Whenever I need to find old/rare anime (unlicensed of course) I head over to Boxtorrents.com, but last weekend I was shocked to find the website was gone! Not just down for maintenance but completely vanished with only a placeholder declaring the domain was for sale by owner.
Even if you weren’t a member, this affects you!
If you’ve ever downloaded manga, anime, j-pop, or any live action Asian show from a torrent aggregator, at least one of the trackers (sources) was probably from Boxtorrents.
So what happened to the website? Well that depends on who you believe. Site administrators Malus and Jarudin say they took it down after they discovered founder “Box” was making torrents of money from donations meant (in their opinion) solely for operating costs. “We had believed in the spirit of Boxtorrents and don’t believe in profiting from operating an Anime torrent site. We considered confronting Box about this, but considering his evasiveness about donations, we felt that that was all the answers we needed,” said Malus in a statement on the site’s forum.
However it didn’t end there. The admins decided to keep the community going by transferring everything to their own website bakabt.com. “So we saved all the site/tracker/forum/wiki/etc. code and databases and brought it over here to BakaBT. We felt fine with doing this since most of the work was done by the staff and not Box, so we felt it belonged to the community and not Box himself. Plus, as many of you may know, Box had little impact on day-to-day operations since it has all be handled by the staff (save donations and contact with our provider) for a while now, which only reinforced our feelings about re-using the code from Boxtorrents. And that is basically how BakaBT came to be and Boxtorrents ceased to be,” explains Malus.
Honestly, I’d be surprised if Box doesn’t sue them despite the dubious nature of the website. But while Box disputes their accusations, he’s apparently taking the virtual coup in stride. In a conciliatory rebuttal, Box said “I dont really blame malus and jarudin for doing this as I really don’t do that much on the site anymore and if I was a regular staff member I would have been ‘fired’ which is effectively what has happened here. The site will do well in Jarudins capable hands and you can no doubt expect some awesome updates to it as time goes on.”
On a side note, L7 World is completely upfront about where donations go: ME! (not that I get any, ya moochers)
