Already seeing abuse of "Fuwanovel" and "Prepatched" Torrents

[Tay]

Taken from my post in the Fuwazette

 

Hi everybody, this is Tay. It’s been a busy few days. A lot of changes have occurred at Fuwanovel, and in the next day or two I will be posting an in-depth look into all the cool new and upcoming site features. This post is a little more specific: as was announced on the forums, Fuwanovel is ending its support and supply of torrents. Regardless of how you feel about this, please pay attention to what comes next:

 

We’ve had some of this in the past, too, but ever since Tuesday’s news I’ve been made aware of several new groups who are trying to repackage our torrents with malware and hawk them as “Fuwanovel” or “pre-patched” torrents. Please be extremely cautious whenever you see these keywords. We recommend you avoid them altogether.

 

If you used Fuwanovel because you had difficulty patching games in the past, please be aware that we’ll be stepping up our support of patching instructions and putting out patching guides in the next few weeks. In the immediate future you can always post help requests in the /index.php?/forum/13-voluntary-tech-support/">volunteer tech support board.

 

Changing our site’s direction wasn’t an easy decision, but it was the right one to make.

[Kyoroto]

[periah250]

i really don't like this no torrent policy but if they can manage to keep good on their promise to beef up their support of self patching i can look past it as we always can use sukebi or whatever it is

[Darklord Rooke]

I'm embarrassed to say I never saw this malware thing coming 0.0

[Kyoroto]

I'm embarrassed to say I never saw this malware thing coming 0.0

[solidbatman]

Both the twitter and facebook pages need to make a post about this as both have been silent on these major changes. 

[Tay]

Working on it.

[Erogamer]

I hope you keep a list of visual novels there are English patches for, as well as provide direction on where to get the patch. It looks like you will be doing one of these so far.

[Eclipsed]

Totally didn't see the malware thing coming either

 

That actually made me forget about the no torrents thing and think more about how to combat this

 

THIS MEANS WAR

[Silvz]

I don''t exactly understand what is happening... can someone explain it in a easier way?

[Eclipsed]

1. Fuwa takes down its torrents

 

2. Bad people download Fuwa torrents before they are taken down, put virus in them, then reupload under the Fuwa name

 

3. Misinformed people download fake Fuwa virus torrents

This has a huuuge chance of worsening Fuwa's reputation, so steps really need to be taken to inform the world that Fuwa will no longer provide torrents and that any torrents are likely filled w/ viruses

[Mr. Meogii]

10 out of 10

Lmao 

[Zodai]

I don''t exactly understand what is happening... can someone explain it in a easier way?

 

Fuwanovel's removing torrents, so evil people are putting up other torrents with the name Fuwanovel in them to try to get viruses in people looking for the old torrents.

 

Truth be told, while they won't be on the front page anymore, I think they'll still be keeping the sources up on Nyaa or wherever they keep them.  From what I can tell instead of searching for the torrents through google, you're better off PM-ing an existing member of an admin to see if they have the source itself so you can avoid the viruses entirely.

 

As for new members, I think that's what the mentor system is for.  We'll probably be using the mentor system to lead those looking to get into VNs to the safe/official downloads.  Of course, whether or not they choose to do this is at the discretion of the mentor themselves, but at least this way we're able to find a nice medium where we don't support the piracy directly (I think we're past the point where it's necessary to get the medium to grow) but still allow a small outlet so the existing culture behind the unreleased Japanese stuff doesn't go away as time goes on.

[Thomas]

Why am i not surprised there are always gonna be A****les  doing things like that

[Silvz]

Thanks guys :B

 

But why is Fuwa removing torrents? I'm feeling lost .-.

[Zodai]

Thanks guys :B

 

But why is Fuwa removing torrents? I'm feeling lost .-.

 

That's in another thread.

 

Basically, they're swapping to a more powerful server, but that one has some stricter Terms of Service rules relating to this kind of stuff.  They seemed to already be planning to move away from piracy as a whole later on, so since now seems to coincide with the plans they decided to go ahead with the move and remove them.  There could probably be some debate on whether or not it's the right move, but it had to happen sometime and no matter how late you did it it would always be 'too soon.'

[kyrt]

I find it rather disheartening that the people most likely trying to ruin fuwanovel's reputation via this strategy are likely previous fuwanovel users. 

[Night]

Too bad huh, guess I can stop seeding now (at least my bandwidth can rest a little)

So, when would the torrents go down?

[Mr Poltroon]

Too bad huh, guess I can stop seeding now (at least my bandwidth can rest a little)

So, when would the torrents go down?

On the 1st of March, at least the official stuff. God knows for how long reuploads under the Fuwanovel name, even without any affiliation with us, will remain.

[ExtraMana]

Oh well back to Nyaa for VNs I'll use fuwanovel to know about new ones, actually way less effort then I've gone to for certain kinds of games in the past.

[Tay]

Oh well back to Nyaa for VNs I'll use fuwanovel to know about new ones, actually way less effort then I've gone to for certain kinds of games in the past.

That's a great plan. We've got some cool things in the works for keeping people up to date about pc games but also mobile, mac and linux (the oft neglected children : P). Be sure to keep an eye on things to help us know when we've found things that "work" : )

[Alucard]

See this is why it is such a disaster that the torrents are being taken down.

[twdarkeh]

With these changes, how is Fuwa any different than vndb, other than the forums? The great part about fuwa was not having to worry about dealing with the annoyance of trying to patch games that really don't want to be patched. And as Alucard pointed out, the whole malware masquerading as fuwa was somewhat inevitable, especially given how sudden the changes were.

[Tay]

With these changes, how is Fuwa any different than vndb, other than the forums? The great part about fuwa was not having to worry about dealing with the annoyance of trying to patch games that really don't want to be patched. And as Alucard pointed out, the whole malware masquerading as fuwa was somewhat inevitable, especially given how sudden the changes were.

There's definitely some overlap, but I don't think it's too big a problem -- it's okay to own two hammers and use them both for different things. A rising tide lifts all ships. Fuwa has a ton of services and features (and new/upcoming features) that aren't found on VNDB and which are a lot different from what you'd find on other sites. (Plus we continue to experiment on new features and bring some innovation to the VN scene, and will continue to do so, so I'd imagine the overlap will decrease with time and everybody will benefit)

[Zakamutt]

I still haven't seen a single example of these rumored malware'd up releases (well, I investigated one that could have been, it was identical to fuwa release at the binary level), though it's certainly something to be aware of nevertheless.