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Full story here.

In short the person running the site was "BOX" himself. A while back when the adds were removed Boxtorrents was kept alive by the donation system alone. After a while curiosity got the best of the other staff so they wrote a script to see how much donation money Box was actually receiving, and came to find out that is was far more money then it actually took to keep the site afloat, meaning Box was making a profit off of Boxtorrents.

When the staff found this out they were "shocked" to see he was actually making profit off of the site so they made BakaBT then transferred everything over saying box actually did very little of the day to day maintenance that keep the site alive anyway. They said from then on donations would only be made to keep the site alive, extra would "rollover" to the next month, and after a certain amount of donations they would disable the donation system for the rest of the month.

Now I'm sure staff were probably mad because he was keeping all the excess donations, but boxtorrents allowed you to even/increase your ratio by the donation system so some people could of continued to donate for that reason. Even then this is probably for the best. I'm sure I'd be upset if I found out that the person who owned the server was getting paid while I was doing all the work or that the "non-profit" site was actually making somewhat of a profit.

Thoughts?

(I was going to place this in Anime discussion, but I felt it was more suited for GD since it's not directly related to anime, just indirectly related.)

So what should he do with the extra money from donations?

A donation box is not something you can close till you need it again or else you will never know when you'll be in a pinch again...

I'm shocked. It's the first time I hear of this, had been wondering why I couldn't open boxtorrents today... man, it was running perfectly fine yesterday.

Wow that's sucks for them, they shouldn't of sold out to them other guys with all there stuff

They said that they had received enough donations to keep the site running for a "long time", but box still continued to accept donations. Meaning all the excess money wasn't going towards the non-profit site, but box's pocketbook.

By using the "disable" option they can receive donations during the month, and when they have enough for the month they can disable the option to donate. This means 100% of donations would go towards the non-profit site, and any extra they might receive would rollover to the next month.

It's not as if that extra money was being saved for a "pinch", but that there was so much extra money the site could of been ran "a long time" without donations, and someone was using it for personal gain.

Moral of the story: Don't donate to shit like this.

What I can't figure out is what Box will do now. I'm not even sure if the site was supposed to be non-profit; I mean, it was Box's site, and now it was hijacked by his admins. He should be pretty pissed right about now.

I see tons of posters saying that after the rest of the staff joined Boxtorrents started to flourish. I myself have never even seen him make an update. I can't say that he didn't do anything because this I don't know, but by the looks of it the staff did the majority of the work.

Boxtorrents is supposed to be a non-profit community, and I'm sure the staff were upset upon finding out that the person who did nothing but own the server/domain was collecting a tidy little sum of money.

Also to Hraesvelgr: Donations are what keep sites like this alive. I've never donated myself, but I do use Boxtorrents/BakaBT. If people didn't donate then this site wouldn't be alive unless they decided to put the adds back up.

So the 'scheduled server maintenance' was all just a coup d'etat? I've never donated to sites like these and probably never will. I maintain a good share ratio and that's about the extent of my support.

Meh I'd probably of done the same. Hell if I can make a website and not have to work because of it(or get some extra spending every month) then I'm happy.

The worst thing about this (aside from the whole scamming donations thing) is that they've moved to a new tracker, so it's going to take a while for torrents to get back close to their original seeding levels. =/

Yes, I realize that and my point still remains. If they go under because of it, it isn't my problem.

He is the founder so really regardless of the reason they have no right to do that.

Making a profit isn't wrong, per se, but off donations that one would assume goes to the site, is.

Amusing mainly.

But when they lost the two big names in anime due to the 'get our stuff off of your site' demands, they lost a lot of content that made them worth it to go there.

And considering Boxtorrents was always to me, a site that supported saying 'screw you' to not distributing licenced anime, which is really counter to the normal attitude of places like Animesuki which only allows anime that is not licensed, I found it hard to care about Boxtorrents.

So I suspect a lot in the anime community are actually likely laughing their asses off over Box having his site essentially stolen right out from under him.

It is funny, isn't it? Oh, and animesuki is a great site, by the way.

What a self-righteous dick move. I seriously doubt they did this shit out of 'good will' for the community. Yeah fucking right lol

When the staff found this out they were "shocked" to see he was actually making profit off of the site so they made BakaBT then transferred everything over saying box actually did very little of the day to day maintenance that keep the site alive anyway.



Douche bags just wanted a piece of the donation pie for the work they agreed to do for free in the first place.

Yea, I suspected the same thing myself. I'd be pretty damn upset though if I knew I was doing the work while Box was getting paid , but they did volunteer freely to begin with so I suppose how it's looked at would be subjective.

I can't say I wouldn't of done the same thing as Box (hell, if given the chance I'd be trying to make a little bit of money, too), but at the same time I can't say I wouldn't of done the same thing as the staff if in the same position.

I've never donated nor do I plan to donate, and I don't even keep a 1:1 ratio (Currently 100Gb behind). But in general Boxtorrents/BakaBT is/was an awesome place to get hard to find unlicensed series, and OST batches so the situation interests me, somewhat.

Any site that allows licensed material is better than both of the sites anyway.

A tale you hear much too often. Reminds me of a certain private Ragnarok server which encountered much the same fate.