nothing is better than an unrestricted access ftp of either a member of the fansub crew that did the series you're trying to download, or of a friend who's made it a point to download, screen, and appropriately name the series you're trying to get.

But those are hard to get, especially if you aren't a fansubber yourself and don't have college campus type connections (campus sharing communities tend to form with not too much effort, given a fairly large and diverse set of residents).

When I can, I stick to l33t ftp hookups. When I can't, I look for .edu xdcc's if it's for a new release or if the group whose stuff I'm getting has an archive set up for it, and then I go to torrents as my third choice. Which is still pretty high on the list.

3 is the cutoff though. I rank kazaa, gnutella clients, dc, emule, all that stuff tied for dead last. With p2p searchable networks like those, you don't know what you're going to get. Trusted ftp's are nice because you know if the file's not the right one, you can tell the owner and they'll fix it. With torrents, you have cryptography on your side, with sha values calculated on every chunk of data. With xdcc bots, they tend to reside in the same place as the group itself, so if it's not the right file you grab an op and they get the problem fixed. With p2p searchable stuff, there are a lot more malignant users and the purpose for many people being on the network tends not to be "share" but "get". Rather different than the purpose of the fansub group's xdcc bots and torrent page, which are pretty much "we're giving this, you can have it". Ya know?