12 replies to this topic

[Tran Linh]

Hello, i'm from XscansX, and I have some request (or rather suggestion) here:

1. Until now, we have never had any trouble with any sites hosting our releases whatsoever. In truth, the more sites host our release, the happier we are. After all it's for the fans, and our own hobby we are scanlating for.

2. We have no desire to join the ads revenue of Batoto. Still I personally think, that's a great and tempting idea.
With all the reason above, I think batoto is going the right way.

Still, for the moment, I would like to request all of XscansX's releases to be removed and further releases of us won't be uploaded here.

The main concern of us is batoto's forum. First, we have always been a neutral party and if there's a site hosting our releases, it'd better be a neutral site. And batoto's forum is full of "Tower of god", "Zippy" (i read those too, in fact, those are awesome series i personally follow)...and then there's the big THE COMPANY'S BLOG...In short, Batoto's forum doesn't give out the vibe of a place that is "friendly" or "a home to many groups" (rather, it clearly shows that, Batoto is The Company in a different name, to be honest), so it's like The Company's forum, it doesn't give us the comfortable feeling like we have in other online readers.

With all the reason above, we request all of our releases to not be hosted on Batoto until further change and notice.
Here's our projects list:
http://www.mangaupdates.com/groups.html?id=3865

Thanks and have a good day.

[Grumpy]

I'm afraid I'm having rather a hard time relating to your concern.
While, it is true that Batoto is created by the people of The Company, Batoto is NOT The Company. In fact, I have been planning to move The Company forums out of Batoto for the very reason. But, from my point of view, this is simply the difference between having to manage 2 forums instead of 1.

On the other hand, The Company releases do make the biggest impact on Batoto. Number of popular series are done by The Company and they're released on Batoto. So, naturally, the most discussed topics are The Company series. What people talk about is something beyond our control and I don't think you can blame any sort of biasing for that. If you feel that the fact that we only have forums made for specific comics are biased, an automated method to populate the forums are in development. Until now, the system was simply that if the comic was discussed, the sub-forum was made.

Knowing these two points, would you be willing to reconsider?

Conversely, lot of the other online reader aren't strictly aiming to be unbiased. MF for example used to have scanlation group which was promoted in their forum. MR has their own team scanlating popular series such as Naruto now. It's just that for them, they have a lot of fans for lot of comics. We have not yet had the chance to have such growth. So, I feel like you're mistaking Batoto's infancy for favoritism. And requests like this rather causes a force to lean in a direction even further which is quite saddening for me.

In any case, I have unapproved all XscansX releases and marked your group to be not-uploaded.
http://vatoto.com/group/_/x/xscansx-r160
Btw, you can change this too.

[powha]

I have to agree with Grumpy.
I kinda know what you mean, but considering its fairly new reader with growing community, i dont see why is that a good reason for not allowing your series to be uploaded here.

But well, your group your rules. =_=

[Tran Linh]

We have spoken our mind. We don't want to waste time on further argument. If what you said you were going to do is true, then do it, make Batoto a friendly and nice place for everyone, I wish you luck on that. We will wait and observe Batoto's change. Until then, our policy remains the same in the first post of this topic.
Thanks,

[FunnyBunnyLogic]

but but but...!

/shakes her fist at the unfairness of the world

This sucks... I was super excited to have XscansX projects on our reader because most of the others have poor quality or break my browser with adds. Oh well, who cares about what I think... and whoever said life was fair... /pouts

I hope that one day soon Batoto will prove to be worthy enough to host XscansX comics! /furiously hopes, with fingers and toes crossed

[Tran Linh]

don't get me wrong, we support you guys because of the great idea you guys have. Scanlators have always been profited from by sites like mangafox, mangareader, mangatrader, mangashare...while we ourselves have to pay our own pocket money to buy raw and other expenses (and at the same time,we already do a lot of work and spending time on the scanlation process)...your idea of helping scanlator, we fully support you guys. Still, before we support you, you have to get rid of the problem we spoke above. Until further notice then~
btw, thanks for Tower of God 49.
And I agree that Batoto has the best quality for online reader.

[Cala]

Hello, Tran!

First of all, I'm writing this note to you not as a member of The Company, but as a manhwa fan who agrees with supporting scanlators instead of third parties, and truly wants to see Batoto succeed.

As stated before, we are working very hard to make Batoto the place you desire. The site is very young still, and many people who read manga do not know about it. The people who do know about it are the people who read The Company's releases, because that is the only place we can advertise Batoto! Naturally, then, a larger proportion of the traffic and discussions will be attached to those webtoons/manhwas. Until our site becomes a much larger database of manga, and more people begin to prefer our reader, there is very little we can do about this!

There is, however, something YOU can do! Instead of telling us that you will not support us until we have reached our goal, why not join and help us work towards that ideal we both share? The two things Batoto needs the most for growth are:

1) More manga/manhwa uploaded here as it's released
2) More discussions taking place for those series.

We are not in a position to supply that for ourselves, but you and every other scan group are! We're aware that our current forum system is not the most condusive to discussions, and Grumpy is working very hard to make a way to automate forum creation for every new series. We would be more than happy to make a forum for each and every one of XscansX's series right now. Why not drop by every now and then and add to the discussion there yourself? Even START the discussion yourself, because all people want is a place to post. I am a huge fan of Gantz and Sun-Ken Rock, and I for one would love to join discussions about them on the Batoto forums. Maybe toss in a comment about Batoto on your forum when you release once in awhile? That's why our releases have traffic here. THIS is how Batoto must grow.

You and other scan groups are Batoto's greatest allies. Batoto supports scanlators, but we won't succeed without the scanlator's support in return. We can't do this without you!

[Grumpy]

I'd like to request everyone other than Tran Linh to cease posting in this thread. This is not a place for discussion, but request and follow (perhaps minimal if necessary).

The suggestion has been made and I plan to follow it, though, admittedly, other tasks are higher in priority of development than moving out the company forums atm.

[Grumpy]

1. I've clearly told my staff to stay off this thread to prevent further argument. The fact that they chose to do so in another thread is their unruly behavior. For that, I do apologize. My staff and myself are quite passionate about this project and we can sometimes get out of line.

2. Your claim that we did nothing is untrue. Your request to take down xscansx stuff has been completed. Your first suggestion to make the forums more friendly for all comics has been taken place by adding forums for all comics. Your 2nd suggestion to move the company forums out has been put into the todo list. Should it have been done already? Well, that would be nice, but I can't do everything at the snap of a finger. The Company forums is actually heavily woven into the Batoto forums -- lot which you cannot see. So, for the sake of less effort, I'm actually thinking of just making a scanaltor's corner where all scanlators are welcome to have their own section of forums rather than moving the company forums out.

3. "...some even convinced my staff to interrogate me...". If this happened while I was not there. Again, I do apologize, that was not my intention at least. Furthermore, when one of my staff did ask me if he should convince you guys, I clearly told him no. But, number of your members did come to us. One even asked me for some material to convince you otherwise. What else could I do? I answered (like below). I want to say that's where it ends -- though of course, I don't know what happened where I was not present.

4. About leechers being ignorant and stuff... I was actually contacted this morning from another member of yours with the same evidence you bring now. And my response is really the same thing, so I'll just copy/paste my response. Just so you know, Knight Run is one of the series The Company does, and we've seen that already. On top of it, ever since we stopped releasing on MF, we've seens loads of comments like that and people just point to another manga reader as the "solution".

Heh, I too know very well that some leechers are stupid. I saw a lot of those types of posts... and frankly, I've given up convincing them through a medium like mangafox (I'm just going to say mangafox for the lack of better term to join all these online readers), etc where masses come without knowing or being presented to where the stuff actually comes from. In fact, sites like mangafox advertise saying "we have the fastest naruto -- blah blah blah". So, anyone who comes through that ad are bound to think mangafox is responsible for giving these translations which is completely untrue. Though, it may be leecher's ignorance, it's the advertiser's fault for implanting such ideas to begin with. So, trying to convince the users otherwise is actually trying to go against the mangafox's advertising power -- which is huge! You have to see that it's against mangafox's business that people learn that the source is elsewhere as inevitably, the source is going to be better and faster. Though, they obviously won't deny it as that will cause a huge uproar of anti-mangafox people, most people don't read the forums that much. According to our stats, over 90% of the people don't visit the forums much, if it all. And it's these users that mangafox really wishes to target into thinking that they are the source, and they have it best and fastest so that they don't go anywhere else. So, it actually doesn't even matter if they deny it or accept it in the corner of forums somewhere. Vast majority are going to continually and blissfully be ignorant of the reality. And sites like mangafox will continue operate like so.

The difference in Batoto's advertising is that we are advertised solely through scanlators at the moment. So, the vast majority of the fans here actually already know that scanlators translate stuff, not the online aggregate.

Other online aggregates also often have no info on the scanlating groups at all. Lot of them don't even have links or even their names on them. We plan to feature the groups' info as well as details as much as possible in the time to come. (Though you have to understand, my time is extremely limited between my day job, my commitments to the company, batoto and other real life issues. Therefore development is slow.) That's why such ignorance is lot less likely in Batoto -- and will continue to be. That's why I initially said I do not understand Tran's view of the "problem" that exists here. Though obviously the gap of understanding comes from different sets of views.

Anyway, I don't want you to misunderstand me either. I'm not saying, "OMG Tran's a jackass for banning us with stupidest reason". Frankly, reason or no reason, a deny is a deny and we have tons of that quite naturally since lot of groups just don't allow rehosting. But the point I'm trying to make and convince is that neutrality of the site is not the issue. It's how the material is presented and advertised.

In summary, looking like the source is their benefit. Looking like we're a gathering point of scanlators is our benefit.

Again, I'm doing the best I can to follow everyone's suggestions and requests. I wish the development on Batoto is faster, but I'm really at my limits of what I can do each day. I no longer read comics for fun, I quit all my games. People say "I'm busy!" when they still watch TV 2hrs a day... I wish I was that "busy" -- then I'd have 2 more hours to work. I've done most of the Batoto development during a vacation from work only to work here. We're not calling you names or hating you. We just want you to understand that even though things may be slow, we're (well, I guess me) really doing the best I can and I can't do anymore in such time.

At the end of the day, convinced or not, just know that it's going slowly.

I hope you understand.
Grumpy

PS. I've unapproved their posts in the sun-ken rock thread as it's off topic and unnecessary.

[Tran Linh]

Here's what I thought after I've calmed down a bit.I just finished reading what I wrote again, i think I went overboard there bashing everyone with my rudeness.

Something should be in order, so:

First, what I wrote there was my personal opinion, it has nothing to with my group nor it can be considered as the whole group's attitude so don't take it too seriously, it's a personal opinion, coming from my own mind that was dead tired after days after days of continuously working. Regardless, what I wrote there, even if it's a personal opinion in a unstable state of mind, it's still plainly rude of me to talk like that. For that I will apologize for the rude attitude I made in the last post. If you don't mind, can you remove that post and considered it as if it's never happened? I normally don't apologize for my action too much, but given this grave mistake I've done, it's just that I should do so. The rudeness of mine, feel free to bash me whatsoever, just don't think it as the whole group's behavior.

Secondly, as I have talked before, I have been your supporter from the day you created Batoto since the idea is really great, that's why i've been introducing you guys to my staff, my friends...still the way you are now, i couldn't help but to think about your future if you keep the company's blog on Batoto. Therefore I ask for a proper answer on the matter of separating the Company's forum from Batoto's forum. Exactly when will you separate your own group's blog and batoto? I know i sound like an ass here, but what I'm thinking is for batoto's good that comes from the depth of my mind. The day you make Batoto a neutral base, you can lift my ban. For that, you have my promise.

Again, sorry for the trouble I created.

[Grumpy]

Thank you for your sincere concern for batoto and continuing support. I sense a lot of urgency in a number of your posts but I feel like the only answer I can give is in weeks or months rather than days you'll be looking for. So, I took a short way out. Rather than moving the company forums out, I've taken the liberty to open up forum space to all groups. Whether or not you approve of this change is up to you, but this is the only viable method within a short time, nor am I obligated to follow suggestions.

As for your previous post, I've removed it as per request.

[Tran Linh]

Fine with me, you can lift the ban now. Feel free to upload our releases.

[rue]

Hey guys, we at XscansX are removing our 12 hour waiting period.
All of our series can be uploaded right after we release, or rather, we'll probably be doing it ourselves.