213 replies to this topic

[Tran Linh]

the bot is up again...i'm sure of it. I uploaded Love So Life only on batoto, i've not even released it on japanzai.com...and after 5-8 mins, it's there on mangafox, even before i release the download link or anything on our site...(i've not added MU at that time too)

[Tran Linh]

well, as you can see, the fake chapter 30 is in mangafox now...

[LittleMelon18]

well, as you can see, the fake chapter 30 is in mangafox now...

Looks like it's gone.

[Kalladin]

How does the mangafox bot work? Does it check for updates of a chapter? Most of the times it's the users who report the errors I suppose.

Suggestions

--Mixing up the order of the pages. Or low quality scans. Or errors in the translation, subtle errors.

--Have batoto use an different ordering algorithm.

--Upload raw versions of manga's in a seperate "place."

--Upload empty chapters that mangafox already has that batoto doesn't have. (In a sense removing a chapter from mangafox.)

Realizing something, you probably all thought of this.


Can you ban mac-addresses?

Then in response... to you trebor (are all ... I don't know what to call them anymore. Generally I use scanalation, but before the cmpny has said that they(you and everyone -else) haven't done scans so to speak and it doesn't really encompass the work done by the groups. you guys computer experts? It seems like it.)
just ignore the fact that they do this. Too much of a pain to worry about. I'm sure you have other troubles...

Edited by Kalladin, 23 October 2011 - 05:42 PM.

[Trebor]

Kalladin, we do know a little bit about how the bot works, from our own investigation and from the efforts of other scanlators.

However, we cannot publicly disclose any of this information for security purposes.

I can only answer one question of yours in the list that you posed up top.

No, we cannot ban MAC addresses, because it is Layer 2 link-level, and the internet runs on Layer 3 Network level.

[Haganai]

Why don't you guys just combine all pages into one, just like webtoons?
also why not use watermark on every pages. 1 or 2 pages doesn't seem to be enough.
Could be great if you addl 2-5 pages of rants in between chapters, to piss them off.

[kurara]

Just to let you know, the pages that inform readers of MF's misbehaving and direct them to this site work! (at least for me since I have stopped visiting MF ever since I found out they are doing boo boo stuff). Took me some time though to research what is actually going on (reading the MF takedown post/blog from FoOlRulez) and reading the forums in here (to make sure this is not just another FM site that pisses scanlators off. LOL).

The fake chapter cracks me up. Anyway, just wanna thanks all the scanlators out there ♥

[Grumpy]

Why don't you guys just combine all pages into one, just like webtoons?
also why not use watermark on every pages. 1 or 2 pages doesn't seem to be enough.
Could be great if you addl 2-5 pages of rants in between chapters, to piss them off.

I believe our higher priority is to be of service to the reader as a great online reader and much lower priority of banning abuse. So, things like adding watermark, excess pages, etc that hinders, distracts or somehow lessen the quality for the user would be out of the question just to annoy the bot as well.

[Trebor]

I believe our higher priority is to be of service to the reader as a great online reader and much lower priority of banning abuse. So, things like adding watermark, excess pages, etc that hinders, distracts or somehow lessen the quality for the user would be out of the question just to annoy the bot as well.

I agree with that. Something else to consider: we don't really "own" these scanlations (in as far as they can be owned by anyone). So, it wouldn't be really nice if we are watermarking scanlation group's releases.

The other thing is, it's probably of marginal use to just watermark everything. I've seen QUITE a few aggregators out there where comics have not one, not two, but THREE (I might have even seen four once) watermarks on it. Clearly a lot of stealing going on, but it hasn't really stopped people from reading the manga on that site.

[Haganai]

Of curse, but what i mean is that the scanlation themself put a watermark on their scans.
both that lead to their website and this website, suppose they support batoto, that way more people would visit this site.
it was those watermarks that leads me here, and am sure it is the same to many other as well.
But considering mangahere, they edit most scan credit page/watermark, so against them it's useless i guess...
if they keep thoose watermark to a small letter, on the side of the pages, am sure it wont bother people, anyway thanks for replying lol

[Tran Linh]

mangahere got 4 watermarks on "hot project". And actually, they are really tired of editing my group (japanzai) 's watermark alone, so if there are other groups doing the same things to their releases as well, it would be awesome.
Secondly, no matter how godly their skill is, they can't properly edit the watermark we've been doing to our releases. Thus leaving inconsistency...people reading it will be annoyed and thus will asked "what the hell is happening, why can't i read this properly"...and in fact some will get curious to know why they can't read a normal release...i think it's working. Just need more groups doing that.

Edited by Tran Linh, 24 October 2011 - 10:20 AM.

[lactea]

Watermarks are bad way to fight Mangafox because they make more harm to readers than to MF owners. All kind of bans are ineffective. Way krytyk used is fun but require lots of effort with small results. I think best way to act is to counter bot with bot. Greatest weakness of their bot - it eat everything. If Batoto create bot being able to feed their bot with fake content without creating inconvenience to readers it will be great problem to MF.

For exemple this bot may upload fake chapter (with message about how bad Mangafox is) on site and delete it few seconds after. MF bot will eat it (probably, i'm not sure how it works), but Batoto readers wont even notice. If bot will do it lets say 50 times per day with random manga MF owners will have hard time separating real manga and fakes. This way there will be few messages on their main page each day.until they stop bot.

Edited by lactea, 24 October 2011 - 09:14 PM.

[LittleMelon18]

Just to let you guys know. After 14 minutes Suyojeon ch 4 was made available, mangafox got its dirty hands on it. *rips hair out*

EDIT:
I had a look at the chapter they leeched off. I realised the batoto advert and my warnings page about NC releases can be only found on batoto and warning readers about manga reader sites profiting has been removed! This can't be the work of a bot, can it? I even numbered the pages so it looks like it's part of the chapter.

Edited by LittleMelon18, 25 October 2011 - 10:20 AM.

[krytyk]

Just to let you guys know. After 14 minutes Suyojeon ch 4 was made available, mangafox got its dirty hands on it. *rips hair out*

EDIT:
I had a look at the chapter they leeched off. I realised the batoto advert and my warnings page about NC releases can be only found on batoto and warning readers about manga reader sites profiting has been removed! This can't be the work of a bot, can it? I even numbered the pages so it looks like it's part of the chapter.

It can be easily adjusted.

1. Bot might be sensitive to filenames
Example in your manga:

http://img.batoto.co...eon4credits.jpg
http://img.batoto.co...8d8c4cb1c/1.png
http://img.batoto.co...creditspage.jpg

Conclusion, it can be adjusted to ignore pages that include phrase "credit". Or some other variations of it.

2. It can be adjusted to ignore pages that are smaller then 1200px height (most of credit pages are smaller then that, and most of manga pages are 1200px or bigger).

3. It can be adjusted to ignore jpeg files, as well as colors (unlikely since webcomics are popular lately).

There are tons of ways and ways to do that.



Oh well, there's my rough draft.

Batoto.com is a very attractive reader that has received alot of attention lately, but that is only within the "senior" part of leecher community, and the scanlators themselves, mainly people who are active part of the community are the scanlators, and readers who are "long timers", meaning people who are familiar with IRC, groups, mangas to wider extent. We do not appeal to "grab, read, discard" leechers.

The thing we should do is to have active advertisement campaign all over the "otaku" communities, fan-forums, et cetera et cetera. That would be most effective course of action.

And to do so we would need to work ACTIVELY, spamming other communities.

Edited by krytyk, 25 October 2011 - 10:45 AM.

[Souldrake]

Watermarks are bad way to fight Mangafox because they make more harm to readers than to MF owners. All kind of bans are ineffective. Way krytyk used is fun but require lots of effort with small results. I think best way to act is to counter bot with bot. Greatest weakness of their bot - it eat everything. If Batoto create bot being able to feed their bot with fake content without creating inconvenience to readers it will be great problem to MF.

For exemple this bot may upload fake chapter (with message about how bad Mangafox is) on site and delete it few seconds after. MF bot will eat it (probably, i'm not sure how it works), but Batoto readers wont even notice. If bot will do it lets say 50 times per day with random manga MF owners will have hard time separating real manga and fakes. This way there will be few messages on their main page each day.until they stop bot.

All Krytyk did was brag. The time it takes for the bot to upload the release to MF is about 10-15 minutes after it appears on Batoto.

[Alxandr]

May I recommend a simple IP-restrict? If you get more than ... say, 17 requests (that's about a chapter, right?) in less then 5 seconds it means it's a bot, then show it a captcha? I mean, no actual person can read that fast, and it's not that hard to implement, but requires an extra table in the database.

You could do something like this:
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| IP | last_access | count | definitiely_human |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| xx.xx.xx.xx| xx:xx:xx | 2 | false |

If a request now commes in from the ip above, check if definitely_human = true, if it's not check if the last request was less then 2 seconds ago, if it was set count = count + 1 and update last_access to now, else set count = 1 and update last_access to now. If count ever reaches 17, show a captcha, and if the user cleares the captcha, set definitely_human = true.

[Edit]
Oh, and to not completely kill of google bots etc. only do this for manga-pages, and not forums etc. Cause there is no use in google bot indexing the manga-pages, but the infopages and forums etc. should be indexed.

Edited by Alxandr, 25 October 2011 - 04:00 PM.

[mhh]

If you look at the webtoons like for ToG 28-35+ pages get loaded with one click wouldn't that mean that people that open ToG get blocked/shown captchas?

[Alxandr]

No, cause it's still only one page-request, even though several images are requested.

[Edit]
Though, it would mean that if the dl started with a webtoon it would have no problem downloading that, but still, this is a way that will not affect normal users, and users who go back or forth in pages really quick will only get one captcha (untill their IP is changed which generally happens less then once a day).

Edited by Alxandr, 25 October 2011 - 07:43 PM.

[©®åƒ†¥µåGGø†]

It can be easily adjusted.

1. Bot might be sensitive to filenames
Example in your manga:

http://img.batoto.co...eon4credits.jpg
http://img.batoto.co...8d8c4cb1c/1.png
http://img.batoto.co...creditspage.jpg

Conclusion, it can be adjusted to ignore pages that include phrase "credit". Or some other variations of it.

Assuming this were the case, couldn't one just rename all the pages so that they are filtered out by the bot? It's a longshot, but has anybody tried it?

[Abozzo]

Assuming this were the case, couldn't one just rename all the pages so that they are filtered out by the bot? It's a longshot, but has anybody tried it?

Good idea! But the bot probably also checks the image size (or will in the future). Credit pages are generally smaller then the other images and could theoretically be filtered on that basis. Reading image contents isn't that hard either, just writing "credit page" on an image can be enough to have the image excluded.

Edited by Abozzo, 27 October 2011 - 10:28 PM.