AegisXI

Hi everyone !

I'm new on this site but as a now-previous user of Mangafox I'd like to share my thoughts, and maybe this can help you guys to adjust your sensibilization strategy of the mangareaders.

[First of all, I'm not a native english speaker, so forgive my errors, weird sentences etc... ]

When I first started reading mangas online, I used onemanga, that was a great site in my opinion, but then as you all know, it was shut down, so I just stopped looking for a site gathering releases and just downloaded the scans of the mangas I like directly on the scanlation teams.

But after a while, I started looking again for a site like this one, that gathers a lot of manga, because it's a great way to find new series you don't know about.
And then I found MangaFox. The site looked nice, was easy to understand/use, there was a huge community and tons of mangas, so I thought : "nice".
Also, I might have not taken notice on a few mangas, but in my opinion, all of them had the credit pages included, and on each serie's page, the scanlation team's names was written, so I thought they had respect for the scanlating teams.

Then again after a while, those "watermarks" (?) saying something like "courtesy of the leechers of mangafox" or something like that started appearing, and (maybe because I'm not-so-clever), my immediate reaction was to think this was a so-called war started by batoto to get more popularity, using mangafox.
I also thought that the message displayed in those "watermarks" was taking mangafox's readers for dumb people, leechers, well I don't the know the good word in english, but some kind of scumbag. And since I had no idea what was going on, I thought : "the hell with those batoto guys acting all knowy and mighty for their own sake".

And then when I was reading a new addition on Mangafox by the Japanzai team (which I thank for it's work by the way, even if it's not the place to do so), I saw this : http://www.mangafox....ga/c002/1.html.
Now this tiggled my curiosity for various reason :
- it wasn't offensive for those reading it
- it explained a little the "why we doing this" thing
- the link with the explanation wasn't a link to batoto but a link to the scanlation team's forum (that's the best point in fact, the one that made me think maybe I was wrong all along, and made me want to know more about this).

Now that I'm aware of the situation I plan on using this site instead of MangaFox of course, and I have to say it's nice that you guys here (batoto) actually supports the teams (first by respecting their wishes and also by sharing the ads income).

The point I wanted to make, is that I'm probably not the only one that understood those watermarks the wrong way, hence making them even eager to stay at mangafox. I think an approach like the one japanzai used in the linked I gaved is way better, as it shows this was not initiated by batoto but by the teams themselves and as it's not looking down on the people still using mangafox.

Also there is of course a large (majority ?) of the readers that probably don't give a shit about the piracy, the respect of the teams and whatever, I do believe many are just unaware of the situation or just got the wrong idea when reading the watermarks.


Sorry for the long text, I hope you can understand what I was trying to say !


P.S: also I think it has been said before, but if the users here would use the forum more to discuss about their favorites manga's last chapter, favorite character and so on, it would probably be a warmer and more welcoming place to enjoy reading mangas .



<edit : Also this is definitly not the place to discuss about this, but I really miss the fact that when you do a research here, you can't see what is the current lastest chapter uploaded for each series. And on another level, the fact that when you're reading a chapter you don't immediatly see the number of pages remaining (like 17/35 for exemple), you have to click on the page scrolling menu on the upper right corner. Even if it's not that big of an inconvenience, it's really more enjoyable when you can see those thing immediatly (at least in my opinion ^^).>

What? No. Hero is just being incredible naive. We're not even talking about the same subject anymore, just trying to make him understand that EVERY scanlator team does their thing out of selfishness. Fame, adsmoney, etc.Noez is just doing business, I don't really hate them like a lot of you people do, but they're still pretty despicable.

You did judge me and every other scanlator out there with that line. EVERY means EACH AND ALL. There is no misunderstanding in that word. I don't know what motivates other scanlation groups and I am not going to pretend that I know. I do know what motivates me and my group and I can tell you it has nothing to do with fame (was that supposed to be a joke? Hell, most people who read our scans think we are a part of Null and we are not and have never been.) and it certainly isn't ad money-- we have never taken a donation or money from advertisements. I am not going to sit here and tell you that scanlating is legal. It isn't. But those are not reasons by which we scanlate. It is not why WE do what WE do and by we I refer to myself and my group but I am sure there are other scan teams that would also fit.

Noez has become shady, dishonest and quite frankly is an insult to the entire basis on which scanlating began. It started off as a fine site, but the greed of Noez corrupted that. I do not want my work displayed there as it may be mistaken that I support their ideals and their ways of doing things. I do not. This is why I try everything I can to inform and attract attention to their actions and try to support sites like Batoto which still goes on the ideas of why scanlating originally started. So these blanket statements you are making are like spitting in my face.

If I do not understand your post then that is because you do not know what you are saying yourself.

The thing that is getting to me is that at Mangafox, some of the ignorant posters there are putting up threads asking like "what is the deal with all of these watermarks slamming mangafox by the scanlators?" and the veteran posters are basically saying that scanlators are immature children who are picking on mangafox because they did nothing wrong and scanlators are ruining it for everybody. Thats not what is really bugging me. What is bugging me is that there are people out there actually BLAMING the scanlators for this situation to get as big as it did and how it had to come to this. Yea the ones that are providing the scanlations in the first place and just want to protect their work is getting blasted because they are making life of the lurkers at Mangafox more harder in reading their work. You would think the big "F*** you Mangafox" watermarks would actually tell you that mangafox must have did something bad to piss off the scanlators, the sources of the manga they enjoy. But I guess they dont realize, or choose to remain ignorant/in denial. And sadly there is ALOT of them, you really wont see a dent in Mangafox activity for a good while, shame.