User blog:Xilinoc/Klub Q&A Status

Hey all, just popping in to address the controversy du jour - the questions and answers provided by Tite Kubo himself on his new online forum/Formspring-type website, Klub. Now, to be clear, I and the rest of the mod team are quite happy to finally, FINALLY have a "direct line" to Kubo alongside the rest of the fanbase to get clarity on the many situations and questions left unresolved and unanswered by the manga (even if a lot of his chosen Q&A segments tend to be about, uh, his fondness for mammaries and other non-Bleach topics)...but as you've likely noticed, aside from cataloguing relevant information/notes here, we haven't actually added any of that information to the main pages.

Why is that? Well, there's a couple reasons:
 * 1) First and foremost, not a single one of these questions and answers have an official translation - you may remember that around the time of the new BURN THE WITCH chapters being released in 2020, we instated a rule about waiting until the official release of new content and media to add stuff about/within it to the wiki, both to ensure quality + not needing to go back and correct stuff later as well as to respect the chosen release dates of publishers and not draw ire from Japan/Shueshia/etc. (as their crackdowns on piracy have gotten a lot stricter over the years). So with Klub content not set to receive any sort of official English translation/release for the foreseeable future (and with fan translations varying widely not only in quality but interpretation), that's already a strike against using it for now.
 * 2) Secondly, Klub content is unique among Bleach media in that it's an exclusive membership-based subscription service rather than a normal piece of physical media...and subscriptions are (legally) limited to a few countries in eastern Asia - accessing it from, say, America requires a VPN. That means that, unlike stuff from the manga or anime, Klub information can't be readily verified/fact-checked by most readers unless they go to the trouble of tricking the website into thinking they're located in Japan/South Korea/etc., then find a proper translator or translation service (again, no official English version to look at) to examine the material for themselves, which presents a problem for references as it now becomes a matter of "just trust me, bro" rather than "here's the exact source so you can go see this for yourself".
 * 3) Thirdly, but tying into the point above, this being an exclusive-access service not (legally) available to the wider public means that we could legitimately get into murky or hot legal water should we begin throwing out the private information and images that Kubo provides within on this public and fairly popular website; it's one thing to do so on random forums and niche fan websites, but this site gets a lot of impressions and we can't get away with nearly the amount of stuff that smaller platforms can, ESPECIALLY when it comes to manga/anime content.

So unfortunately, those three facts of the situation combine to tie our hands on the matter - it's just not viable, fair, or even fully legal to present that information on the pages right now, as much as we'd all like to given what's being talked about on there. So we ask for your patience and understanding, and hopefully one day we can resolve this in a way that lets us finally add/use the information in an accurate and legitimate manner. See you around.