Igga

I have been reading on this site for the better part of a decade. I am sad to see it go, but I can understand the stress that you must feel running such a site. I guess I always took for granted that Batoto would always be around to find new adventures to explore, keep up with my favorite stories, and revisit some old memories that either warmed the heart in times of pain or entertained my wildest fantasies. I still remember reading the very first chapter of Tower of God the first day The Company posted it and thinking to myself how I had found an inspiring and complex story that could give me the fight to wake up every day in a time when found little joy in life. I remember stumbling upon this website craving more Berserk after watching the old anime and deciding to give manga a try for the first time because I just could not get enough. I remember nights in college when I thought I was so stressed out that I felt like one more paper away from losing it and just diving into the random button over and over in the hopes of finding a hidden gem that could take my mind off the insanity. I just want to say that you made one of the best parts of the internet in my opinion, and I thank you for all the work you put towards building a community for all of us. I visited this site almost every day I had access to the internet and cannot imagine what I will do now without it. You and the work you do will be sorely missed, but nonetheless I sincerely hope that you get the rest you so clearly deserve. See you space cowboy ...

Other thread is so clogged, felt like a new announcement would be more visible. This thread is locked and purely for announcement only.

Bot Mitigation

I will be implementing some bot mitigation techniques. This will be the first of changes along with different reader. From the brainstorms, I've learned a few things that may assist in curbing bots, in addition what I thought of implementing. Some of it will be a bit more of an enterprise solution, some of it will be custom solutions, and some of it will just be basic changes that make crawling more of a hassle.

These will be added over a long period of time. Almost all of these are machine targeting machine. And you won't even see it.

Changes to Reader

To assist with the bot mitigation and reduction of resource usage, the reader will be changed a bit. It will look mostly the same, some might not even notice. But it is coded in a way that'll help me track the abuses more as well as making it lighter weight. So, the users should be able to hit next page faster too. Yay! This is already coded and being tested.

Unfortunately, this comes with new URL scheme. Old URLs will be shut down once new is fully operational and without issues.

Also, it will now require javascript & cookies to function. So... to the <1% that has it off. Sorry.

Membership Requirement

This has been a source of lot of controversy, but I do still find it almost certain it will happen. Yes, some users will leave. Ad revenue may go down, but so will operating costs. They always move together. I foresee no financial concern from this change. On top of that, kenshin has offered more help that's acting as a safety net in terms of cost issues. And if that means I get to have more horsepower to serve the members that care, I see no real concern. I believe what made Batoto into the giant that we have grown into are the contributors. And by contributors, I mean from people who's uploaded thousands of chapters and to people who's made a single comment about their thoughts. Contents are what makes this site, and they already are members.

There are no plans to close membership nor anything like a paywall. You can register anytime you want, and become part of this community.

Membership requirement will not be a sudden switch. It will be eased in. And what requires membership will slowly grow. The slow pace will give me the numbers to confirm/break my expectations. And that is from where I'll ultimately draw the final choice, not from guesses or what might be. I can't see the future, nor can anyone else from thin air.

Uploader's Private Direct Link

This is one change of direction I realized may be helpful after reading the feedbacks in various places. The uploader, optionally can generate a second URL to the chapter. It will not be mentioned anywhere on this site, but people coming to that URL from the source site won't need membership to view. That way, we can still provide a reliable way for uploaders to share without affecting the anti-crawl of our system.

I will likely add this sometime while membership requirement is being eased in. Hopefully in early stage.

Why are Changes Being Made Now?

Quite a lot seemed confused about this. I do apologize for lack of clarity initially. I've said before, but complete prevention of copying Batoto isn't the goal. It's just not possible. I know that some of them have humans to copy from Batoto in rare occasions that I troll them with fake contents. Goal is to reduce it.

Over the years of maintaining Batoto, I didn't do it alone. I have hired other professionals in the past occasionally to help. And their first reaction to my server is always that I'm getting DDoS'ed. If that were true, this is the longest DDoS in history of the internet. (They do eventually know that it's not) We just get crawled that much. We have to get it down to a reasonable level where it's manageable. This, is a viable goal.

It's not that Batoto's going to die tomorrow without making the change. Or a month or etc. It's an ever growing problem and has to be tackled sometime. Doing nothing is to just shut down.

After

Hopefully focus can be sent back to bunch of stuff that's like 80% done but never finalized... Like follows overhaul. Flattr/changetip that was started like years ago... So much in queue.

Self-Published Titles

None of this applies to self published titles. Except automatic bot mitigation.

The change kind of scares me to be honest. From an administrator's point of view. Batoto is very optimized to be viewed by guests because guests make up roughly 90% of the visitors--and it's much easier to optimize for guests as they require less dynamic actions. When they all become members, many of existing optimizations made over the years become useless. I don't know if our current system can handle the increased load. I don't know if decrease in bot load will be significant enough. I don't know if it'll make more members leave us. I don't know if ad revenues will be enough to support the system once it's changed. There's quite a lot of unknowns.

Those unknowns are exactly the most important things you have to know before making such a huge change. Your objectives become redundant if, after the change, you don't have enough ad revenue to support the site - I also would not advise relying on user donation as a back up if things turn for worse.

If you are going through with it, or any alternative suggested in this thread, you should have a 1 to 2 week trial period so you can at least estimate the unknown variables to a reasonable degree before making a final permanent change (if any).

My opinion on the bot problem is that no matter what you do they will still exist (short of only letting people you approve visit this site). The most you can realistically achieve is have less bots in the site - but is that worth it for a maybe significant decrease in visitors? 

The people behind the bots do it because they make money from it, and they will not think twice in finding a way to get past your new change in order to keep making money.

Have you also considered that the ones that doesn't make an account will start visiting aggregate sites, which makes using bots on batoto more profitable?

Either way, there's way too many unknowns - the changes need to be tested before you go through with it.

Look at what g.e-hentai.org is doing.

I think g.e-hentai.org does a good job with their gallery. You have a limited amount of pageviews allowed/day as a guest (more when logged in). You have ways to improve it. Also, their distributed server thing is pretty cool (I got it running for internet points!)

Another idea would be to ask the user for a captcha after a number of pageviews.

Another idea : just torpedo the sites that do copying after they do it. They should be easily identifiable.

I'd like if there was an option for my scanlations being open to everyone. I don't do my scanlations for money or fame, I want as many people to read them as possible. If only batoto members will be able to read my scanlations then that defeats the entire purpose. Who cares if other sites copy your shit? It was never yours in the first place. The mangaka and the publisher own the manga and all its derivations. Scanlators are just doing public service.

Quick question, why not restrict the amount of chapters one can see as a guest?

Normally people here read a few chapters and then leave.

A bot however would need to constantly check all released chapters.

Restricting heavy users would only affect people that either already have an account, or bots, or people that should have accounts anyways.

That's how I see anyways.

This change does not affect me, and if it's for the best, I support it whole heatedly.