Welcome AnimeBracket, Playlists Open Beta, New Backup Torrent & more

AnimeBracket has found a new home

As you may or may not know the anime ranking site AnimeBracket.com has been looking for a new owner after the current maintainer isn't having the time anymore to keep the site hosted or updated. We have a small relationship with the site, since we also use its API to create our own bracket pages. But apart from that we are also fans of the site and would like to see it continue to exist.

And this is why we reached out to the owner and proposed to take over the site in the future. I'm happy to announce that they accepted our offer and we will be taking over AnimeBracket starting this weekend.

The application in its current state is a bit outdated, so our long-term goal is to rewrite it from scratch. But this won't be an active project until early next year after we have launched the playlists update. Until then we will maintain the site in it's current form, just on our servers. We will also carry over the entire database.

We hope to make this migration as seamless as possible, but please bare with us if the site is a bit unstable at first.

Playlists are now in Open Beta

For those of you who have been following the development of our next big feature update, user playlists, we have exiting news: our previously closed beta is now open for everybody!

Our beta site is available here: https://beta.animethemes.moe/wiki

To get started with playlists, all you need to do is to create an account by going to the My Profile page and clicking on “Create new account”. After creating your account, you’ll need to verify your e-mail address to unlock the playlist feature. You can find your playlists on your profile page where you already created your account. Themes can be added to playlists by using the … menu or directly from the video player.

Speaking of which the video player also got a big update so be sure to give it a look. There are various other improvements the beta brings and we are still actively working on it. For more information we will publish another blog post on the beta soon.

Backup torrent updated for Summer 2023

We know a lot of you have been waiting on an update for this, so we are happy to announce that our seasonal backup torrent has been updated with the themes from the Spring and Summer seasons of 2023. It also includes all other themes from our site which accumulates to roughly 600 GB of video.

There are two versions of the backup torrent: One for all video files (in WebM format) and one for all audio files (in Ogg format). The current torrents, AnimeThemes.moe - OP/ED Collection Audio/Video Backup [2023.10.26], can be found here:

Video: https://files.catbox.moe/4wbq7i.torrent

Audio: https://files.catbox.moe/yc45el.torrent

The next torrent update will be 2024-01-01.

Discord overhaul and Staff changes

Our Discord server got a small overhaul. Here’s what we have changed:

• We are now making use of the Onboarding and Server Guide features to help new users navigating the server.
• We reduced the number of channels by combining channels with similar topics. For example all Trello related channels got merged into #trello.
• We reorganized the channel categories. We now have a Bots category for channels where only bots post and a Contributing category for everything encoding and wiki management related.
• We updated the #rules and #faq channels. You can find them in the Server Guide at the top of the channel list. The #help_wanted channel will also be updated in the future.

There were also some staff changes. We removed the Trial role and gave members more appropriate roles. With that we also added the Developer role and are happy to welcome two new members: SentFrom and Geo.

Transparency update

Today we also want to give an update to our transparency efforts. You may know that we have a transparency page on our site. Unfortunately we haven’t gotten around to update it, since we changed hosting providers. It also doesn’t properly support our current workflow, so we will give it a proper overhaul later.

For now these are our transactions since June:

Month	Amount	Description
June 2023	$568.07	Carried over from our old hosting provider
	$26.17	Patreon income
July 2023	$109.93	Patreon income
	$-146.64	Initial setup costs for our new hosting provider
August 2023	$116.58	Patreon income
	$-114.35	Monthly costs for our new hosting provider
September 2023	$126.93	Patreon income
	$-82.86	Monthly costs for our new hosting provider

A few notes:

• Our old hosting provider paid out our current balance at the time of our cancellation. This includes all Patreon earnings that haven’t been spent till then.
• In June we still operated from our old hosting provider which is why we didn’t have to pay for it that month (it was already paid for before the transfer).
• In July we set up two new servers which had initial setup costs. The second server also had a monthly cost in August. After that we cancelled it and our now operating with one server only (making up the $82,86 per month).

As you can see thank to our incredible support from Patrons we could handle the shaky transition between hosting providers relatively well.

AnimeThemes.moe Development

animethemes-batch-encoder

v2.1 and v2.0 have been tagged and released.

• An interface is now created with some new options such as selection and checkbox to make it easier to use.
• Source videos can be selected all at once.
• With the --custom argument it is possible to customize some options for each output file.
• Audio and video filters can be selected.
• Added --inputfile argument allowing source videos to be inserted on the command line.

Thank You

Last but not least we want to give a huge thank you to everyone supporting the AnimeThemes project. Special shout out to everyone subscribed to our Patreon, without you we wouldn’t be able to keep this project alive.