I have decided to write something about MyAnimeList after all these times, these 12,000 years of aishite — okay, okay, a long time, I mean. It’s been long since I tracked my Anime fix — which I did just now for my Fifty (Anime) Ships segment — and I’ve tried to gather my MyAnimeList and Hummingbird.me data to do that.
There’s only one thing that made me curious about MyAnimeList now — almost a month ago, they’ve been divested from CraveOnline, LLC. This means that they are now MyAnimeList, LLC, which has a different set of investors with them. Not only that, they also now have their own Facebook and Google+ profiles — after, again; all these times, these 12,000 years of aishi– okay, I’m shutting up on that now (I barely know the series where I got that track). So, what happened?
It was in August of 2008 when MAL is acquired by CraveOnline, LLC. CraveOnline describes themselves as a website catered to what men crave.
This acquisition enables MAL to continue to grow without being burdened by rising server and bandwidth fees (which have increased a lot lately), and helps us branch out into more beneficial features (think video). CraveOnline has no plans to change our community or thwart the direction we’re headed. If anything, they’ll help us get the things we need faster and more efficiently. (Garett Gyssler (Xinil), 2008)
Okay, so how much is the acquisition? This news article posted at MediaPost’s Online Media Daily gives us the answer somehow.
[…] The deal cost Crave less than $1 million, according to Mike Dodge, SVP and general manager of AtomicOnline. “Our acquisitions typically range from $400,000 to $2 million,” Dodge said. “This was on the lower end. […]
People were excited with the news at that time, but as time goes by, problems pop up. In 2013, CraveOnline’s been targeted by malicious software — and their assets.craveonline.com domain, which is also being used at MAL that time, were affected as well. This means that MyAnimeList users have received malware alerts.
In January 2014, someone by the codename of hireshi shared a letter that he sent to the guys at CraveOnline. By this time, Gyssler (known as Xinil) had less activity in the forums, and the problems in the site’s infrastructure range from downtimes to missing features such as the [img] BBcode. His last login a MyAnimeList is June 2014.
In January 16, 2015, Xinil spoke to the MyAnimeList community with a planned 8-hour maintenance.
MyAnimeList will be undergoing extensive maintenance this coming Tuesday, January 20 2015, from 10am to 6pm PST. During this extended maintenance we’ll be migrating our web servers to a new data center. We do not expect MAL to be available throughout most of the actual maintenance time and will be posting a ‘Down for Maintenance’ message informing unknowing users of the planned downtime.
[…] This server migration is the start of something I’m personally thrilled to tell everyone. MyAnimeList has been acquired by a new investor company! Starting the 20th, we will be running on their servers. This means CraveOnline’s involvement with MyAnimeList will cease after January 20. I can’t even begin to express how hyped I am for what our new owners can bring to the table for us!
2015 is going to be a HUGE year for MyAnimeList. So if we have any migration issues next week, I ask everyone to please think of the big picture: we’ve got a new team working on MAL (an actual development team!), and a company to hold our hand and get us the help we need. It might start out a little bumpy, but I’m confident our new owners will get things working. I know that soon our long list of features and bug fixes will finally get the attention they deserve. I can’t speak to specifics yet, but we’ll be making announcements soon after the migration! (Garett Gyssler (Xinil), 2015 [Emphasis mine])
Finally, they were able to have a faster server, and the fixes are done. As of this writing, MyAnimeList now has a mobile version of their website, covering most of the website’s pages and the forums.
Now that MyAnimeList had a fresh start, it’s time to check out my list over there. *Tweaks things* Oh snap, I think I broke something. Nevertheless, I hope that this post was able to chronicle what happened at MyAnimeList in recent times.