me grieve for. We’ve been releasing a lot of Blurays during the past few months. Some of which have been highly requested, and some not. Many of you have reached out to me to give me advice on how to handle our backlog which I would like to clarify right now. We do not choose to work on backlog in order of number of requests. We never have. We have, and always will opt to work on shows that the staff like, instead of ones that are generally disliked. I’m pretty sure a lot of you are aware that many of the shows that most of you, me included, enjoy aren’t very well liked by the majority of the staff at FFF. This isn’t something that can be changed. What you want, however, will definitely come if you wait. I personally guarantee that.

Lastly, there are matters relating to recruitment as well. The Spring 2015 Recruitment run has been our first recruitment run in many seasons, but it hasn’t really been successful. We’re still looking for Translators, Timers, and Typesetters to join us. Something I’ve noticed being done is the lack of effort in filling in the recruitment form. We’re rather serious about the form and we urge all applicants to take it seriously. We’ve found direct relations to the people who’ve passed our tests and the people who took the form seriously. Recruitment is still open and you can submit a form here.

Now, I’m aware that many of you may have more questions you’d like to ask. Questions or topics that I might not have covered in this post. That’s expected. I will personally be writing a couple of more detailed posts for matters relating to myself over at my personal blog during the next few days or weeks. If you have a more pressing enquiry, please leave a comment in this post, or if you’d like to be more anonymous, you can leave a question over on my Ask.fm.

Without further ado, here are our plans for the season:

Spring 2015 TV
Assassination Classroom (Ongoing)
Dungeon ni Deai o Motomeru no wa Machigatteiru
Hibike! Euphonium
Highschool DxD BorN
Kyoukai no Rinne
Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid
Nisekoi 2
Ore Monogatari
Shokugeki no Souma
Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Come wa Machigatteiru. Zoku

Winter 2015 BD
Akatsuki no Yona [FFF]
Assassination Classroom [FFF]
Death Parade [FFF]
Dog Days S3 [FBI]
Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata [FFF]
Seiken Tsukai no World Break [FFF]
Shinmai Maou no Testament [FFFyuu]
THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls [Chibiki]

Once again, these are subject to changes. No insurance will be covered but you are free to join us as staff and change this!