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Member Since 06 Mar 2012
Offline Last Active Jan 22 2018 01:03 PM

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Member Title Potato Sprout
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#1853001 Batoto will be closing permanently

Posted by CaptainNarcolepsy on 07 January 2018 - 09:03 PM

Thank you for your hard work over the years! Batoto has been the best manga reading experience for me.

Chaos, dadois, Quicksilvir and 111 others like this

#1852999 Batoto will be closing permanently

Posted by Stark700 on 07 January 2018 - 09:03 PM

Wow. This came to me as a surprise but thanks for everything.

I haven't been active on the forums here but always been reading manga for the past 5 years since I've joined.

Ananse, oliverwashere, Ncf and 118 others like this

#1852992 Batoto will be closing permanently

Posted by Grumpy on 07 January 2018 - 08:57 PM

Hello everyone.

Batoto will be closing down permanently.

I just don't have the will to run this site anymore. This is not a sudden decision for me or something I make lightly, it has been on my mind for a couple years now. And I've finally made my mind to put it into action.

I started Batoto along with the crew from The Company back in January of 2011 and it's been a very meaningful part of my life. I don't regret taking on this hobby called Batoto and I cherish the role that I've played as well as the countless hours everyone else here has put in as well as the great community that we've built. I've come to see this like my baby. At 7 years, I suppose it's not even a baby anymore. But it is at a point where I need to move on with my life. I'm tired and I just can't do this anymore.

Batoto is proving to be ever more time consuming to maintain despite the fact that we have fewer real visitors. Our bot visitors are always growing as we're the only source that still gives true quality. I've made some serious and controversial changes to counter that like adding membership requirements. While that helped a ton at that time, it always creeps back and we're almost back to square one at this point when I look at the statistics. They currently make up roughly 35% of the traffic which are much more troublesome than real users. And I don't want to make more serious change to this site that'll inconvenience the readers even further. We've already lost enough.

It's not just the bots that adds to the technical issues. It's a big site with huge number of page views. It's just expected part of running the site. Whether it be a DDoS attack, scraper bots gone haywire, servers/hosting company being annoying, ad company being annoying, there's just so many stuff that I constantly have to deal with. Over the last 7 years, I haven't had a single day when I could just freely take a day off. If the site goes down, I had to be there, on my computer, ready to take action. I obviously don't do something every single day, but just making myself available is taxing on my life. The fact that I'm unable to take a vacation have often been a point of argument with others in my life. Anytime someone says, let's go somewhere, I could only say no. I have to be here. Sound sleeping is also a thing of the past. I have alarms that go off when the site goes down. I'd wake up in the middle of the sleep to take care of it. False alarm, while irritating, is one of the best things to see when I'm interrupted from my sleep. How else would I have always responded to issues immediately?

I've simply run out of will and I feel this is the best choice for me. I beg that the community understands this difficult decision I've made.

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.

I have stopped accepting donations for a several months now and I'll check to see if anyone sent anything directly and I'll be sure to refund them if they did.

Going forward, some of the staff members have and still are in the process of backing up the entire Batoto comic content as they have been notified of this decision well in advanced. They may choose to create a new Batoto or something simpler. That will be up to them, but I will no longer be part of running it.

I understand that our forum is a valuable form of communication for many. Because of that, I will be keeping the forums running for an extended period of time, date of which is not yet decided. I will also be making an export for your follows list so that your list isn't lost. Additionally, this list will be available as long as the forum is up and running. Other information that may be useful to the community may be filtered and backed up then made available for the community, but I will, under no circumstances, give anyone a full backup of the site or database. Many have used our system in confidence and it will stay that way.

I would like to thank everyone here for your patronage all these years. It has been a good run. Really, thank you. Wouldn't have made it this far without you.

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Looks like a lot of people are in a scramble to save what they can, and as a result, site is lot slower. I'm turning on the cloudflare anti-ddos protection to put the site back to a manageable speed. Will likely need to keep it on until the end.

- 2018/1/7

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The export feature has been added. Go to my follows and check the side bar. Realized there isn't much data to save when our IDs and such are all gone. But it's there anyway for the fuller version.

If domain is no longer up, forums will be available at the alternate address of vatoto.com (not used right now)

- 2018/1/13

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The servers have begun to expire. First the of the servers are now offline. With the exception of the main (control) server, it's designed so that load is shared among the rest when one goes down. So, it'll continually get slower to serve pages unless people trying to access also decreases. I will manually remove reader pages by 25th and migrate the forums away.

- 2018/1/18

Chaos, Tammy, mhh and 835 others like this

#17148 Batoto is...

Posted by Grumpy on 27 September 2011 - 04:47 AM

(This is probably overdue... but better late than never)

Dear readers, fans, contributors, authors and friends,

Through this small letter of mine to you, I hope to let everyone understand what Batoto is all about -- why we exist, what we wish to exist for and why we must exist. Batoto at a glance is just another online comic reader, an aggregate of comics. But we exist for a goal much different than the others. We exist so that the community, the ecology, and the value, the economy, of comics have a place to exist.

I'm sure almost all of you have found your way here to read a scanlation -- a derivative work created by fans for the fans of an original comic. Scanlations exist because there is no other way. Without scanlations much of the world populous would be unable to read your favorite comics, whether it be a manga (Japanese), manhwa (Korean), manhua (Chinese) or any other origin, due to barriers of language and barriers of finances. Ordering a comic that you cannot read from a country far away where shipping will easily out price the comic 3 to 1 is just not possible for many of us. I'm sure you've had moments where you laughed and cried (or you didn't read enough!) as you read them. But the joy that it brought to you is a moment that everyone deserves and a moment that we hope to share. And that is why scanlation exist. As much as many of us wish that all of this can be done for free of charge, free of hassle, that is not possible. There are expenses; you need to pay for your comics, you need to buy equipments to make the process possible, you need to pay for hosting your content, and etc. Then there are those who earn through this process; your hosting company earned, even your electric power company earned, and etc. You see, everything in the world has an intricate active economy no matter what. Sometimes you need to spend more, sometimes less. And when the costs end up being too high, you may have to just stop. And that is why Batoto exists. Batoto hosts not only your comics but also the groups' own ads with them for participating groups. This gives them the chance to recoup their costs through their own advertiser(s) for who need it. This may not be a lot, but through their earnings, it secures their ability to continue and motivate to do more. (While this crossed out statement is still within Batoto's ideals, we are currently unable to do so due to changes in ad networks' function. We will re-enable this feature if/when we can.)

Now that is why we exist today, but we want be and do so much more. Primarily we want to be a place where you can publish your own. Next, we also want to truly be part of the economy of comics. Today, there is no place where you can publish your own comics without heavy restrictions or retain your rights to your work except through self publication. But if you were to publish your own web comics on your own website, vast majority will struggle to even get hundreds of views. Numbers like these will not be able to financially help the author. So, just like we make the impact for scanlation, we want to do the same for self published work. A place where they'll retain full rights and immediately be introduced to potentially millions of viewers. Then, perhaps, they can spend their energy in creativity of their work rather than worrying about their next meal. Another wish for Batoto is to be able to be in a position to buy licenses to increase our reaches to more comics in more languages than ever before. This way, our existence benefits the ecology and the economy of the comic world.

Lastly, Batoto must exist. Today, there is a growing trend in the comic world that's quite frightening and making me grumpy. That is: loss of respect. Some of our competitors are doing things that are just wrong. Some are doing things against the wishes of their scanlators, publishers and/or authors. Hosting the content even when requested not to. Frequently even ignoring DMCA notices as the reaches of the law are often powerless in the Internet. Some are even going as far as claiming that the works are their own. What can we do when even the law can't? We can show people that there is a better way. We can educate people to do things the right way. And we want to show that doing right way doesn't even require more effort or cost. Though we may not be able to eliminate those who disrespect others, we hope to diminish their effects and their powers by simply being the better alternative.

Batoto is a publisher that just wants to make things right.

Sincerely,
Founder of Batoto, the one who is grumpy about what's wrong.