512 replies to this topic

[Anomandaris]

Preventing bots is always an arms race. That login-required would incentivise aggregation sites doesn't make it inherently bad if your only goal is to have less hits from bots. If login-required enables enough tools make writing effective bots very hard, and the increased difficult outweighs the new incentive, it's still a net win (absent other factors not discussed here).

 

Of course, if what you care about is discouraging readership of certain aggregators, that's a whole different issue...

 

 

One other thing... Grumpy said the ratio of logged-in to not logged-in views is like 1:9. I wonder how much of that 90% comes from bots.

[tallos]

// Offtopic

I don't really know how bad it was before, but right now we're actually quite lenient with policies in regard to "mature" mangas. Even many smut are allowed. The only ones I've seen that we really censor are the blatant hentai masquerading as "borderline-H" and expecting to get away with it (then again, I could be wrong. I'm new here)

 

// On topic

I don't think going private would be a good idea personally. As somebody mentioned only a page or two in, it'd be similar in a sense to pointless DRM on games and such. I don't doubt that the sites that crawl us for data would have their bots working with an account within a week of the change.

 

And that's not to mention the significant dev time required by you, Grumpy. You seem to be lacking in that time already... *cough* https://vatoto.com/forums/topic/16874-how-i-plan-to-overhaul-the-follows-for-comics/*cough*\

In the end it's up to you and the rest of the community though, so whatever ^.^

 

No, moderation of "Mature" manga is completely draconian and unreasonably biased here. Male+female borderline-h/smut gets regularly purged with random exceptions because of high viewer count, yet yaoi smut which is more explicit gets a pass and stays for no explainable reason. I stopped using the site regularly years ago because of this, and only come here to check the status of scan groups that actually reside near exclusively on batoto.

 

 

As for going Private/Members only, you will just piss off your userbase and within a month the scrapers will have bypassed all of your new requirements and the users are stuck with all the downsides with no gains. The 90% of users that dont log-in will simply migrate to sites that do not require registration to view, even if it means viewing a crappier version of the chapter which has been downscaled.

[DVerde]

 By the way, there is already a better "secret club" out there.

 

4chan isn't a secret.

 

There is always a "Secret club" for everything under the sun. Why is this remotely concerning?

Edited by DVerde, 21 October 2015 - 12:19 AM.

[redlar]

Speaking as a member, an uploader, and a former scanlator, I think this is a bad idea.

 

Leeching sites will always find a way to leech. That's just how it's been since the Onemanga days. This change will primarily impact users, not the leechers. And when you force people to sign up to use your site, there is a significant population that says "Screw that." They'll just go to other sites that offer the ability to read manga without the personal investment of passing on their private information to you, because these people don't like giving out their email addresses or going to the trouble of making a throwaway account and password that they need to bother with remembering everytime they lose their cookies just to get their fill of manga.

 

I've always taken the view that making it easy for people to read manga, rather than trying to fight off sites that mirror content without permission, is what's important.

 

While it might be a little frustrating for scanlators or site admins to see other sites competing with the same content, watermarking it and degrading the quality to save a few megabytes on their servers, the way to fight these sites is by convincing more people to use the good ones. You can't beat them by walling your content off, and doing so is self-defeating because it just pushes away new visitors rather than drawing them in. When you see a closed door, is that an invitation to go in or to fuck off?

 

While I do try to always be logged into Batoto, sometimes I do get logged out or I come to the site from a public computer, and it's really nice being able to just flip through a chapter or two without needing to log in from a machine other people have access too. If Batoto goes private, even partially, then that just makes it a lot less likely to be my choice when I'm not at home.

 

Taking Batoto private is a bad solution to a minor problem.

[shogun01]

I can only think of two ways of implementing this without having a lot of backlash.

 

1.) Like others have said, create a delay release for non-members (guests).

 

2.) Use a bot recognition program for non-members. Many of these aggregates are using bots to retrieve these updates. Simply using a "I'm not a bot" program would reduce these bots quite a bit. For the guest reader, they simple just press a button and the program will if they are a bot or not in a matter of seconds.  

[Tarage]

I'm not sure if this has been suggested, but what about a scanlator opt in instead? If a scanlator feels that their manga is being unjustly uploaded, they can set a flag on upload that either says "delay for non-members" or "exclude to members". That seems like it would be a lot more scanlator friendly, though I admit I don't know how hard that would be to implement,

[daime17]

since I'm a member think I would have no problems but how about delaying the the updates for nin memebers

[Kanasuke]

What are you guys doing?

 

You're trying to prevent sharing of your members works, while at the same time hosting a platform for the sole purpose of sharing works without approval? Be consistent.

 

What business is it for the scanlators and distributors in this sector to be worrying about the prevention of sharing? What we do, we do out of our own liberty and we do not and have not the moral ground to prevent others from doing what they do. Please....! Just live and let live! Scanlators or distributors in this sector have no business defending the copyright privileges of other scanlators. It's not their place.

 

Also, online readers are not our enemy they provide expensive infrastructure, servers and take the effort to optimize the netcode to serve millions of viewers online, serving it in a way that is convenient and free of charge. Scanlators (who are mostly students and poor) could not afford this, and even if they could, they would not have the technical know-how or the entrepreneur instinct to make a business model out of it that can sustain its own operation. (Not to mention it's a legal risk that students don't want to or know how to take). 

 

I also agree with the person above (hypo_crit. except for his use of language), this site is attractive to me because I only need to upload once, and it goes directly to all the other online manga readers. This is an extremely important feature to me. Don't handicap bato.to's viewer count for no reason. It won't achieve your intended goal.

Edited by Kanasuke, 21 October 2015 - 12:33 AM.

[OMGWTFBBQPONIES]

Offtopic,

yaoi smut which is more explicit gets a pass and stays for no explainable reason.

that's because both yaoi uploaders and yaoi readers seem to think explicit sexual content is fine if it's between men for some unexplainable reason and it gets read but not reported, non-yaoi readers don't read it in the first place so don't report it and batoto doesn't have enough staff members (it's all volunteers doing stuff in their free time) for a major cleanup of stuff that gathered with time in the database.

[serriatian]

I'm not sure if this has been suggested, but what about a scanlator opt in instead? If a scanlator feels that their manga is being unjustly uploaded, they can set a flag on upload that either says "delay for non-members" or "exclude to members". That seems like it would be a lot more scanlator friendly, though I admit I don't know how hard that would be to implement,

Probably the best idea I've seen so far. Only hassle is verifying the scanlators, but I think it could work.

[2hot4you]

Stop acting so high and mighty here. None of the contents of this site belongs to any of you guys. In the end everything is stolen, you can describe it how you want it, but it's not your content, no matter how much you edited it. Stop beeing so fucking hypocrites.

 

Let's check what will happen when you add login requirements:

- A big part of your 90% non registered users won't bother to log in, there are enough of different sources.

- You are basically helping the people you want to hurt, since many of this not registering user will just go to mangafox or whatever

- Bots will be rewritten so your login requirement won't even matter

 

By the way, the only reason why our scanlation group uploads to batoto is because we know that half the internet "steals" from you. So, it's an easy way to spread our work. Honestly, we don't care about all the revenue, the only thing why we even bother is because not everyone knows japanese and want it to make available for everyone. Your idea is actually hurting this.

 

But yeah, batoto has always been the most elitist site, so go on with this acting high and mighty and risk everything for nothing. The worst thing for everyone not dependabe of batoto will be that certain apps won't work for a short time, some pages will have a delay for a certain time. This will change nothing. By the way, there is already a better "secret club" out there.

why are you so angry man

 

All Grumpy does with this site is chasing his ideal of what he thinks this site should be as he explained at various points in time at various places on this website. 

 

I don't see how batoto is acting high and mighty or being elitist at all for trying to make the horrible world of manga and scanlating a little bit better

[Anomandaris]

What are you guys doing?

Going by Grumpy's original post, trying to prevent large amounts of traffic from bots and discouraging aggregators that only exist to scrape other sites and host low quality images for ad revenue.
 

You're trying to prevent sharing of your members works, while at the same time hosting a platform for the sole purpose of sharing works without approval? Be consistent.

No-one is stopping you from uploading elsewhere, and trying to block bots is hardly preventing sharing, just preventing automated robocopying.
 

What business is it for the scanlators and distributors in this sector to be worrying about the prevention of sharing? What we do, we do out of our own liberty and we do not and have not the moral ground to prevent others from doing what they do. Please....! Just live and let live! Scanlators or distributors in this sector have no business defending the copyright privileges of other scanlators. It's not their place.

First, others feel differently, so who's to say you're right and they're wrong? Second, who claimed moral high ground, where, and why? Third, afaik no-one (except you) is framing this as a copyright issue. Last, at the end of the day, Grumpy can do whatever he wants with the site. He has his goals, and you have yours.

It's sort of like adblocking. Users aren't obliged to request certain resources (ads) from a server if they don't want to. Likewise, the server can choose what to do in response to requests. Including deciding you're a robot and not returning the data you asked for.
 

Also, online readers are not our enemy they provide expensive infrastructure, servers and take the effort to optimize the netcode to serve millions of viewers online, serving it in a way that is convenient and free of charge. Scanlators (who are mostly students and poor) could not afford this, and even if they could, they would not have the technical know-how or the entrepreneur instinct to make a business model out of it that can sustain its own operation. (Not to mention it's a legal risk that students don't want to or know how to take). 

I also agree with the person above (hypo_crit. except for his use of language), this site is attractive to me because I only need to upload once, and it goes directly to all the other online manga readers. This is an extremely important feature to me. Don't handicap bato.to's viewer count for no reason. It won't achieve your intended goal.

Batoto doesn't exist just to distribute your translations to every other site for you, and certain online readers may not be your enemy but they definitely appear to be at odds with other groups.
Nothing you have said is really an argument against requiring a login, to be honest.

Edited by Anomandaris, 21 October 2015 - 01:38 AM.

[Tarage]

Something worth mentioning in regards to what Kanasuke said is that most scanlators also host their own archives of the chapters on their sites. It's not like we want to block people from reading it.

Let me paint for you a scenario I often run into as a scanlator. I'm human. I make mistakes. I upload a chapter that has a typo in it. Either it slipped through QC or it was a last minute change, it gets onto Batoto. 30 minutes later someone points it out to me, and I fix it, re-upload the chapter, and everything is fine. Right?

Wrong.

The chapter has already been scraped by Mangahere, uploaded in it's flawed form, and duplicated on hundreds of copycat sites where people who don't use Batoto read it. And these sites never fix their errors, even when a fresh upload is put up. Want to know how I know that? http://www.mangahere.co/manga/jitsu_wa_watashi_wa/c094/8.html

That page has been wrong for weeks. I've reported it, and nothing has happened. People have posted about it, and it's still there. Because I don't have upload rights, I can't fix it. It's there, forever. As a scanlator, that is incredibly frustrating. Do you see why people want to have a little control over what gets uploaded where? It's not out of some vanity or greed. It's about being able to fix mistakes.

[OMGWTFBBQPONIES]

batoto doesn't have enough staff members (it's all volunteers doing stuff in their free time) for a major cleanup of stuff that gathered with time in the database.

To continue the thought, I've made some attempts at it and can't see it happening unless someone gets hired to do it or someone sacrifices a month or two of their time on reviewing all the content.

 

 

 

On-topic, I'm probably on the side of people saying that locking content for non-members is a bad choice. I don't really read manga anymore and will be fine with any solution that won't make batoto fora completely empty, but if I were a random unregistered lurker I totally can't see myself registering just to see content that's available without account requirement on other sites. Batoto's Self-Published side never passed the critical mass required for it to become a go-to place for webcomics/indie authors, so it's relying primarily on scanlations and there are dozens of other sites that offer them without account requirements (readers who don't care about quality, adblock users, etc. certainly won't mind migrating elsewhere if forced to make an account here). Registering may seem like a little trouble, but with the amount of other sites on the internet requiring having an account to access their features, each new login and password to remember quickly add up and make each consequent registration seem less interesting and make people first look for alternatives (there do exist password managers for such occasions, but they're not for everyone). Batoto also doesn't have any major member-only content/feature that'd make registering look very tempting (people who read more manga than is available here probably already use B-U to keep their reading lists, not everyone is interested in joining the community, there's no "you can read nsfw manga if you're 18+" or "read shoujo manga that otherwise you'd have to register and post on scanlator's forum to get access to" option on batoto, and your average reader doesn't care that some publisher from a country other than their own wants some comics taken down) - though there's the availability of non-english scanlations that might be a big enough selling point that I forgot to consider, but I have no stats on how popular they are in comparison to english ones to reach any conclusion.

 

If I had to pick some solution from the mentioned ones, daily/hourly page reading limits for guest readers sound the least intrusive to me if properly balanced and probably would go unnoticed by a lot of readers.

[Anomandaris]

Something worth mentioning in regards to what Kanasuke said is that most scanlators also host their own archives of the chapters on their sites. It's not like we want to block people from reading it.
Let me paint for you a scenario I often run into as a scanlator. I'm human. I make mistakes. I upload a chapter that has a typo in it. Either it slipped through QC or it was a last minute change, it gets onto Batoto. 30 minutes later someone points it out to me, and I fix it, re-upload the chapter, and everything is fine. Right?

Wrong.

The chapter has already been scraped by Mangahere, uploaded in it's flawed form, and duplicated on hundreds of copycat sites where people who don't use Batoto read it. And these sites never fix their errors, even when a fresh upload is put up. Want to know how I know that? http://www.mangahere.co/manga/jitsu_wa_watashi_wa/c094/8.html

That page has been wrong for weeks. I've reported it, and nothing has happened. People have posted about it, and it's still there. Because I don't have upload rights, I can't fix it. It's there, forever. As a scanlator, that is incredibly frustrating. Do you see why people want to have a little control over what gets uploaded where? It's not out of some vanity or greed. It's about being able to fix mistakes.

This is an excellent point. It also demonstrates how little effort the people writing bots put in, because when you re-upload the bot could fairly easily scrape the updated chapter too.
 

If I had to pick some solution from the mentioned ones, daily/hourly page reading limits for guest readers sound the least intrusive to me if properly balanced and probably would go unnoticed by a lot of readers.

Unfortunately, chances are, if it's sufficiently unintrusive it would also fail to prevent fairly rapid crawling via an IP pooling proxy service.

Edited by Anomandaris, 21 October 2015 - 01:47 AM.

[Sudz]

Someone mentioned this earlier, but I think it would be important to figure out what the groups who contribute (or wish to contribute) exclusively to Batoto would feel, simply because these would be the people that are affected / "hurt" the most from all the image crawlers. Granted, I suppose this is where your 'viewing controls' are talking about - letting the groups decide when it should be viewed. (I wouldn't be surprised to see quite a lot of publics, though that is my opinion)

 

As for the idea itself - I think that it will probably turn too many people away to be feasible.  Again, it depends on how many series here are exclusive (or supposed to be exclusive) on Batoto, but those most affected would be the average layman, whose easiest solution will be "visit another manga website". Botters won't be affected at all, because in all seriousness, these people have the persistence to the point we might be glad they are trying to crawl on this website instead of, say, inventing viruses to steal all our souls.

 

"Do or do not, there is no try." Yoda

[domoon]

reminds me to the time when Sun Ken Rock has that big jesus overlay on the whole page LOL. that's when i started using batoto...

[cmertb]

The only matter of concern is how Batoto's ad revenue will get affected. As for leechers who don't even comment on manga or discuss them, and thus have no account, who cares? They're so invisible they might as well not exist. So what if thousands of those ghosts go to other online reader sites? No one will even notice.

[p71rock]

I have been a member of other sites over the years. I have noticed that when going private; it does help slow to a crawl the bots and copiers limited depending on the implimentation of the private side.

 

I do believe that going private my seem like a big hurdel, but I believe its well wirth it.  Also it will stop the DMCA BOTs from scanning you site with out signing up.

[zuram]

This is like the debate with backdooring encryption.

 

Likely scenario:

 

- Crawlers find workarounds, sooner or later they will.

- Average user gets screwed. Either because he has to register (that's a minor hurdle, tbh, but some people would rather not register) or because now he can't do some things that he could do before.

 

That's how things work usually on the internet.

 

 

And the result might be that the average user that used to come to batoto, may end having to go to those sites that crawl batoto, because those sites give him what batoto doesn't.

 

 

Of course, just speculating here, but previous experiences have shown that this is usually the case.

 

 

"If it ain't broken, don't fix it"

 

But also:

 

"If it's broken, sometimes the best fix is doing nothing. Not that it will be fixed, but you won't break it further."

 

 

It would be best to promote batoto as a site where you get your weekly manga fix, than giving those sites extra users by making it harder to do so.

 

 

So what if thousands of those ghosts go to other online reader sites? No one will even notice.

 

Yes, that those online reader sites will increase their ad revenue, thus giving them more incentives to rip from batoto.

 

You don't want thousands of ghosts going to those sites.

Edited by zuram, 21 October 2015 - 02:12 AM.