Founder of AnimeMangaBefore200,DCB, here! This is a journal announcing the official end of AnimeMangaBefore200,the history of the group as well as the reasons why this group is dead. On 5th of August,2020 All Submtions shall be closed permanetly! It's more of a personal journal as the Founder of this group,so if you are not interested,there is nothing else important mentioned below... -The begining I have always had hard time finding people from the anime community who were into the same series as i was, mainly due to my avoidance of "mainstream" series. That's why around 2011-2012 i decided to create AnimeMangaBefore2000, a place to celebrate forgotten and underrated series ,not only from anime but from video games too. The idea at the time was simple : A place where people (including myself) interested in old series would introduce and get introduced to old "new" series through artwork. Unlike other groups at the time, we didnt care much for art skills as much as we did for preserving series that were lost in time and promoting artists who chose to draw obsecure series. That was my vision,a place for "haters"(if ya might) of mainstream who would discover old series and try to revive 'em via their own art styles. -So what went wrong? In 2012-2014,i was passioned enough to give all my free time to the group, not only for upgrading the group and authorize submitions but also for spending hours upon hours finding artwork of old series on DA and ask the artists to join our group. It would take me around 4 hours daily,browsing DA,contacting artists and having 1/3 of em joining us.The consept of our group was pretty weird at the time so i knew if i didnt go out of my way to find members,nobody would even have heard of our lil' group.

Unfortunately, as the years went by, not only did i lack the time to keep up with the group's demands, but also due to sudden member increase after our 1st contest, the submitions went crazy,from around 3-5 to 20-40 per day. It doesnt sound so bad until you realize that out of the 40 submitions, only 2-3 were thematically correct with our group. The rest were mostly Naruto,One piece and Bleach (which series we had banned after a vote poll),OCs and last,just random drawings of unknown theme,no descriptions and confusing titles. The last ones were extremely fruastreting,especially since the admins couldn't tell if the drawings were of some old series they never had heard before or just random shit,so they would had to contact the artist and ask about the theme of the drawing. This would take from hours to days. In case the artists never replied,the admins had to go out of their way and gather any element from the drawing they could,in order to research it by themselves online,most of the time in vain. Other problems arise when people would ignore the rules and spam submit or demand explanations why they artwork got decline "since it contain 1 old character and 4 OCs".

2nd Contest brought even more people who mistook the group for an "all-fanart" group,at which point the submtions would reach the 80-100 a day,with only 4 of them related to the group. A short-lived manga translation project by our group was promoted but never got anywhere due to mostly, people offering their services changing their minds and members of this group having only few old series to suggest. With little interest from the group,i decided in 2014 to terminate all collaborations with manga translators and editors. That was late 2014,when a behind-the-sceen argument between Co-Founder and a member spiral to the point of the Co-Founder been threatened with doxxing which resulted in a search for new co-founder/s to help with the group....That ended too after a couple of week, when nobody suitable for the job was found and people who were willing to help wouldn't accept the long process of checking each submitions. At thie point, the submitions box was full of Naruto art,OCs and mostly mixed art,a fact that in combination with rl demands, discouraged me from even looking at the submitions. The most suitable artwork would be from Sailor Moon,Dragon Ball and HunterXHunter,all mainstream series that i was hoping to avoid.. And on that note,i stopped caring for the group. It's not that i completely abandoned it,i would check on the submition box from time to time but with the group been far from my original dream,i would't even bother accept a submition. I saw all the worrying comments from our members between the years 2016-2018 and this is the reason why i am writing this entery,to give them a closer with this group. -Will this group be completely deleted? I thought long about "sinking the ship with all it's glory to the bottom of the sea" but...i think i will keep it afloat...at least for now. However, as mentioned above,on 5th of August,2020,i shall shut down all the submitions to this group so if there is something you want to preserve in this group or you want to remove,this is the last call. -Will the group come back to life one day? I don't really thinks so...at least it wont come back with me as the Founder,thats for sure. This group has lost all it's meaning to me at this point. -There are so many remasters and re-releases of games and anime recently,it's a good time to start the group running again! Yeh i get that,but that's also my problem with this group : it just feels like another "go with the flow" artgroup...The main idea was not to have easily digestible content here (like a seasonal remaster anime for which the hype will die out in 2 months) but instead, encourage artists to share their obscure series and have others say "oh wow,i never saw that before,let me google it and see what it is" and thus revive the artist's favorite series,help em find more friends throught their obscure taste. -What can i do to keep this group open? Nothing really,sorry...It's already 2020 that's a huge gap from "before" 2000...so maybe it's time to move on. -I am still interested in old anime still...any recommendations to find new "old" stuff? It's truly mostly luck, finding good old stuff is like "treasure hunting" in a way,that's half of the fun of it...I could recommend playing the anime bots on Discord,that's where you find new characters and if they interest ya,you may even search for the anime they are from. (thats what i do lol) -So what's up with the Feature folder? The feature folder is exactly what i imagined this group to be. Some members asked me about it already but if you noticed, there is only 1 artwork of each old series in that folder. Each of the artworks in were picked by me to represent each specific series in hopes that people would browse the folder as a "catalog" of shorts, to find new series they hadnt seen before. That folder is like a hope folder i guess,my initial idea been that each series and each game,no matter how obscure and forgotten it might be,have at least 1 fan who is willing to share their love for those series with the rest of the world. So guess that's all for today folks! I really am greatful for every person who joined our group and even more greatful to every person i met thanks to this group... I wish ya all the very best ,stay safe and keep spreading your wings through your art~:heart: