Never forget that there’s an entire range of experience and interest on every topic. Some people build their entire collection around torrents and know all the ins and outs. Personally, until I heard about the Harmy versions and started looking at how to get them I just bought evrything and assumed that the only reason for using torrents, etc. was to not pay creators for their content which I don’t believe in. But that’s me, to each his own. And I had never even heard of FanEdits. As a result, it took many weeks of reading, learning to use entire new classes of software, buying the hardware, etc. to be able to get the one set of movies. TUIG helped but at the start a lot of that was still Greek to me. Not everyone can put in the time or money just for just the one set of movies that’s not available for purchase. I don’t fault them for looking for a simple answer. I did too in the beginning and appreciate how steep the learning curve is. I still don’t understand most of what I was doing as I was following instructions found all over. Bouncing from source to source and trying to avoid unscrupulous links, dead ends, and malware does make getting these a challenge for new people, of which I still consider myself to be. And it’s hard to make contributions to the community when you don’t have the knowledge or creative skills to generate new content. Personally, about the only way I’ve been able to contribute is to leave the torrents seeded. But I still have no idea if I’m still a leecher because I’ve only done the few titles that I am intersted in that aren’t purchasable, or that the creator’s specifically requested be seeded to help spread the content.
On the other side, a new person often offends even while trying their best to comply. Although I was eventually provided the NJVC set links and was able to get a copy, I still don’t have a clue about what the right behaviour is. Since they weren’t publically provided, was I supposed to share them or keep them private? I don’t know the answer so I never shared to be safe. I want to respect the content creators so they’ll keep creating because my skills are non-existent. And that’s just on the downloading side. Now that I have the files, what’s the right behaviour? Spread them across the torrent program I use or leave them on the invite only torrent they were moved to? Again, I don’t know so they haven’t been shared. Would I be helping the creator by creating additional sources so they aren’t so overwhelmed with requests or would I just be helping create more eBay scum sellers profiting from the creator’s work? Someone who uses fanedits and torrents frequently picks up the nuanced behaviour naturally, the way a child learns, by frequent and repeated observation of those around them. But people like me who have a more limited exposure and interaction are more like tourists visiting a foreign country. No matter how aware we are of our own ignorance, how much we respect the locals, or how polite we are trying to be; we don’t know what the ingrained offenses are until we make them.