Yu Han Sung

It seems we're getting a lot of applications. Bit more than I anticipated. hehe. <3

So, I'll be closing applications and set the deadline to the 10th of August. After that, we'll get to evaluations and promotions.

Thanks to all those applied.

I appreciate the thought, but I don't think that will help us that much other than giving complainers a place where their complaints will reach and annoy a lot of people.

Offending user banned.

Well... just keeping up seems to be a lot of work now... >.>

I just put up another server in Europe to help out with the "archive". People reading old stuff from europe should have less of a hassle now. We don't really have that much more people than not long ago... but we do have that much more comics to store.

Additionally, I'll be taking down US East server (probably tomorrow or 2 days from now) for some serious maintenance. There's an issue with one of the two disks. And will likely have to reinstall OS and everything. The load will be temporarily shifted on the new server (albeit different continent) in the meanwhile so there's no heavy hindrance on anyone.


Lastly, few people have been asking me when the next update (outlined in the sneak peek) is going to be put out... I think I can give a dozen excuse to why it's late... including the visible one above... But I don't think people are too interested in that. Sorry it's late. But, my hands are kinda full. I'll do what I can when I can. Sorry, that's really all I can say conclusively at the moment. I can say what parts are done on development side. Major items, all but follows are done. IPB changed the backend of follow once again (TYVM IPB), so I need to alter that. And some minor visuals to go.

"New" used to vanish before after a certain amount of time , i think it was 2 days or something , recently it doesnt do so as its supposed , i dont know the reason , but it probably wont get fixed until the update is in place.

Well, with the recent issues of server load, I had ordered yet another server to serve the website itself and was implemented just NOW. It makes the 3rd server just to host the website serving HTML stuff. ^^;; Hopefully we won't be having any more slow downs!! Yay!

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For those who wants to know...

The issue was rather odd that prevented me from ordering another server earlier.
Our web server gets quite a load to serve. Normally, we get roughly 10,000~13,000 requests a minute. But once it spikes up to 17K (due to surge in traffic, some of which has been caused by bots recently -- tyvm), it wouldn't be able to recover from it. So, the server goes to a crawl; unable to serve anyone, not even 9,000 requests anymore. To give an analogy, take a highway. if the highway is capable of pushing 1000 cars / min, up to close capacity of cars, while packed, the highway still allows the cars to run at high speeds. But, once it's over capacity, everyone starts to go into a stand still of jam packed cars. The highway is no longer even capable of pushing 100 cars / min. The same phenomenon exists here. However, we are not a highway. Servers should recover faster. Not only did it fail to recover fast, it didn't recover at all (possibly because we always have a ton of traffic) by itself. This was a great puzzle to me and my sys admin (who is kinda famous for being awesome in the industry)...

In the end, I'm throwing more money at it to solve the problem. And it sure has solved it... Enjoy the speed everybody!

Although, I actually did order 'earlier', just that... "There has been a transformer explosion at Corelink Las Vegas which is affecting power to their facility. Since we use them as one of our network PoP's, we've been busy making some adjustments to keep our network running in case we lose connectivity through that PoP." which delayed the actual deployment. I put up the 3rd server about 30 seconds after the link was finally connected.

Well, this has been the pain in the butt for a while. Many theories have been made as to why this occurs... but so far, can't really confirm in any direction.

I do know it's a problem on our end. Not an attack or any 3rd party involvement (other than huge number of users we have. )

About 40min ago from this post, the issue was temporarily resolved once again... And was resolved possibly due to a blunder of mine (lot of ppl probably saw white screens... lol), or even coincidentally fixed itself at the time...

 borked.jpg   115.1KB   19 downloads

But thx to my blunder, might have found out the exact cause. If it stops happening in the future. You know the answer. xD

Just a general note to everyone who uses translations from third-parties: We really can't be responsible for "stolen translations" when the translations are public and done by freelancers who aren't part of your group. If you do not want your translations "stolen", then don't post them up publicly and make them a part of your group.

It's often quite difficult to tell who/what a translation being "reserved" means, especially to many of these one-man "groups" who don't really know much about scanlation and just want to put some translations onto manga. I'm not saying this is the case here, but this is a general observation.

The price you pay for using freelancers is that their translations will be public and the freelancer can decide to make their translation available to more than your group, and you lose the ability to control the translation.

Well, the installation of IPB 3.3 has been a time consuming one. Primarily because much of the customizations done by me were broken after the change.

New Look!
But, here's some peaks (with pics) for how it's going to look like.

First, there will be 2 skins (on top of IP.Board - Default).
The new default for our website will be "Deluxe" by Tom Christian
 Deluxe_comic.jpg   153.46KB   309 downloads  Deluxe_forums.jpg   261.73KB   484 downloads
And for those who want it dark, "Blood" by SkinBox
 Blood_comic.jpg   221.16KB   462 downloads  Blood_forums.jpg   309.67KB   276 downloads

I might or might not bring back Sylo (current theme) depending on if the new version is ever released (or if I ever bother to check).

New Features
There are couple features that comes with IPB 3.3 that were often requested.

• Comment modification/deletion/report. You can do that yourself now. No more asking the mods for help on that.
• And for the admins, comic/group searches are actually there in the admin panel. XD No more brushing through 50 pages.

That covers the two biggest ones by IPB. The full list is available at the IPB Website.

And by me!!

• Site-wide language filter. Yep, this is probably THE most requested feature. And it'll roll in with the next upgrade. While it looks pretty simple, when the front page alone gets over 200 req in less than a minute with 2 tiers of caching, nothing's simple anymore to modify.
• Follows Bugs. To be honest, this was fixed like months ago... But it was never implemented because I never had a good chance to get a scheduled down time with all the mess that's been happening.

Ad Share
I've already mentioned pretty much everything regarding to it in the Contributors forum (details of schedule) last month as well as the edit in the Emergency announcement (details of method) previously. Simply adding here to give a date of when. I'm assuming most people who care about this has already read it. If not, you know where to look.

For those with custom ad share setups (grandfathered methods from long long ago), from the moment the above system is set in place, they will ALL be discontinued. Why? Between problematic ads arising and security concerns, I don't think I can afford to have less control in this sector.

WHEN?!?!
I'm hoping to get the above items sometime next week. I'll post further details when I'm fully ready and tested for.

Edit: Sorry, due to timing conflicts, this has been delayed. See latter posts for more details.

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The Next Big Milestone
This has been one of Batoto's goals. But I guess everything slowed down. But, I'm happy to finally say: Webcomics in English.

No, we're not just going to rip them and put it here. Batoto would like to welcome all web comic, self published artists to join us.
The author/artists will retain all rights. No more iron-fist ruled publishing terms. We simply ask for a license to publish and to promote your comics. You can even advertise your other goods and merchandise on our website free of charge as well as ask for donations. We'll, of course, share ad revenue with the author/artists as well. The entire process won't cost the you anything with a lot to gain.

Interested? Mail us @ [email protected]

There is a button called "Special BBCode" on the left side of the font dropdown menu , that contains various bbcodes that arent present on the 2 lines with codes , spoiler is there as well.

The follows issue should also be resolved now. Sorry about that.

This thread looks ripe for locking.

To be honest, this also seems to be an annoying problem (though I personally don't use the status update system that much). And I'd love to help, but I don't see any options on my end to be able to change it.

We're going to upgrade the forum from 3.2.x to 3.3.0 soon, so hopefully more options will be available.

Thanks for reporting, it's been taken care of.

Administrative first.
I've splitted out your post from the announcement as that's what the suggestion forum is for.
Since you find yourself the need to anonymize your email, I've taken the liberty of disabling your email notifications (you can do so yourself in settings as well).

Onto the suggestion.
You haven't actually mentioned the reasoning behind your suggestion. So, I can only make assumptions.
I will assume that you believe such actions will stop watermarks.
Let us then split it into two cases.

Case 1: Watermarks don't go away.
Would you then take your statement back or stick with it? It doesn't seem to bring any benefit other than to punish ourselves only for imposing such rules. So, obviously this is not the answer. The end just sucks.
I see this happening with groups who's been largely vocal against other readers prior to our existence or our increase in fame. The fact that methods of watermarking has evolved is something that can never truly go back. So, for them, at least, nothing would change. We'd simply stop hosting while other sites do.

Case 2: Watermarks do go away.
This however has dire consequences. Batoto was created because the scanlators were loosing too much power relative to the amount of work that they do in the world of scanlation. This yielded in abuses and was quite frankly demotivating for many scanlators. Though, I don't enjoy naming people, let's take Prozess as an example. He had quit scanlation as he was tired of all the abuse. Looking beyond the right to argue about it, ability to argue about or even who's right and who wrong, the end shows a loss for the scanlation community simply because there is less total workforce put in, meaning less scanlation. Prozess came back because he saw the opportunity to fight back. Should we work against him to limit his strengths, he'd simply go away again. While some might rejoice that watermark has disappeared, you have less scanlation that's actually done. So opposed to now of it being your freedom to not read watermarked scanlations, you will simply be unable to read them anymore. In this case, I do not see how anybody benefits either.
You could argue that someone else will take a specific comic, but the total empirical count of work force is undeniably less.

Conversely, I can't perceive any reasoning or purpose for people to start scanlation just because watermarks are gone, while there is a purpose to start scanlation because there are watermarks, a motive to create clean version.

I won't deny that Batoto was essential to the changing scanlation world to one with watermarks. Some of it was what we wished, though most of it was a butterfly effect of things we couldn't even imagine. But times are changing, I don't think a single policy change will turn back time to undo its effects -- which is likely what you are seeking.


Onto the specifics of the suggestion.
I don't think such strict forms of watermarking is actually what you're wanting. For example, watermarks on the trim of the pages. These are never complained about as they're off to the side and I'm going to assume you don't mind them either. But it goes against your height 6%. I can't imagine anyone holding a ruler to see if it's 5% or 6%. Removing the nitpick and going to a general idea of a small watermark, it's too easy to remove it then. The increasing watermark was a response to attempts to remove them. By making it very easy to remove watermarks, you might as well suggest for any watermarks causing a ban.


We also have to consider alternative forms then. With watermarks gone banned, and the group chooses to put a credit page between every single page. That still passes the rule, yet that will probably annoy the readers even more. To those who feel the need to watermark will attempt to find ways to comply and to deliver their message. Would regulation truly even be the solution? Just as laws do not solve societal problems, I don't think us enforcing rules will even solve the issue. This was one of the reason Batoto had chosen to be a content neutral medium. To simply provide a fair and open ground. I currently don't see how censoring certain actions will come to a resolution.


Personally speaking, I do not like large watermarks. I do not like animated pngs for watermarks either. Both as a reader and as a operator of this website. As a reader, it annoys me. As an operator, it costs me more to deliver these gigantic things. On top of that, every so often I get an angry email saying I'm an asshole for putting watermarks when I never even encouraged such action, although we have given a page insert. But, I don't really have a solution where base problem, the source of watermark, can be solved. I think that's a goal the community must attempt to find. Perhaps we should seek ways to deliver the message without annoying the readers, or something much more creative.

Sorry for the long text wall.

Also, as this topic is quite heavy in likelihood to go in the incinerator, I'd like to add a small note. Please try to keep this thread civil. Constructive criticism is welcome. Insults are not. If you don't know how to make constructive criticism without being insulting, please don't post. If you're wondering how, think back to when your teacher told you to write a constructive criticism on a piece. Moderation will happen just like anywhere else in the forum. Offending posts may be removed or edited as deemed necessary.