Nyaa Is Getting Annoyed, Or How to Block Ads and Still Get Torrents

Nyaatorrents has hung a sign above its chat room, telling people to turn off their ad blockers. Why is that? First, the guy who runs Nyaa is probably not making as much money as he’d like due to people blocking his porn ads; second, people are probably complaining that they can’t find the download links. (I’m just guessing here because I don’t hang out in the chat room, but I’m pretty sure I’m dead on.)

I don’t use ad blocking per se, but a proxy filter called Glimmerblocker. Over the past months, I’ve laughed as Nyaa tried to outsmart those of us blocking ads. At first the ads were served from one directory, so it was easy to block them. Then the serving directory took on random names such as OMG and LULZ and so on; at first the images were all JPGs or PNGs, but then GIFs started coming through, so you couldn’t filter on just the graphic type anymore. I gave up on a regex to handle all the permutations and instead wrote one that blocked all graphics from the site. Yet, I download torrents from there whenever I want.

Here’s why Nyaa is stuck: serving up HTML links using anything but a href tags requires non-automatable solutions (such as creating custom Flash objects that launch URLs, for instance), which means that they’ll never be done. If you mess around with your filter, you should be able to block the graphics but leave the links intact. Doing that leaves you with some very small but functional links. Voila`! Porn avoided, and torrent happiness achieved.

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NyaaTorrents Pushes Porn

For the last month at least, NyaaTorrents has been running softcore porn ads for one online marketplace of Japanese anime`-related stuff. Because most of the people who submit torrents to Tokyo Toshokan upload their torrents to Nyaa, I figured that I was stuck. I don’t use Firefox, but I do use a proxy server, and I got tired of cringing every time I visited the site, so I started blocking ads. What really tipped the scales, though, was the behavior of the site owner. In a recent chat, someone asked politely for him to stop running the ads. He told them no and then told the person to just deal with it. I myself registered for an account just to point out that Nyaa is pushing softcore pornography. The figurines of women with exposed breasts is porn; the figurines of characters touching themselves in obviously sexual manners is porn. This isn’t artistic stuff and there’s no way to take it any other way. So Nyaa is purposefully pushing porn. The question is why, and why be such a jerk about it? Well, here’s another bit of information. I’ve also inquired of ad rates on Nyaa, thinking I could throw a banner ad or two up for some of my anime-related projects. I was stunned by how expensive it was. Nyaa is raking in the bucks from pushing porn. Others tried to legitimize it, but the basic situation is that the owner has made a decision to exploit women for the sake of financial gain.

I’m blocking ads from Nyaa, so there’s no way he can make money off me. I’d gladly use any other torrent host, but Tokyo Toshokan is about the only fansubbed anime listing site that I can stand and most of the groups seem to rely on Nyaa. Sigh.

We really should all come together and stop using Nyaa.

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