Fansub groups

[deviln3]

I think we should be able to rate and add a lil comment about fansub groups..

the likability of an anime depends a lot on a fansub group.. i mean people should be able to see if an anime they decide to start watching will be released like once a month or the group is fast and such..
so like anime or manga is reviewed..

we should be able to do the same for fansub groups.. just not make it as big as anime.. make it a small part of the site

[leoxjm]

I don't think this is a bad idea, but it would require some talk with upper management (AKA Kaiser and Frundock) to see how viable is it. I'm not 100% sure it is a good idea due to a recent incident between Shinsen subs and AniDB exactly because of a website rating system. People started to thrash either AniDB or Shinsen left and right. Not a very constructive situation, if you ask me. No voting system is perfect, everyone knows that, but I think that "fansub group reviews" are a touchy issue, and if a group gets low scores it would be natural for that group to feel alienated and think that the way the voting system works is unfair to them. No fansubber does crappy releases on purpose! (I think).

Personally, I think that asking in the forums "who is doing the best sub of X?" would get you good results (it has worked marvels for me in the past). People tend to respond in terms of image quality, translation accuracy, etc, but ultimately the choice is yours. Aditionally, fansubs are not an "either/or" issue. People can download both the weekly "speed subs' to watch every week and the "quality subs' to save every month. that doesn't necessarily mean they prefer to watch one over the other, they are simply getting each based on a different standard. The forums should be able to provide all the information you need about who is fansubbing what series and how.

Here are two examples that would make rating complicated (at least for me):
1) I went through several groups (mahou, AonE, and Kuroneko) before settling for eclipse's version of Fate/Stay Night. my standard was irregular this time: I put all the weight of my selection based on who subbed episode 14 in a way that UBW made the most sense. The winner was eclipse, even though I liked the picture quality of AonE's release better. If you told me to put a number rating on each I would honestly be stumped. I certainly made a choice, but which one would I say is "better"? I had no absolute terms there, and a star/number rating doesn't accurately reflect the nuances of some choices such as this. I don't think that it was a coincidence that people in the forum recommended me eclipse as the most all-round group doing F/SN, but they always said "if you're looking for X factor, check X's releases".

2)When Eureka Seven came out it was done by only 1 group: nanashi. nanashi took a LONG time to release each episode, but the quality was nice. I would have definitely recommended people to pick up Eureka seveN, but having to wait long for each release was certainly annoying. The last bundle of episodes were released in batch, but they took months to prepare. If you asked people "how good is nanashi's version of E7" the answer would have been "good, but slow". Which one would affect the score more? in the months before the release of the last episode I'm sure nanashi's score would have dropped, maybe unfairly so. But I bet that the same downvoters would have happily watched the completed episodes later, and maybe given a better score then. Which score is "the right one"?

In all honesty, I think that fansub ratings are too nuanced/complicated to pull off successfully.
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[Frundock]

I would feel sort of bad to rate fansub team. They do it for free and they all deserve good rating for that. That, and people like a fansub group for different reason. I like steady releases over image quality... might not be the same for everyone.

Here's an idea, instead of rating the quality of their work, how about maybe giving a quality to the team like :

- Speed subs
- Quality freaks
- etc. ?

Is this a good idea or again, does it still falls into a negativity aura ?