Giantess

you should consider keeping your list somewhere like baka-updates:

Spoiler

you can also add any kind of list you want there (plan to read, dropped, waiting for translation, private hardcore yaoi list gf dun knows about, actually bought these mangu, whatever)

 

the only time-consuming thing would be to make the initial list; updating stuff as you read is not hard and it should be another-reader-dying-proof. and you wouldn't be tied to using a single site in case you grow tired of it.

That site also has an option to import your follows in "bulk" - just download the CSV of your follows from here, open it in a CSV reader, and paste them into the bulk-add box from that site's "My Lists" page.  They're definitely the easiest place to upload your current Batoto favorites to if just want alerts for updates.

Here, hit the Add Series button, then the Bulk Update button.  Not perfect, but it's better than nothing.

While not a manga hosting site, I recommend uploading your bookmarks here to https://www.mangaupdates.com.  You can do so easily - download as a CSV, open in a CSV reader, grab the column with the titles and copy it.  Then go to the Baka-Updates list editing page, choose "add series", hit the "add bulk" button, paste them into the box that appears, and hit "Add Bulk" again.

Note that a few might error out due to differences in the name, in which case you'll have to add them manually.  It will tell you the ones it failed to parse.

Emiya Shirou got mentioned a lot in this thread (and I don't disagree that he sucks.)

Here's an interesting question, though:  How is he different from Baam in the first chapter of Tower of God?  What makes Baam interesting and Emiya Shirou annoying?

At that point in the story, Baam is both fairly weak and very idealistic.  What makes him work when Emiya Shirou doesn't?

Part of it might be that in the first chapter Baam is, for the most part, genuinely kind and polite to the people around him -- he clearly recognizes that he's in over his depth and doesn't know what's going on, and he's willing to listen to others.  Whereas Emiya Shirou is not only weak and ignorant, he acts like he knows everything regardless simply because he's the protagonist -- he seems meek and kind, but he's actually completely dismissive of everyone else's opinions despite having almost nothing to contribute himself.

For comparison, even when Baam gives occasional speeches about his idealism, it's only in the context of what he feels he has to do.  Also there's the fact that Baam's idealism generally leads him to do things the audience, at the time, would want him to do -- going to save Rachel, taking the Guardian's test -- whereas Shirou's idealism constantly has him doing stuff that the audience knows is stupid at the time.

(Granted that a lot of the stuff Baam does because of idealism turns out to be stupid -- yeah, uh, maybe you should have gone with Androssi, dude; and in retrospect, his speech to Yu Han Sung about how the top of the tower doesn't matter without Rachel there is a bit cringe-inducing once you know what's really going on -- but because of the way the story is structured, we're more likely to sympathize with him and put ourselves in his shoes as he does it.)

It's interesting to compare the two characters, though, since they have a lot of similarities, yet have very different audience reactions.

I don't feel the ten-line limit is reasonable.  It breaks what I'd say is the most important rule for discussion guidelines -- it isn't intuitive; it's not something that the average reasonable person would expect to have as a hard rule.  This means that enforcing it will require constantly patrolling new users by editing their posts, and it will encourage older users to snipe at them for violating a rule they couldn't reasonably have anticipated.

Additionally, "lines" is subjective -- lines on what display?  Lines with what default zoom level?  My resolution is 1920 x 1200, and I know many people have it much higher.  If someone else is on a 800 x 600 laptop, or on their tiny tablet screen or whatever, and they report one of my posts for going over ten lines on their display...  what happens?  It's not a small difference -- between a high resolution and a low resolution, the number of lines can more than double.  For example, I only became aware that the new rule existed when someone mentioned -- asking people to spoiler their 'long' comments -- on a page where nobody had posted anything that, on my display, went anywhere near ten lines.  Clearly they were browsing on a smaller display, and to them some posts broke the limit.  Are those users going to get in trouble?  (Keep in mind, you can't just "fix" those posts, because they are going to constantly make posts that the other user will see as over ten lines.)

I also dislike the spoiler rule; I feel that the fact that you have to scroll past the list of existing chapters to reach the comments means that there's sufficient warning, and trying to excise plot talk from the comments (which is inevitably the result of asking that it all be spoilered) will result in less useful and less interesting comments overall.

I also feel that this discussion wasn't announced widely enough; if I knew the discussions were taking place, I would have strenuously objected to most of these changes, especially the line restriction and the spoiler tag rules.  I think they're bad and unnecessary rules that will reduce the quality of the comment threads on Batoto; and I don't feel that there was any real need or demand for them.  I foresee them making comments (and comment sections) less vibrant, interesting and useful; more importantly, I foresee them causing bad blood and friction in the community as people get censured over violating what was previously common practice.

The one thing I do not see happening is any improvement to the forums from these rules.  People post in comment threads because they are quick and easy; if you limit what they can post in comment threads -- if they post something there and get a response telling them they did something wrong -- what's going to happen is people posting less overall.  Discussion threads remain dead on smaller works because a single stream-of-consciousness sequence of comments is a more natural way to discuss them and because they lack enough people interested in talking to support meaningfully distinct threads.  This isn't going to change that; it's just going to stifle the small amount of communication they do get in the existing comments.

I think it's best to remember the maxim that that which governs best governs least; to the extent that the forums and comments can be kept productive with a minimum of interference, that's the best way to go.  People come to a site like this to read and discuss comics, rather than to worry about rules; nobody wants to be contacted by a moderator telling them they need to do something differently.  So it is best to allow as much as possible as long as it doesn't disrupt the site, and to try to minimize the amount of moderation that is necessary by sticking to rules that mostly reflect the better aspects of the way people already behave.

Why would you rate something based on release quality??

 

If it was a bad-quality release of an already released chapter, read the other release(s).

If it was a bad-quality release of a new chapter, suck it up. At least it was released.

 

The only case I can see for this is providing at-a-glance info for which release of a chapter is better, but having all of those ratings on a single page is HORRIBLE web design, so if it wasn't implemented in a stupid way the reader would have to do some extra clicking to get the rating for each release anyway... making it all but pointless.

a manga shouldn't be judged by its scanlator. it never should be.

 

but the problem is, of course, that a lot of people do just that. so yeah, separate ratings would be needed. but most scanlator groups at least scanlate to a certain level of quality, so ratings for release quality shouldn't really be needed that much.

I'll play the devil's advocate here:  Low-quality translations do definitely exist, and they do make it hard to enjoy (or sometimes, even understand) the comic you're reading.  Worse, it sometimes isn't obvious that it's the translation that's the issue rather than the comic itself just being naturally incomprehensible.  In some cases, I would definitely prefer not to read the comic at all (and wait until someone else translates it) rather than spend a long time reading its translations only to belatedly realize that the quality of what I'm reading has suffered from bad translations; but there's no way for me to know about that in advance without ratings.

I know that it sucks for translation groups (who are, after all, doing this for fun) to deal with that kind of feedback.  And I think that it's important to balance that problem with the issue of quality.  I mean, I don't go up to translation groups and say mean things to them, because (unless they've asked for honest feedback) I assume they're not interested in what I have to say.  And certainly, nobody has the right to demand anything from those groups.  But I think that the best-quality groups deserve some form of recognition for the extra time and effort it takes to do a really good translation; and I think that the comics themselves deserve to get portrayed (when possible) in the best possible way.

Therefore, how about this?  Instead of ratings for groups or for individual chapters, allow users to select one translation for each series which they feel is the best (that is, out of all the groups who have done at least one chapter of your favorite series, you pick one as your favorite.)  The one with the most people choosing it as their favorite could get a star of some sort in the list, or whatever.  To discourage drama, no stats more detailed than that are displayed -- you can see which one has the most people picking it as favorite for a particular series, and nothing else.

This solves a lot of the problems with the current rating system:  Because people are only "rating up" instead of "rating down", it becomes harder to grief a specific group (you can vote for one of their competitors in a series where they have a competitor, but that's unlikely to make much difference, especially since the only thing that gets displayed at all is who has the #1 spot.)  It doesn't apply when there's only one group doing translation for a series, so you avoid meaningless arguments.  It is also specific to a series (which tends to be one coherent effort) rather than a group, which can handle different series differently, and that discourages people from focusing on the group rather than their work.

I noticed that the search engine doesn't provide a category for webtoons or for 'long-form' comics.  (There's Manhwa, but of course that doesn't perfectly overlap.)

Would it be possible to add that option to the search engine?  I assume that it's stored somewhere in the database, because webtoons offer to let you read them in webtoon format, while other comics don't.