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.