arimareiji

404 Grumpy Not Found

(If you look reeeeeally close, you can see all the f@#*s he used to give, drifting out to sea and almost over the horizon.  )

From Grumpy's post on this thread:

 

"Services will be severely affected starting January 18th as servers expire, though content may still be accessible for you. By January 25th, critical number of servers will have expired that the site will no longer function. But you should consider 18th to be the last day."

 

So, by his words, we may be able to use this site until the 25th when his contract with the last server company expires.

 

As for me, I will take every extra day with extreme gratitude.

As far as I could tell, we functionally* lost the manga image servers at 10am UTC (not quite six hours ago). Midnight in Honolulu, 2am Pacific, 4am Central, 5am Eastern, 10am London, 7pm Tokyo. I'm guessing that was most of the load, and I'm also guessing the people running the aggregators are in a pre-panic befuddled state.

Going to miss you, Chuck. (Edit: Would either Ero-Chuck or PSC be a better choice, now that it's almost moot?)

* - Right at that time, I got the first dreaded "CDN LAX". I got a few more images, but within twenty minutes it was "CDN LAX" every time.

Main site is still up for now, at

8:15pm Friday in Kiritimati.

3:15pm Friday in Tokyo.

6:15am Friday in London.

12:15am Friday in Dallas.

10:15pm Thursday in Los Angeles.

8:15pm Thursday in Honolulu.

6:15pm Thursday in Baker Island.

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/full.html?sort=2

If anybody is interested i made a small addon for backuping manga list.

I don't know if your addon performs the same function, but I'd recommend to everyone: Go through your list and bookmark the pages of the groups that have given you the manga you loved. The increasingly-censored commercial search engines (Google, etc) can NOT be relied on to help you find them afterward.

Until I did that, I had the mis-impression that there weren't so many. I owe gratitude to a LOT of groups present and past, perhaps with some overlapping members but I imagine there's been a lot of turnover. Scanlating is a nearly-thankless job, and it seems to burn through people like a brush fire.

To all the scanlators who have kept the manga community alive with their generosity: Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. m(_._)m

(And I hope that by some lucky chance, as little of your work as possible will be lost after today.)

thanks - I edited my post, did not realise it sounded so suicidal

My apologies for my tendency to hyper-worry... I know from experience that being worried about needlessly can be aggravating and stressful. And thank you for checking in to let us know everything's okay. m(_._)m

Suicide has become far too common a cause of grief for everyone involved. Thaaaaanks, sick and twisted society that places zero value on life for its own sake (versus to make someone a profit).

Well, in this case I don't really see a difference between passive and active as the consequences are the same. Sure, one is worse than the other but dividing into worse and worser seems like a moot point at this time. Is it bad if you don't pull back a child that is walking into traffic when you could have saved it from getting overrun? Yes. Is it bad if you push that kid onto the street? Yes. The 2nd sure is worse but the end result, dead kid, is the same.

As to his own statement, this has been in the run for months, or rather years, for his part. So it is, in fact, modus operandi to keep it all in just to go out with a baaaaaaaaaam. There are so many people who would have loved to step up but didn't get the chance to do so because there was no communication. All that website gibberish could have been shared and, if some of those tech guys on /r/ are to be believed, possibly reduced drastically by changing some things in the configs. Now I'm not knowledgeable on that technological stuff but what I do know is that a solution by brain-storming with a lot of experts generally creates entirely new standpoints and options. That chance was forfeited by choice. And that's where my anger and disappointment stems from. I'm not angry that Grumpy wants to get a life. Heck, if it was only that, I'd be the first one to buy him a drink to slurp under some palm trees and congratulate him on his newfound freedom. I totally understand why he needs to distance himself from the chaos. I simply cannot help but feel resentful about the fact that chances were thrown away à la "devil-may-care".

 

And no, I don't think (and never meant to insinuate) that the staff were profiting from this. If I had to choose, I'd actually feel sorry for them (or at least for those who have already openly stated their sadness about batoto ending). It's the same as the scanlators/contributors/donors who helped make batoto what is is. They all invested emotions, time and sometimes money into this. While Grumpy certainly was a driving force for batoto, there is still a lot more to this community than that. And by going solo the way he is, it feels like Grumpy could have just as well said "Well, peepz, I'm sick of this and now who the heck cares what happens next? Not my problem anymore. I'm outta here, thanks for all the fish~". If this development had had recent origins, i.e. the death of a family member, unemployment or w/e, I wouldn't be as disappointed because "it couldn't be helped". But this was like staying in a relationship while knowing "Oh, I'll end it in 4 weeks but let's make the most of it before then." and the other partner is oblivious. That behavior is what's making me bitter - not Grumpy's need for a batoto-free life. :/

Your previous post on the subject echoed, but it didn't really resonate until I saw the image below. (Not that it was particularly weighty, just that it made things feel real instead of like some sort of bad fever dream.)

image

Imo, a second metaphor also fits: It's like a teenager being afraid people will look at him strangely if he gets up to go to the bathroom, so he waits until he's pissed himself while sitting on an irreplaceable Persian rug. "Oh well, someone else can clean it up since it's their fault this happened."

For reference, the above is a true story from decades ago (minus the irreplaceable Persian rug). Poor kid I knew in high school was wound up so tight with anxiety, he made Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off look like a stoned Robin Williams.

just hoping that someone can  help with a new site ,a SON of batoto

Or maybe its younger brother... Batotōto! XD

This is a great discussion, but it's completely moot. The mods completely ignore spoilers, even when the most egregious spoilers are called out to them in the thread they designated for that purpose.

I have no idea why we have a checkbox with an obvious warning to not spoil, instead of good instructions on how to not spoil. Forbidding something, when you have no intention* to enforce it, encourages it.

* - or even the ability, to be fair

What I actually said:

Spoiler

From an outside perspective, it sounded as though they raised the point because they want Batoto to make it easy for other aggregator sites to download their work. Information wants to be free, and all that. I could see the point in this (I'm a pretty big fan of that concept myself), if it weren't for the fact that the person running Batoto has repeatedly clarified that the load from other aggregator sites' bots has gotten so bad that the site can't survive if something isn't done to reduce it.

 

Just tossing out a thought: If Archangel's goal is to distribute their work to all of the aggregator sites, upload it to one of the cyberlockers and send out an email with the link. Not only are they in the business of allowing people to upload files for others to download, they're pretty happy about the traffic.

What you're claiming I said:

Spoiler

Err... I don't see how responding to the guy in quote in my post above, and others who might be incorrectly thinking our group publicly supports aggregator-bot sites, and giving more clairty on other things warrants a calm down. I'm sorry you feel bothered by my posting, but I feel the need to respond to everyone who talks about us and feed correct information regarding our team.

With all due respect, I paraphrased what you had in fact been saying over the course of the thread about as charitably as I could... and you respond by shrieking about how I supposedly slandered you? That's chutzpah.

Spoiler

Unfortunately getting on peoples nerves and becoming annoying is something that can happen often with me, and such ill go ahead and remove myself from future public postings. I will begin contacting and informing people privately via PM, if anyone does raise any futureQ

I'm glad you're perceptive enough to realize there's a common element. It would be much better if you acted on that knowledge in the future.

Spoiler

My lack of knowledge on the real situation, and the true threat behind aggregator sites blinded me slightly.

Gee, thanks for the correction buried at the bottom in small type under a pointlessly-large image. That's awfully swell of you.

When in doubt, I'm a fan of the flip-a-coin method of deciding. Heads for option A, tails for option B.

If I find myself immediately questioning the result and thinking of reasons why it's a bad idea, I know that what I really want is the other option. If I find myself neutral or positive, then I know the option is probably what I want (or at least wouldn't be dissatisfied with).

It's a much better method than asking people for advice, because at least 9 times out of 10 what we want is the exact same thing as a coin flip: A sounding board to help us realize what we really want. And a coin's feelings don't get hurt when you do the opposite of what they recommend.

I don't think Grumpy genuinely intended this to be an advisory thread in the first place, given that it started off with "I write this announcement..." Brainstorming, maybe - advisory, no. But even if he did, I think it helps a lot to realize that what most people want is help in breaking through their mental static to figure out what they really wanted to do in the first place. Sometimes people really do want to hear the facts that helped others form their opinions, but almost never the actual opinions themselves. Choosing the opposite isn't meant as a negative reflection on those who recommend otherwise (or on the reasoning behind it).

If I understood Grumpy correctly, there's a very big hitch in the plan to serve ads to the bots as a means of raising revenue - you're generating false clicks, which Grumpy has already said (and wisely so) he won't do. When (not if) an ad vendor realizes they're being soaked for false clicks, the best that could happen is that they break ties and stop paying altogether.

So? Any real ideas, i've seen ONE real idea what to do instead of "members only Batoto" and tens of rants how it will be bad. Leeching sites are starting to be serious problems for servers. Will you pay for them so everything could go as it is now? No? Then give a solution .

The absence of a solution that helps doesn't make it a good thing to rush ahead with one that doesn't (and will probably make matters worse).

Which means I won't be able to download chapters from Batoto

Yeah I know that bypassing the ads by directly downloading the images is greedy and cruel on your servers but think about the people with low internet speeds. It takes some time to load a single image(it's like 1-2 minute for One Piece and JoJo colored comics which is really long) but downloading chapters using a download manager or FMD gives us the privilege of reading without waiting between two pages. It would be great if something is done about it. 

Just an idea, but you could try doing what I do - multitask. If a page is taking a little while to download, go to another tab and come back when you see it's done.

I see where you're coming from, but to be honest? If it actually were possible to block downloading (without also blocking everyone else from viewing), and I were in Grumpy's shoes, I'd do it in a second. The harm of making you or me wait a little bit between pages would be greatly outweighed by the benefit of locking out the for-profit aggregator sites.