White Cloud Pavilion

White Cloud Pavilion has used and promoted batoto as a free alternative for readers since July 2016, and further back since Jan 2015 with our old Archangel Scanlation roots. We thank batoto for their service, and are very sad to see it shutdown.

- The Entire Team at WCP

This wasn't a "service", to be sure, and if you *really* wanted your illegal-scanlated-manga to be seen on other websites you would upload to those websites...instead of being lazy about it and then complaining when the scene changes.

 

IF you can spare the effort to translate/clean/etc. you can spare the effort to manually upload to a few other sites.

Regarding the illegal scanlated manga part: Both series (Autophagy Regulation, & I, The Female Robot) under our team 'Archangel Scanlations' are on U17 for FREE for anyone to view. They are not licensed anywhere and if they ever did become licensed or if we were contacted to cease and desist working on both series we would. U17 is a place for aspiring artists to create, upload, and share their own works with anyone. We've been considering as of recent on contacting both authors for official authorization which is unprecedented in most scanlation groups.

Here are both links uploaded directly from the Father & Son Comic Group & Daylight-Day Enviroment culture

Secondly, we work hard to bring the fans of both series the series they love to the sites they love reading on, and we have never been called a lazy group until now. As said in earlier posts we used batoto to automatically distribute the chapters to other manga-sites for maximum exposure. I would like to point out that we have already uploaded the failed to distribute chapters to other services to get it out to 200,000+ awaiting fans. The mangaworld is far bigger than batoto alone, there are other sites that abide by the rules and respect DMCA-takedowns.

We respect batoto for listening to DMCA takedown requests by the rights-holders, like some other manga sites compared to the many other manga sites which ignore such requests.

We would like to think that the creator of both series would love for their series to be spread around and read by as many people as possible. The mangaworld is simply bigger than batoto, we wish most manga sites would respect groups and the rights holders more like batoto does, some others do but not nearly on the same level. One of the particular things we love about batoto is multi-language support and our series Autophagy Regulation has been picked up by Spanish, and Russian scanlators to spread the series to even more tounges.

1. We do not support sites that are in it for profits.
2. We do not support sites that do not respect the rights-holders.

We understand the need to fight such bots.

...but not at the cost of restricting content access to everyone who is not logged in, and forcing registration on those who aren't registered to view batotos content.

It sounds like it's going to get worse in the near future, and right now I already have a problem with the non-registered having access to only the 3-latest posted chapters. We have a spanish and russian group working on one of our series listed above, what if their releases overlap our own english releases? We're just concerned that the changes will make things much harder on those who don't want to register to batoto, and we're worried we won't be able to promote batoto as our official reader.

It seems like you might be looking for a different kind of platform, one that facilitates aggregators by actively supporting and encouraging reproduction of material through APIs, feeds or server pushing. I suppose it might best be stated as a sort of content management and delivery system. The reality is, Grumpy himself has stated that he is against supporting, encouraging, endorsing, or facilitating aggregators.  A view that is justified by the fact that he has been paying for the excessive bandwidth costs due to constant abuses caused by naive web scraping. As to the use of Batoto as for reproducing changes across sites/services, your statement appears to be contradictory to what another contributer has stated here.

 

Put bluntly, one can't reasonably expect another to foot the costs of ones own ideals.

The service that was provided before 10/22/2015 was more than sufficient enough for our group, and many other scanlation groups that have previously uploaded to Batoto. These changes made alienate scanlators whome directly upload from the heart of the very people that pour free time to: translate, proofread, and place the dialogue on the pages for fan/readers entertainment. We have our own manga-reader that we host/upload on our own database/servers that holds all of the content we need for our fans, that is sadly incapable of spreading the chapter to the mangaworld, but we also upload to Batoto within mere minutes for fans, which then eventually ends up on other manga websites. Our group is not in it for profits as we started out as a non-profit organization, and we care little about boosting traffic to other hosting sites.

We truly care about the fans that read the chapters that our team pours their soul into completion each week.

We have never tried to delay a release as we want maximum exposure to the series. We upload to batoto on priority because of the automatic distribution to other sites, and the management that gives us the necessary control that is helpful to scanlation groups. We want to support a manga hosting site that offers the best experience for our readers, and if the current changes stand without revert then we will need to find an alt. I cannot speak for batoto contributors that aren't actively in a scanlation group, and upload for the sole purpose of contributing towards Batoto with loyalty. Perhaps our group is unique and my contributor status as well, since we exclusively upload two series (Autophagy Regulation, and I, The Female Robot) and use Batoto as a distribution service to the outside mangaworld.

One thing is for sure is that these recent changes are not welcome by our group. We're particularly not pleased to hear about the membership requirement while other manga sites offer full unrestricted content access instantly, including the restricted view to those who aren't logged in (reducing convenience). Sadly no other manga hosting sites offers the services that batoto does, managing when chapters get uploaded, and the power to take them down for swift editing after a mistake. All of these tools are very helpful, and incredibly useful since you could also intercept a chapter before it heads to other sites. I then come to my point above about the alienation of those groups who upload their chapters directly to batoto for these benefits with these recent changes. Today we had to upload a copy to mangafox/mangahere today, since the chapter we uploaded failed to spread to the many other mangasites, which still has not spread.

Batoto provides around 8% of the views each series receives weekly from its own site to the above listed series. 200,000+ fans that are waiting for the next chapter on other sites that we also care about, this is a huge problem for our group and many other scanlation groups. It's sort of shocking to see how so many other manga sites rely on batoto for their specific upload. Batoto offers around the same service as any other manga hosting site with the huge difference being that it offers helpful extra tools, that is incredibly attractive to scanlation groups, (such as our group) that work on the chapters behind the scenes. I understand the service was never meant to distribute chapters to other sites with awaiting fans, but it was a major benefit to our group which helped expose each series to it's maximum viewing potential.

We will be following these changes with lots of interest, since it effects us greatly. Hopefully it continues to offer the best possible user experience to ALL USERS/Readers that want to read the manga that is hosted on it's servers. We will still be using Batoto as in the meantime as currently we have no other real options. Unless we manage to strike a deal with a superior/equal-to manga hosting service, that has the capability of allowing groups to post the chapter directly, and has the potential of spreading a chapter around the manga-world almost immediately. The changes have made things far more difficult, and nearly every other manga website has yet to receive a copy of our newly released chapter I, The Female Robot - Chapter 40 - A One Sided Battle.

The recent changes made have effected the mangaworld (other sites) far greater than what I've said here in this post, and it goes to show how much the mangaworld relies on batoto. We hope you make the correct changes in the future to offer a similar service that was offered prior 10/22/2015. However because we want to spread the chapter out to everyone as fast as possible, if the distribution fails to work then we will need to find another service to upload to spread the chapters, we would possibly pull down batoto promotions from our website/facebook that directly links the chapter at batoto since users won't be able to have ease of access without requiring to login to view all the older chapters.

We love batoto and the unofficial distribution service that it had offered before 10/22/2015 (might've been all those bots, which hunted chapters to mirror on their own sites for profit) so in a way I sort of understand.... but it sucks for us as a scanlation group.

- Higasho

Our group uses Bato.to because of how open it is to manga readers with few restrictions involved, this announcement has only just come to my attention and I must say I am quite worried. We're a group that want's to get our chapters out to every single mangasite possible (Mangafox, Mangahere, Readmanga.Today, Mangadoom, Kissmanga, Mangatown, etc) for maximum exposure to the series itself.

We use Bato.to as our first uploading choice because of how friendly it is to anon visitors, which recieve unlimited access to all the chapters with full convienant access. We also use Bato.to as our very first uploading choice because of the power we have to manage/upload which is very useful for last minute changes, and how it spreads the chapters to other manga sites within an hour as we want maximum exposure for the series.

We uploaded our chapters and noticed only the latest 3 chapters were avaliable when logged off, and other manga sites have yet to recieve our upload (likely due to the changes made to the reader) which requires us to upload to another site to get things to spread around for our fans/readers. We're of course against content being locked off to members only as a group like ours that wishes to spread the series to all readers as soon as possible.

Loyal fans of Bato.to who read here would likely enjoy the idea of such restrictions, but I would like to point out that it would alienate many scanlation groups who loyally upload here such as our group. We're not in support of these content restrictions that will limit our fans access to previous chapters, partially forcing them to sign up with your service to read. Hopefully many other groups share the interest of spreading the hard work that goes into a chapter to all manga websites, and to all fans who wish to read their favorite series on their favorite manga reading website.

We love Bato.to and love the openness and flexibility that it gives to scanlators to bring fans their favorite series to them as fast as possible. As a contributor and as someone who posts links directly from social media to Bato.to with continued outside promotion. A warning as these future continued changes could potentially push our group to seek out an alternative, which we truly do not want to do because we love it here. We want our readers that decide to click on our social links which direct traffic to Bato.to to have full access to both new and old chapters avaliable which is no longer the case.

Bato.to is the only service that provides a superior experience to scanlator contributors compared to the many other manga websites, which is why Bato.to is our first priority uploading choice. It would be very sad if Bato.to went backwards instead of forwards and began locking, and restricting access to anon readers who want to gain access to chapters immediately. All chapters must be open to all of our readers on the front page of a series which allows ease of access to the chapter.

- Higasho Retired Editor of AS [Qcer/Technician/Uploader]

Archangel Scanlations