Hidenotora

Yeah I can confirm that's not Natto. There's also someone on Rumble posting his videos, again it isn't him, just another reposter. Reposting is fine as long as they're not using it as an excuse to try and make some money (not that there's anything we could do about it anyway).

Hi guys, I'm the admin in Natto's Discord and was responsible for his Telegram channel. I'll quickly go over what happened and what is happening. At the beginning of December, myself and some others in his Discord server were actually getting copyright strikes WITHIN Discord for posts that contained links to Natto's videos. My account got muted for 24 hours and then eventually the Discord just wasn't there anymore. They didn't give us a chance to remove to links or anything, just gone. They also took down Natto's personal website by contacting his webhost directly. This was all done by a company who specialised in protecting Japanese companies IP overseas, who NHK have obviously hired to chase him down. So over December we decided that the only option going forward was to switch to Abema footage, and to (at least initially) drastically reduce the number of people who had access to his videos in the hopes of shaking off this company. Hopefully both of these things combined will allow us to regroup a little and see how things go. There's just so much noise around his videos usually it's impossible to run any sort of experiments like this. So: - Natto's Discord is back, but it's semi-private for now. The only way you can get Discord to remove individual posts for copyright is a manual process via email and involves quoting to them the unique ID of a post. This means someone had to come in the server, find the posts and email them to DIscord's copyright reporting process. So for now, we're keeping membership limited to keep people like that out to the best of our abilities. - Natto is making videos, but they're being distributed on a limited scale while we try out what we can get away with. I'm not even going to fully say how we're distributing the videos, to keep some air of secrecy. Someone else is then taking the videos and putting them on their own Telegram channel (the SumoCuts Telegram channel Akinomaki mentioned above), which we're aware of, and then someone has taken the videos from there and is doing their own Russian commentary over them. Neither of them are Natto himself though. Anyone pretending to be Natto on Youtube and especially Facebook are scammers trying to solicit donations in his name. There's a guy seemingly from Vietnam who has been doing this for years now, but Natto is NOT on Youtube and NOT on Facebook. If you get to watch the videos that's great but don't give anyone any money unless you're getting it from the legit source. If you don't know the legit source, then simply do not donate. Natto isn't really that concerned with people reuploading his videos (especially since it means it's other Telegram channels and Youtube channels in the firing line and not him) but the people trying to make money off others under false pretences are certainly nothing to do with him. Reddit is absolutely swamped with people asking for the videos but I'm sorry, unless we know who you are you'll have to miss this one out. The Reddit discourse is just a clusterfuck and anything I said in there would be buried but hopefully here I can get something across. I highly suggest joining the SumoCuts Telegram channel if you're that desperate for Natto, if not you're stuck with the official sources. Sorry to post this diatribe but hopefully it clarifies things. If things don't calm down then maybe Natto will never go "public" again, but NHK's actions are forcing our hand.

Where'd you get that impression?

I think the drop in your views might be because a lot of people don't know that you're still going; your Mord Dresner channel doesn't come up if you search Kintamayama, and what even IS a Mord Dresner anyway? People don't realise it's you. NHK basically have someone full time blocking Natto's videos at this point, someone seems to sit down at his desk at 9am JST and then sends out the daily takedown notices. He's decided to unlist his videos and only post the links in his Discord server now to see if that works, which will lead to a significant hit in views just because people won't know and give up. He has Rumble/Odysee/Telegram/BiliBili channels to as backups, but people just don't use those websites unless they have to. It's becoming very tedious dealing with Youtube at this point. But yeah for yourself, people don't realise you're still going, hence the "you're back" comments because to them you vanished when the old channel went down. It's pretty hard to address the rabble of western sumo fans because there's no one place where they all hang out.

I count 200 on the entry list, though some may be duplicates...

I was going to post in this thread saying that the search function wasn't good, because there was no ability to exclude certain subforums from a search, which meant almost every search was flooded with results from the game forum and made finding anything useful a total chore. But, someone in thread said that the advanced search allowed you to do this, but I've never seen the option for it anywhere at all. So I messed around and found out how to get the option: you have to select "Topics" under "Content type", and ONLY then does this option appear. Why that isn't the default is beyond me, though I guess the real question is why the default "All content" option doesn't let you do this (probably because "status updates" and "events" can't be filtered this way, but these things aren't used on this forum so they're irrelevant and would be better off removed). Just knowing you can do this makes the search infinitely better and I never knew about it until now. The fact that by default this almost essential option was hidden is probably worth me mentioning it here in case other people didn't know this! As an aside, something I have noticed is that this forum can't be searched with Google; I simply get no results when I limit results to site:sumoforum.net. Has this been done intentionally? (meta tags and robots.txt or whatever it is these days) I can get results if I use Bing, but no one uses Bing and it would be helpful to use Google to search the forum. Seems pointless to block Google but then not Bing and various other search engines.

Is this a totally new game, or is it a reboot of something you did previously? I'll be entering this time as well anyway

54 here I think, highest score I've heard so far is 65. Interested to see how things break down this time.

How would someone feed the links to NHK? They must get a lot of emails and correspondence, seems incredibly efficient of them to action these emails about people from outside Japan uploading sumo highlights on Youtube. Feels like it's more likely someone is being paid to find the links and do the takedowns. Just seems like this will be the new normal when you upload on Youtube, Natto is putting his videos on some of the other video sites but all of them have problems in some way, alongside the fact nobody uses them comparatively. Feels like no matter how much you try to make people aware of these other places, you're still gonna get threads on Reddit called "Natto Gone?!?!?" by people who haven't gotten the message at all. Can see how it feels like a losing battle sometimes.

Sorry to hear about the troll. I entered today, but I don't see myself with the rest of the entries yet; however if it can take up to 24 hours then I guess it just hasn't updated yet. My team is in my account page so I guess you have it. A few people's team name seems to be just their email; I can't imagine that was intentional, maybe some people wouldn't want their email being exposed like that? Something to look at maybe going forward.

Nice! I'll have a go and spread the word about the site. I like games that are easy to play like this, just set and forget. Since you can't change your guess I'll wait until closer to the time for my entry.

59 here I think, I got the same things wrong everyone did, but hearing other people's scores it seems like I'll have done alright.

It'd be a huge shame if the channel got shut down, it's probably the only way to watch a lot of specific matches and basho. I've downloaded all the videos on there (I think anyway) as a backup, have you got a backup at all Kinta?

I'd guess the origin of that translation is that someone looked up 錦, saw that it can mean "fine dress, fine clothes" on Jisho etc., turned it into an adjective to get "well-dressed" and then used that to describe whatever noun comes after it. It does have huge "novelty t-shirt from Japan with random English words on" vibes though, I'm a fan!

Any theorising on why ex-Chiyootori has switched kabu? He owned Sanoyama outright (I think), so why the switch?

60 (62, can't count) here I think, too many half rank differences in the way that gets you no points, but I'll take it.

Here's mine, very similar to Reonito's and most people's, so this will either be one where everyone scores roughly the same, or one or two brave guys guess some insane precedent-defying weird decision correctly.

I make it 142 entries, so the chocolate cake is safe! 3rd highest number of entrants ever right?

Very surprised I got 10th, the bottom 3rd fell into place for me but I messed up on the joi because I didn't follow the rule of not moving people who didn't reach 8 wins/losses. Endo's treatment is the outlier and I also promoted Ichiyamamoto, but I'll take what I can get!

60 here I think, I thought that was decent but seems like it will be a high scoring one on the whole. I missed a lot of stuff by half a rank, but the half rank that gets you no points in this game. I only got bullseyes and misses, no one pointers here, even number only gang! (I think anyway)

I was going to post this in the Shohozan intai thread, but this is probably a better place. If Shohozan wanted a kabu but couldn't find one, seems like we're definitely about to hit a big kabu crunch. There seems to be an expectation amongst a lot of fans that basically every makuuchi mainstay rikishi deserves a kabu: I can't imagine a majority of people actively saying "this rikishi doesn't deserve it" except for genuinely unpopular rikishi like Ryuden since his mistress/baby scandal. Even if normally they barely even notice the guy, they'd still say "it's so unfair he couldn't get a kabu!" And it probably is to be honest. People already point out when a rikishi with a not particularly high peak rank ends up becoming an elder, but then again your highest rank doesn't necessarily reflect your potential skill as an oyakata. If sanyo becomes the default assumption once they hit 65, a lot of people are going to miss out as things are now. Seems like it's becoming more common for ex-rikishi to make 65 and 70 and the system doesn't really allow for much turnover with that. But on the other hand, if every guy who became a makuuchi mainstay acquired kabu, there'd soon be a crazy amount of oyakata. Not really sure how to balance this but it does feel a bit unfair that a former komusubi can't find a kabu, but there's some oyakata now who never even got out of juryo. Not sure if the NSK feel like anything needs changing but I can imagine there being a lot of disappointed fans in the coming years. Should they start preferring guys with higher peak ranks over ones who peaked at mid/low maegashira or especially juryo? Should they add more kabu? Something else?

Very similar to mine. Ignore my bizarre colouring scheme!

Current record is 164 entries in Haru 2022, but this is the 2nd highest for sure, I've been reminding everyone I can to see if we can get the last 11 and break it, I'll do it again now!

The official site doesn't seem to have updated yet, but its all confirmed. Nishikawa has a new shikona, Gounoyama, 豪ノ山, using the same kanji as the Gou in Goeido (or Goueidou hah). Shin juryo: - Gounoyama (former Nishikawa) - Chiyosakae - Oshoma Sai juryo: - Hokuseiho

Yeah I imagine Hokuseiho isn't there because he'll be sai-juryo technically (despite only having fought one bout there) so they don't have the interview scheduled.