Tuesday, January 28, 2014

[Rant] A Notice for those who Care

Yo! Just taking a moment aside here to say something that needs to be said. I don't really like hi-jacking Evil Cats blog to do something like this, but you folks should know. So I apologize in advance, and warn you that I'm about to rant at you, and do something that I feel is not what this blog was meant to do. Feel free to pass this post by. I'm going to try and get at least 2 more posts done to help bury this.
One or Two of you may remember me saying something about how I make the summaries I attach on the first impression posts of new anime, by splicing together the summaries from a bunch of different websites, so that they not only are accurate but don't spoil anything, after I watch the first episode?
Well I just enjoyed having to jump into the HTML coding of the blog to remove advertising that had been inserted into the text I copied from a website.
Said website was Watchanimeon.com.

Now, I usually make a strong point of neither talking up, nor down, about other websites whenever I'm on a website of similar/equal interest. That is to say something like this: If I'm on one anime streaming website, I don't advertise for another, or talk bad about it or the one I'm on while I'm there. If I have something to say about a website, I take it someplace more fitting for it. I don't spew hate and anarchy all over someone else trying to have a good time, and I absolutely do not ever advertise for someone or something else, EVER. I may say a good word or drop a plug when it is earned  or asked for by the person(singular) I'm talking to, but I do not advertise.

Now, in this particular instance this is nothing new. Websites have had these code insertions for a while now, that's not what bugs me. It's to help prevent plagiarism, so I don't mind and encourage it. Another website I visited for my splicing also had the copy paste insertions.
No, what bugs me about watchanimeon, and why they can go piss off, is that they double inserted their website and an ad for it. Not only did I have to delete a 'see more at watchanime.com!' from the end of the literal one sentence I copied from them, that I damn well bet they copied from someone else, since it was the exact same as a piece from another tab with a summary I had open, (which is why I was using it), but when I came onto the website today to check for comments, to lay out templates for a few more anime's first episodes, and to see if I missed any editing or grammar/spellcheck that I needed to fix in recent posts, I got to see a lovely line of text running right through the middle of three different posts, advertising for watchanimeon.
Here's the part that really pisses me off. I had to go remove it, from the HTML. The only reason I even knew to do that, was because I have had a college class on web programming, and I knew that was where it had to be to cause this. What if someone else had this problem? They wouldn't know how to get the text off, and they would have a massive headache trying to google a fix.

*Stops to breath and calm down*
Okay. Here's the thing. I had to do this after I cut the ad out of the text I copied. AND I had to do it four more times here for, and I counted, 4 more copy pastes that each contained, in this order: 5 words, 3 words, 2 words (a name), and 8 words (a full sentence). That's four separate places, in one post, that I had to cut it out of the HTML, and then double check to make sure I hadn't damaged the formatting of the post (which I did the first time). This is never minding that I had to also cut this lovely little parasite out of 2 other posts, thankfully only once for each of them.
I literally had to remove not only a Text ad insert, but an HTML ad insert, for TWO and THREE words. I understand that their website simply does this for everything copied from it, I understand that, what pisses me off is how much of an arse you have to be to hide a second ad in the HTML.
A second ad.
My point? Watchanimeon is a free anime streaming website, with associate forum and inter-website links and so on. They provide a free service that costs them money. I cut a bit of slack for people that do something like that. However! They are doing so, intentionally or otherwise, at a partial expense to the people that produce the anime we all love so much. They provide, for free, permanently, something you would have to otherwise pay money to purchase after the shows stop airing on TV. This is why you'll occasionally run into an episode of an anime that has been taken down on whatever website they use to embed the stream. The website that hosts the video stream they embed takes it down for legal reasons. They have probably a hundred other competitor websites doing the exact same thing, catering to us, the anime community fanbase. What's more, there are even websites like Crunchyroll that are trying to establish systems that bring profit back to the producers as well, with their simulcasting system (which they pay money for in a deal with some part of the anime industry, I'm sure).
My very long winded conclusion is that when there are probably a hundred other places we could go, some a lot more moral (some less), that don't use an aggravatingly poor practice, I see no reason to put up with it. Now, I give credit to watchanimeon for being one of the few streaming websites that don't drown you in banner ads and popups. I got real sick of that real fast way back when. Whenever crunchyroll doesn't have something, I usually fall back on watchanimeon. I probably still will. But this isn't the first time I've ran face-first into a problem because of some poor practice on their website. I'm not going to say what other problems I've had, that's poor taste. I'm not going to tell you to stop using their website.
At the end of this post, I have officially concluded my business, which was to inform you that I have been aggravated in my attempts to continue providing the service that The Evil Cat started by an aggravatingly stupid and, in my opinion, immoral, practice of another website. Do what you will with this information.

I really, really, wish I could collapse all of this ranting into a spoiler-style button so not everyone had to put up with this when they were just coming here to read a post on anime. I still haven't figured out how to get it to work, despite trying three different tutorials on making them. So I apologize, again, for ranting at you all. I apologize for, basically, stealing The Evil Cat's blog for this. I hope you all have a great day, because I haven't for the last half hour of double checking my last 7 posts.

2 comments:

The Evil Cat said...

That's a common trick lots of sites do to advertise their sites. One way to defeat it is to always copy and paste into a text editor (emphasize on text, not those that does fancy html or rich text, those does only text editing, like notepad if you're using windows, or TextWrangler if you use a Mac), then copy from the text editor to paste into destination.

Lots of times, I find it so annoying, I'd rather just re-type the whole sentence if necessary than copy and paste. Personally, I would paraphrase and shorten the sentence while I'm at it, too.

p.s. I think this is the first time I visited here in like a month or so. Thanks for keeping the site going. I've been kept busy with work stuff and haven't even watched anything new since October (>.<) A couple of my friends that read it frequently actually commented about the change of writing style and thought it was actually rather interesting seeing the changes.

(=^.^=)

Zetro said...

Good to know there's at least a few people enjoying it. I haven't seen or heard anything from...Mutou was it? My co-support for keeping things goin. I'm frankly impressed at how you kept up with releases, I still haven't finished watching the first episode of all the january releases, in addition to noticing I missed one from last season, probably others too.

I was using notepad at first after realizing the ads were being inserted, but eventually switched to wordpad for convenience since I have it pinned to the start menu as my episode list editor. I never realized notepad was saving me the headache. For small cuts from most places I was just using firefoxes attached google search bar, and that appeared to have kept the HTML insert out of my earliest posts. I'll be sure to stick to notepad now, I'll get a shortcut out on my desktop for when I'm doing posts. Like I said, the ad inserts didn't bug me, there were a few. When I realized they were inserting HTML, that's what got me rolling and ticked off. I didn't even know that was a thing that could be done (not that I know much more than basics).
And I'm happy to help out, it's why I agreed in the first place. I didn't think much of it, was really easy to keep up since I started in mid-season, but when the new season rolled in, DAYUM, I just couldn't keep up, and it boggled my brain how you seemed to always have at least one post for all the new releases. I still need to get Wizard Barristers first post up, it's why I was popping into the site to check for comments. Great to hear from ya, hope work is going good for ya, I'm actually job hunting on my end, stuck in the endless loop of everyone wanted job experience and no one giving it. *shrug*