6 replies to this topic

[chaosrune1]

Seriously, whats with the stupid watermarks, one of the only reasons that I came to this site is because of the "war" you have with Mangafox, so to support you, Im reading here, but you still have the watermarks! Then what's the difference between reading here and in Mangafox?

[Trebor]

The "war" isn't necessarily with us (Batoto staff) and Mangafox. We have some quibbles with Mangafox for slightly unrelated reasons, but the real problem is between the scanlators and Mangafox.

This is sort of one of the conceptions that Batoto is trying to dispel. We have nothing to do with the creation of the scanlated manga, it's actually hundreds (thousands?) of individual groups that scanlate the manga. We merely put them all together in one convenient place for you to read.

Maga-Tsuki is scanlated by Japanzai, so you can contact them at japanzai.com. They made the decision to watermark, not us (again, "us" refers to Batoto staff / Batoto the site).

But, in closing, I would like to say a few thoughts about watermarks and the difference between us and Mangafox.

- The watermarks are necessary because Mangafox has been ripping (stealing) comics off of Batoto. They have an automated program (called a "bot") that automatically comes to our website and takes any new comic it finds. If the watermarks were not also on our site, then Mangafox would just steal the clean versions from us.
- By reading here, the comics are higher-quality. This is because Mangafox compresses (lessens) the quality of their image, in order to save some space on their servers. Try comparing the same chapter on here and Mangafox, and you should see the difference. For example, the manga Good Ending.
- When you read here, you support the scanlators, because we work with scanlators and try our best to comply with their wishes. Also, we share the profits from ad-revenue with the scanlators (the people directly creating the comics), to help them be able to purchase more raws to work off of and not act as a giant profit sink -- Mangafox keeps all of the ad-revenue generated off of scanlator comics, even if a scanlator doesn't want their work appearing on Mangafox.

[chaosrune1]

Ok, I get the points behind the watermarks, but you guys are still getting the publicity from the watermarks, so that might be one of the reasons behind people thinking its between you and Mangafox, and also, my concern is if we can expect this from now on, when its going to stop? The watermarks, while necessary, distract from the manga, and break the mood pretty bad, I go from laughing to reading about how much of a scumbag Mangafox is, now hat's a turn off.

Now about the other points:

-Sorry to hear about the bot ripping out stuff, I suppose that something like that will be almost impossible to get rid off (what with how a IP ban can be avoided by simply changing IP), so the best of luck.
-While the quality is higher here, it also means slower pages, and while I appreciate the higher quality, the default size of the images makes people scroll too much in every single page, while instead, in sites like mangafox, while the quality is lower (but not very noticeable in my 15" monitor unless I zoom in), the pages loads faster and you can almost see the whole page in the screen at once, which makes it easier to read. Not saying that higher quality is bad, just trying to show the other side of the coin here. Maybe implement a Lite version of the pages for faster navigation?
-Now this I completely support, and nice of the scanlators getting a piece of the pie, so to speak.

Now some other points about comparing this site with Magafox (not sure if this is the right place for this, please direct me to where I can post this, and maybe work in solutions)
-1 of the reasons most people stick with Mangafox is because of the great community and activity in the forums, you can find dozens of post of your favorite manga the day a new chapter is release, and it feels great to talk about other people about a manga you love. Here, well the forums are almost dead, I see almost no activity in the mangas I started to follow here. Now I know that this is something you dont control, but unless something change to make people come here, thats never going to change, and people is going to stick with Mangafox and the forums there.
-The RSS feed is kind of confusing, I'm still not sure what to do to add a RSS feed of my follow (or is it watch? Im confused) to my Google reader
-No way to search for Mangas by gender or popularity. Now this is a big one, I cant count the number of great mangas I have found this way on other sites, but I just dont have the option to do that here, which kind of makes me to go back to other sites to search for more mangas.

If you got to this point, thanks for reading my wall of text lol

[Loki]

1 Manga isnt supposed to be read on LQ under any circumstances , because someone decide to take 0.2 seconds less and read it on mangafox/mangahere , is downside only for him . After all no group wants to see their work degraded in that way , so why not read in the quality that is released if its possible .
2 Japanzai and XscansX release version of some of their chapters free of watermarks , if they want to upload them here , so you can read them cleanly , they will do it , we cant do anything about it - their work , their rules.

[KingAntonius]

Just wanted to say as someone who is close to a few of the higher ups on MangaFox, there is NO BOT! I'm not sure how the heck you guys got that impression, but there just simply isn't one, otherwise some of the stuff that is more risque would show up on MF as well. They DO have some of that stuff, but not others. Also, some chapters upload here sooner than they do on MF and vice versa. I totally understand the scanlators wanting their work on their own sites for a set period of time, and I know that MF has not been abiding by that (simply because they are not technically capable of it at the moment unless they completely redesign their uploading system), but the BATOTO watermark is definitely getting annoying. Why not watermark the scanlators site instead? It almost feels like Batoto is putting these on MF as their own promotion. I'm not saying that you guys are doing that, but it still kinda feels like it.

[Tran Linh]

mmm, watermark our site's name? For the purpose?
Look, readers want all their manga on a place that's why fuckers like mangafox, mangahere got big community of lazy asses readers. Too bad that the majority of readers are lazy asses like that so i decided to watermark batoto instead of Japanzai's site to promote batoto to screw mangafox. And watermarking or not, it's our choice, not anyone, not batoto. And only our staff has that right to negate that. Clean version will still up later though.

[Grumpy]

Just wanted to say as someone who is close to a few of the higher ups on MangaFox, there is NO BOT! I'm not sure how the heck you guys got that impression, but there just simply isn't one, otherwise some of the stuff that is more risque would show up on MF as well. They DO have some of that stuff, but not others. Also, some chapters upload here sooner than they do on MF and vice versa. I totally understand the scanlators wanting their work on their own sites for a set period of time, and I know that MF has not been abiding by that (simply because they are not technically capable of it at the moment unless they completely redesign their uploading system), but the BATOTO watermark is definitely getting annoying. Why not watermark the scanlators site instead? It almost feels like Batoto is putting these on MF as their own promotion. I'm not saying that you guys are doing that, but it still kinda feels like it.

1. There IS a bot. And we can prove it. I even had to take extra measures just because of it and I'm sure the bot maker is fully aware of our defensive actions. We (the community) even had numerous tests using fake releases to initially test whether or not MF is ripping from us. This has been proven successful quite a number of times. One example here: http://www.batoto.co...dpost__p__18472
2. If MF simply stops stealing content from Batoto and disrespecting scanlators, I'm sure the watermarks will go away. So, in my opinion, your hate of watermark is directed at the wrong person. It also would be incorrect to say that MF needs a revamp of their upload system just to abide by scanlator wishes. They were doing that for a long time until their major comics started putting no-upload rules. That's when MF started uploading regardless and stripping MF "volunteer" mods powers to remove them or even report for removal of them. They took further actions to remove the forum to report for such problems by the scanlators themselves. Additionally, recent uploads on MF were only made by admins, primarily uploading all the groups that used to have no-rehosting policy. Are you suggesting that a redesign of the upload system is required to block out their own admins? It's obvious their revenue stream is of higher importance than anything else.

MF will continue to promote Batoto if they continue to take contents that shouldn't be there to begin with. It's a very simple equation.

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Thread locked. Derailed (partly thx to me) and OP's question has been answered.