Project Status Update February 2025
Added 2025-02-03 07:41:51 +0000 UTCIt's been a long winter for us with an equally chilly silence about the future of Ranmbooks content. The community has expressed concerns and it's time to address those concerns in this post.
A menu was not posted during January due to insurmountable uncertainty. In the first half of the month, art production was halted to deal with credit card processing regulations which were impacting Ranmabooks.com.
We thought we had satisfied those regulations in December 2022, but were informed that more had to change for us to keep the website's Merchant Account with CCBill, a service which many use for their membership at Ranmabooks.com.
So we are clear, had we NOT paused everything and satisfied our Merchant Account Compliance Review, the project would have lost its primary source of funding, an outcome which would endanger its very existence.
We had to do this, enduring the removal of numerous gallery art pages, art which our team spent days and even weeks of their lives creating. Every time we deleted something from the galleries, it felt like we were deleting part of our lives too. ๐ญ
Know we did NOT do this lightly. Yes, dozens of "violating" art pages were removed from the galleries, but some false flagged images were saved too as we battled to keep as much content there as possible without alienating our Merchant Account provider.
Once that painful matter was resolved after the span of several weeks, the frost of this cruel winter still had not fully thawed. Planning for art updates needed adjustment to keep the website content compliant now and in the foreseeable future. This caused yet more art production delays and the team is deeply sorry for so little January content output.
We hope the community understands the difficulty of creating and posting content with confidence when you're learning about exotic content restrictions that can at times seem quite arbitrary (for example, no vampire sex is allowed. Vampires are supernatural monsters and those are prohibited. Even though most naked vampires aside from something like Nosferatu look completely human, hardly monstrous at all. If you don't get this explanation, neither do we frankly! Yet those images were forced out of the galleries!).
We know the community wants a full list of those content restrictions. Frustratingly, no complete list is provided and our Merchant Account reserves the right to change the restrictions in any way, at any time. It's not fair, but it is the reality of being an adult creator in 2025. For those who still seek an idea of the restrictions we are facing, please consult the CCBill Acceptable Use Policy.
Nobody likes censorship, but we don't make the rules. What we do make is Ranma hentai, something we've been making for over 20 years now.
The team wants to assure the community that we're still here, and with the new anime ongoing, we remain passionate and hopeful that Ranma has years of interest ahead of it. We're pushing on despite the hurdles of our journey because we still believe Ranma is special and deserves the devotion of our artists and its fans.
Thank you to all who supported us at the time we needed it most. Now it's time that we reward the community for their faith. Expect the next post to be of our menu for February. Ranmabooks is BACK IN ACTION and ACTION the community shall have! ๐
-Deep Star, SHADE & The Ranmabooks Team
Comments
I imagine it was a tough moment to find the better solution the keep most of the art alive and being able to continue. Thank you for all the work of the RanmaBooks team ๐
Moriana
2025-02-08 12:57:47 +0000 UTCYeah, the thing is, I don't know of a single place that would accept ALL of it. Some of the suggested sites, like Newgrounds, would only accept part of the removed content. And as we're not allowed to host or promote the removed content at other websites, even if it existed somewhere on the net we could not help the community find it. As our creations are dear to us, we hope somehow orphaned art will find a home out there or be welcome again if restrictions were to soften in the future.
Ranmabooks
2025-02-03 08:19:38 +0000 UTCIt really sucks that censorship is hitting this hard. I hope there is a way to host the removed content somewhere where it won't affect you guys this badly
Alibaba
2025-02-03 08:07:08 +0000 UTCFinding a home for removed content has been one of our goals. An extensive archive of removed content has been kept on our end. But as we're not allowed to link, list, nor promote that content on Ranmabooks in any way, such efforts might need to be fan driven to happen in the near future. Said another way, no OFFICIAL account of such removed content can exist that is run by Ranmabooks or its team, here or elsewhere. If a fan had the time to create and maintain such an archive, I know there are those in the community who would appreciate that.
Ranmabooks
2025-02-03 07:52:15 +0000 UTCI'll admit it aleays feels a bit empty when there's no apprent attempt to move the questioned content elsewhere (Newgrounds, blogger. anywhere else really), but we're here because we trust these issues will be resolved at some point. Long as good faith is shown from you, it will be reciprocated at least from me.
Jesus Zamora
2025-02-03 07:48:34 +0000 UTC