Update on the Future of AnimeThemes.moe

Hey everyone, today we want to give an update on what has been going on in the last couple of weeks. We want to give answers to questions including our current hosting and staff situation as well as the Patreon campaign and the future of the AnimeThemes project.

The Incident

As you may have read from our recent announcements on our socials, our hosting provider got a copyright abuse complaint. It stated that if we didn’t respond within 24 hours, our offending server would be taken down. At first, we prepared for the worst and pulled as much as we could from the servers to prepare for the migration to a new hosting provider. We also responded to the abuse complaint hoping that we could get more time for the migration. The response did prevent the shutdown of our services after the 24 hour mark, but the abuse investigation remained open for further scrutiny. It remained clear that it isn’t a long term solution to stay with this provider.

New Project Ownership

With the announcement of the hosting incident came also the announcement that para will be leaving the project. In case you don’t know, para was owning and maintaining our server infrastructure, developed the backend and API for AnimeThemes.moe as well as paying a lot of the bills out of his own pocket.

Combined with the incident mentioned above, it made sense for us to start looking for a new hosting solution and transfer project ownership. This also included various accounts that had belonged to para which have now been given to other staff members.

At this point I want to thank para for everything he has done for the project over the years. He put all his heart into this project and I believe it wouldn’t exist without him. While I understand his reasons for quitting, I hope he will come back to this project once in a while to check out our progress. For now I wish you all the best for the future.

para also wrote a farewell letter in which he looks back on his time with AnimeThemes. Be sure to give it a read: A Farewell to Para

Host Migration

When you are reading this, most of the infrastructure for AnimeThemes.moe has already been migrated to another hosting provider. For the end-user this transition from one host to another should be completely seamless.

To keep things simple we decided to start by only migrating our US region servers to the new provider. The EU region will follow as soon as possible, so please excuse slower loading times if you are living in that region.

We also haven’t migrated our beta site, yet. It should be up again, in the following weeks. For Patrons: Accounts created on the old server will be carried over to the new one.

New Patreon Campaign

Since the Patreon campaign was managed by para, we also need to transfer it. Unfortunately, it is not possible to change ownership of the Patreon account which is why we have to create a new campaign. Everything else will carry over from our old campaign, including perk prices and benefits. The important part though is that we have to ask our current Patrons to re-subscribe to the new campaign:

https://www.patreon.com/AnimeThemes

If you were a Patron on the old campaign, your subscription should have already ended, so you don’t need to cancel it.

For transparency's sake, I want to add that I (Mani) will be running the Patreon account and therefore, I will also take over the server bills. Like before, 100% of the Patreon earnings will be put into hosting our servers.

Thank you to all our Patrons for your support so far! Without you it wouldn’t be possible to maintain AnimeThemes.moe.

What’s next?

The current staff is motivated to continue the development of AnimeThemes and bringing you the best collection of anime themes out there. After the new beta server is up, we’ll continue the development for our upcoming playlist release. If you haven’t heard about it, you can check out our monthly status updates or get the latest updates on our Discord server. The playlist release will also feature a brand new video player, so stay tuned for that!