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Happy Anniversary to ACDB!!!



18 years of serving only what we can give to all anime fans on this planet!
(Outer-planetary visitors are also welcome 👽)

We’re now old enough to vote, rent a car, and legally drink — cheers to that!🍻
Well... almost!

Thank you for being with us on this amazing journey. Whether you’ve been here since day one or just joined last week, you’re part of what makes ACDB so special.

🎉 Founding History

Back in 2007, a young dreamer named Rei decided to be bold and build his own website — to serve the community with something they truly needed: a way to identify anime characters on the internet!
With that simple yet brilliant idea, Anime Characters Database was born!

Over the years, ACDB has stayed true to its core mission. Sure, we’ve added a few bells and whistles along the way — we’re never shy to try something new!

💬 Community & People

User Highlights – ACDB has an active community of anime lovers, with over 85,000 registered members. Yay, ACDB!

Team Shoutouts – Massive thanks to our amazing team of moderators and administrators.
Big love to our skilled and pro admins: RinaK, Nori13, NatsumiSawada, CaptainBrain – you’re fantastic!
And our beloved moderators: ShinyShinigami, Moon_Moon, rpgguy999, Froylan, ilikememes0 – we truly appreciate everything you do.

Global Reach – ACDB offers a multilingual interface, thanks to our talented international team. While it’s still a work in progress as we strive for top-tier quality, we currently support English, Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian!


🕹️ Throwback Zone

Embarrassing Baby Picture Alert!
Here's what ACDB looked like in its earliest days.


Click to enlarge

Charming, right? The graphics have come a long way, but we’ve always stayed true to our ideals — and our local goddess, Konata!


🚀 Share Your ACDB!

Now it’s your turn!
We’d love to hear from YOU, our awesome ACDB community. Pop into the Lounges or the chatbox and share your first memory of discovering the site.

Also… anyone want to guess how many cups of coffee and days of non-stop coding Rei pulled to get ACDB to where it is today?

Send your guess to our Ko-fi page *wink* *wink*

Thank you all for being a part of this wild and wonderful ride.
Here’s to another amazing year with ACDB! 🎊

2025 has been a year of great challenge keeping websites online and responsive. ACDB has roughly 20k to 30k ＂human＂ daily visitors, this has been consistent for the past few years.

But this year, we have had wave after wave of new AI discovering ACDB.

The first and worst was Alibaba, which at one point used more than 100k servers to make 200 requests per second for over 4 million pages in a day. Contrast this with the 20k regular uses that make 100k requests in a day.

Initially I thought it was great seeing so much traffic. It was stimulating looking for ways to optimize the site to serve even more pages. Optimizing code. Adding indexes to databases. Dropping pages that were out dated. Removing pages that should not have been publicly accessible in the first place. The fun eventually ran out. I am not running a website for bots, I am running a website for the anime community. Real people were getting error pages, and slow pages. While we could buy more server capacity, the bots showed me the site clearly has room to grow 10x before that would be necessary. I choose to block the largest data centers owned by Alibaba. Not one regular user was affected, and the load on the site returned to normal.

On FreeBSD this was accomplished with

ipfw add 669 deny ip from 47.0.0.0/8 to me
ipfw add 670 deny ip from 106.0.0.0/8 to me 443
ipfw add 671 deny ip from 139.224.0.0/11 to me 443
ipfw add 672 deny ip from 140.205.0.0/16 to me 443
ipfw add 673 deny ip from 152.32.0.0/14 to me 443
ipfw add 674 deny ip from 163.177.0.0/16 to me 443
ipfw add 675 deny ip from 180.97.0.0/16 to me 443
ipfw add 676 deny ip from 182.92.0.0/15 to me 443

This did not last for long, as yet another AI discovered ACDB. This time one with more than 400k servers at their disposal. I dread the day IPv6 gets involved.

One important point I'd like to make is that Web Spiders like Bing and Google are not the same as the current AI bots.

Web spiders show at least some level of respect, reading robots.txt and following Crawl delay directives. This allows one to request Google crawl only 1 page per second. Bots on the other hand, use multiple servers to requests pages as fast as possible - no delay between requests.

I can deal with a few bots requesting 1 page per second, whereas the AI bots are requesting 100x as many pages. the long term solution would be to force AI bots to follow the same rules web spiders do. Until then, they are a menace on the web indistinguishable from a hostile DDoS attack.

~~~

I've also been using nginx to limit each IP to one request every 2 seconds.

limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=one:10m rate=30r/m;

As well as targeted limits for members and non members.

For higher priority, speedier access to ACDB, it helps to log in.

~~~~~

More consequences from AI bots:



Went from having Healthy Core Web Vitals to mostly Needs Improving.


--
Rei

Spring Anime Releases!


As winter's snow goes away, the Spring 2025 anime season brings a fresh lineup of exciting new releases and returning favorites!

The current new releases have been compiled to our usual anime chart style, be sure to check them out in the image below.



Here's the list of anime series that will be continuing airing April onwards!

Wind Breaker Season 2 - 04/03
Fire Force Season 3 - 04/04
Bye Bye, Earth Season 2 - 04/04
Shoushimin Series Season 2 - 04/05
I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level Season 2 - 04/05
Uma Musume Cinderella Gray - 04/06
To Be Hero X - 04/06
Aharen-san wa Hakarenai Season 2 - 04/07
Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2 - 04/13

🌟 Top 5 Popular Anime Spring 2025 on ACDB 🌟


🤖 A romantic comedy where a boy find out that his crush is a robot designed for a secret purpose!
‍
🧙 A boy named Kai fights to protect his home. After a life-threatening injury, he gains memories of a past life, revealing the harsh ＂rule set＂ of his world!

🧠 In a dystopian future, Ren struggles with his identity in a world where virtual lives are just as important as real ones.

🦍 The story of a young noblewoman, blessed by the powers of a special animal, proving her worth through bravery and charm, all while surrounded by dreamy bishounen!

💖 Philia, the saint of Ziltonia, is discarded by her fiancé for being ＂too perfect.＂ In a new country, she discovers a new life where her abilities are valued!

Curious to see what else is popular? Check here


Make sure to check all of our titles by season here and add all your favorite titles to your anime planner!





Have you tried today's game ?
ACDB has a big collection of fun mini games for you to try out.
By playing our daily game selection, you can get many jewels and cards!
Not a member? Join us!


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