On the removal of the Jr Idol club

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goofy3

Member
Feb 11, 2007
79
91
I would like to echo lifeisgook to say that matrix can be a good platform to support some ongoing discussion and sharing in this hobby. Both of us have used it for some time now, I think with good results.
Doubtless both of us will continue our im4k, sai_ppv, and other funding discussions there, although for the most part in separate rooms.

My focus has been exclusively on Freshidol/Imouto and Minisuka content for a number of years now. The group I manage all together has what is likely the largest collection of 4k JI photo and video content outside of Japan (every im4k title, plus a very large percentage of all the 4k photos those outlets have ever sold). We are narrower in scope than lifeisgook (no 18+ content), but deeper in knowledge and historical content for these particular materials.

Please feel free to DM me if you would like to be a part of it.
 

chompy

slacker
Staff member
Super Moderator
Emperor
Nov 7, 2006
1,763
616
I doubt it will make much difference to note that the decision to close the Jr idol club subforums is, as many have already deduced, based on multiple external pressures and ultimatums which are existential to the rest of the website.

In the 17 years the forum has been alive, we've been forced to move hosts more than once in order to resist attempts to remove the subforums. This is no longer a tenable position.

Whatever community has developed here may wish to consider migrating to another space. With that in mind, we have extended the read-only period for the Jr Idol club to 7 days. This will be the only time extension. Deleted subforums/already deleted threads will not be re-instated during this time.

We will not be providing any sql dumps of the subforums, however many of you are resourceful enough to download whatever threads you want for posterity.

Several members have already proposed different approaches to maintaining the community. This is extremely encouraging. Please use this thread for any further discussions.
 
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zakurabu

The Idolmaster
Aug 25, 2015
236
268
Two more torrent sites:

Here's a searchable site with torrents: https://bt4g.org/search/icdv

And another: https://en.btdig.com/imof_003

Anyway we do appreciate the time extension. Hopefully all threads can be archived in that time. Also, is there no chance for making the forums public (no registration wall) to make public archiving feasible? Or restoring deleted subforums even if it's just text only?
 

MrTimscampi

Active Member
Nov 13, 2012
9
119
I made an unlisted Imgur post with screenshots from the database project, if you're curious about what it looks like currently:
Since it looks like this thread is open to posting links to external communities, I'll plug the Discord again, directly this time: https://discord.gg/chg5KzTHHp

Edit: I'm currently running a mirroring tool on the JI club. I'll share links to it here and on the various Discords in this thread (Probably as a torrent) once the mirroring is done.
 
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HiddenInSight

Active Member
Jul 16, 2017
93
106
This is truly a sad day. And it couldn't have happened at a worse time. It would have been nice if someone had preserved the torrent index before shutting down the torrent forum, but it is what it is I guess. I honestly only ever used this site for Jr. Idol stuff so I'm probably gonna dip. It was fun while it lasted. Peace. Good luck for the future everyone, I hope you all go on to live happy lives and make your dreams come true. Hidden signing out.
 

Immergeil

Very Old Member
Aug 10, 2014
500
789
This is truly a sad day. And it couldn't have happened at a worse time. It would have been nice if someone had preserved the torrent index before shutting down the torrent forum, but it is what it is I guess. I honestly only ever used this site for Jr. Idol stuff so I'm probably gonna dip. It was fun while it lasted. Peace. Good luck for the future everyone, I hope you all go on to live happy lives and make your dreams come true. Hidden signing out.
There isn't much actual activity on this forum, as far as I can tell it's mostly people spamming JAV downloads, not much discussion.

For actual JAV and 18+ gravure discussion there are better places, so for me the only real draw here was JI.
 
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MrTimscampi

Active Member
Nov 13, 2012
9
119
There isn't much actual activity on this forum as far as I can tell it's mostly people spamming JAV downloads, not much discussion.

For actual JAV and 18+ gravure discussion there are better places, so for me the only real draw here was JI.
The entire site has been mostly a download spam by a few users ever since the file hosting partnerships started, honestly. It's become less of a community and more of a way for a few users to make some money by sharing content through these sponsored hosts.

The amount of "XYZ Exclusive" downloads has all but exploded over the years, to the point where most of the DDL threads only have links to these sponsored hosts.

And the torrent sections are basically on life support, since everyone prefers posting on the DDL ones to try to make a few bucks.

Pretty much all sense of community the website had in the late 2000s is gone at this point, and all of that moved to the few Discord/Element servers made by members with similar tastes.
 

lifeisgook

Certified Man of Culture
Jan 26, 2016
437
563
The entire site has been mostly a download spam by a few users ever since the file hosting partnerships started, honestly. It's become less of a community and more of a way for a few users to make some money by sharing content through these sponsored hosts.

The amount of "XYZ Exclusive" downloads has all but exploded over the years, to the point where most of the DDL threads only have links to these sponsored hosts.

And the torrent sections are basically on life support, since everyone prefers posting on the DDL ones to try to make a few bucks.

Pretty much all sense of community the website had in the late 2000s is gone at this point, and all of that moved to the few Discord/Element servers made by members with similar tastes.
I didn't want to blatantly say it but this is correct, the filejoker sponsorship ruined sharing since it incentivized the trickling of content, someone buys a subscription on one of the few remaining sites, splits the galleries into 100 different links and forces you to download a 30mb archive for 50 minutes unless you pay $20+ for a premium account that costs more than the subscription on the actual gravure site. They get payed for pretty much wasting your time.

Then you have people who are more focused on reuploading old rips and backups that they didn't even buy on file joker instead of properly archiving it or maybe trying to recover some of the lost/missed ones that are scattered throughout the aftermarket since most of the makers shut down.
 

ninjatrev

New Member
Apr 24, 2008
17
18
This is heartbreaking news ive been a lurker here for 15 years, and i had a pretty good collection, then the hdd i had died , i had to start over.
I seen a news article saying tht the age of consent was being changed to 16 in japan, i dont know it that has anything to do with it. Thank you all for all your work.
 

goofy3

Member
Feb 11, 2007
79
91
I didn't want to blatantly say it but this is correct, the filejoker sponsorship ruined sharing since it incentivized the trickling of content, someone buys a subscription on one of the few remaining sites, splits the galleries into 100 different links and forces you to download a 30mb archive for 50 minutes unless you pay $20+ for a premium account that costs more than the subscription on the actual gravure site. They get payed for pretty much wasting your time.

Then you have people who are more focused on reuploading old rips and backups that they didn't even buy on file joker instead of properly archiving it or maybe trying to recover some of the lost/missed ones that are scattered throughout the aftermarket since most of the makers shut down.
This might be correct, but it is definitely not the whole story.

Filejoker is just a means to keep the lights on here. People might be frustrated about paying membership fees for it, but someone someplace has to cover the overhead of site operation. What is a better business model? Sell ads? Pledge drives? I don’t think you will find many better options than partnership with a file host. You want to archive content? Great! Where, and who is going to pay for it and control access? That question is never answered.

I’m no insider, but I know enough about business that I can be sure no one is getting rich in this operation. Margins must be tiny as there is huge competition in every direction. And given the nature of the content, costs are definitely going to be higher than average. The failure here is not about greed of uploaders or even of AO management.

The root cause of the failure is much closer to home. People came here feeling entitled to free content, and guess what? It failed because nothing in this life is free. I’m as sad as the next guy to see this result, but there is no conspiracy here and no mystery as to what caused it.

So going forward, what to do? Maybe there are two pieces to this: 1) Forums and discussion threads, and 2) Content archiving (including purchase and access control).

I would love to see some debate about what we want out of each of them. For #1, as mentioned before, matrix can be a good tool as it’s flexible and encrypted. We can distribute admin workload by allowing individuals to create and manage rooms according to their areas of interest. We just need a central place where people can see what rooms are available and inquire with admins for an invitation.

For #2, NAS systems have progressed to the point where we could easily have mirrored systems around the globe. This would depend on probably 5 or 6 people who have the money and time to devote a system to the effort. Set up correctly, this could give redundancy and reasonable access speeds for lots of people.

Anyway, just ideas, maybe fatally flawed. I think most important here is that we don’t end up in someone’s proprietary system where one person holds the keys to everything. But I’ll bet with some creative thought and discussion we can come up with some interesting solutions.
 

MrTimscampi

Active Member
Nov 13, 2012
9
119
Filejoker is just a means to keep the lights on here. People might be frustrated about paying membership fees for it, but someone someplace has to cover the overhead of site operation. What is a better business model? Sell ads? Pledge drives? I don’t think you will find many better options than partnership with a file host. You want to archive content? Great! Where, and who is going to pay for it and control access? That question is never answered.
Plenty of private torrent trackers do exactly that: keep obscure content accessible long-term, for free, while relying on donations. On the rare occasions donation goals aren't met, the admins just foot the bill as a group, in the name of keeping stuff accessible. Though it's usually pretty rare, as members are keen to help.

You just need to incentivize people to keep seeding with a ratio system and a bonus point system (to encourage long-term seeding of content, bonus points can be exchanged for ratio).

Many private trackers have survived for 15+ years at this point. To take an example, PassThePopcorn, a movie tracker, covers 280,488 movies with a total of 816,801 torrents as of this morning.

The root cause of the failure is much closer to home. People came here feeling entitled to free content, and guess what? It failed because nothing in this life is free.
Piracy is free, and what's happening in the downloads sub-forums on AO is piracy. JAV, IV and U-15 aren't special snowflakes. In fact, there are entire communities built around sharing JAV and IV for free. Or even anime, where Japanese boxsets are usually prohibitively expensive. All for free, for the pleasure of sharing, archiving content and making it available for others.

Hell, I've ripped stuff myself before, and I have a bunch of content lined up to rip whenever I finish taking care of some personal stuff. I'm not asking for any money or premium account to share it, I just do it because I care about keeping stuff available and sharing what I have.

Piracy is not, and should not be, done to make money or to "cover your costs". Financing stuff as a group through group buys is fine, locking content behind paywalls isn't, imho.

And, if FileJoker was actually good, that'd be one thing. But it limits how much you can download even when paying. A limit that seems, at best, completely random (Sometimes I've been locked at 50GB, then blocked for 5 days, other times I've been locked at 100GB, then blocked for 2 days).
I'm sorry, but if I'm paying 20$/month (The same price as the top tier of Netflix in the US, for comparison) to be able to download pirated content, I am at least expecting to be able to download as much as I please in the time-frame I have paid for. I don't think it's that unreasonable.

The entire problem is thinking about it as a business or wanting to make your money back. I've talked about Kanojo above in the thread, and I'm going to have to host it somewhere, and pay for all hosting costs. I do plan on making a donation system to help me cover costs, but I'm not expecting anyone to participate. It's money I'm willingly ready to lose, because I think the project itself is a good thing for the community.
If I have to pay hundreds of dollars per month out of pocket to host it, so be it.
 

In Tyler We Trust

New Member
Mar 31, 2020
22
22
The best part of this site was the JR downloads, Where else can you get something like that? It wasn't just the downloads from FJ, it was also the wealth of info that went with it, again, where else can you get something like that? Please, drop a link to a new place that can provide it if it exist.
 

lifeisgook

Certified Man of Culture
Jan 26, 2016
437
563
The root cause of the failure is much closer to home. People came here feeling entitled to free content, and guess what? It failed because nothing in this life is free. I’m as sad as the next guy to see this result, but there is no conspiracy here and no mystery as to what caused it.
The cause of the subforum's closure and the terrible sharing culture are two separate issues, as already well stated it is possible if your passionate enough about the content to pay put of pocket to host a community. the admins taking filejoker sponsorship was probably the beginning of their disinterest in the content/community. I don't really blame them for that, my criticism is more towards the scavengers that are left to take over.

Regardless i already found my solution for getting content, with the information being the big loss here. Right now the Kanojo database seems to be the best solution.

Plenty of private torrent trackers do exactly that
I think this would be the ultimate goal, at least after enough content has been amassed. Only obstacle is i think this type of thing needs talented web devs/engineers. If anyone wants to take a crack at it I'm willing to put money into it.
 

lpcs1

Suffers from semenly incurable Narutophilia
Dec 7, 2012
639
623
Thank you AO for those good years.

But JIs are not dead ! Also the dawn of AI generated JIs is upon us

Join the resistance: https://discord.gg/45GQPfhH


edit: invitation URL is set to expire in about one more day, won't have another one to share after that
 
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MrTimscampi

Active Member
Nov 13, 2012
9
119
Also the dawn of AI generated JIs is upon us
For those curious about what he means, this is something I released last week: https://civitai.com/models/8645/anju-kozuki

The next few releases are a model of younger Anju, then 2 or 3 models of Rei at various ages (No ETA though, since I'm juggling with quite a lot of projects already :p ). Further models for idols will probably be based on what's getting requested or what the community wants to see.

In other news, I have completed a mirror of the JI Club. I'll clean it up a bit, then package it as a torrent. It's around 26GB, do it may take a while, but all the data is safe and browsable.

So I'm happy to announce that all the information gathered over the years is safe and in at least one person's hands.
 
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