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P_TuSangLui

P_TuSangLui

Member Since 04 Oct 2011
Offline Last Active Feb 09 2018 02:53 PM

#1858681 Batoto will be closing permanently

Posted by PervySageChuck on 19 January 2018 - 03:10 PM

so, why is it still running? am i in the past? time travel?? is this january 19 2017? a year back???

 

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.




#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.
 
---------------------
 
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
 
---------------------
 
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
 
---------------------
 
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



#1650289 Batoto becoming registered only?

Posted by Grumpy on 20 October 2015 - 02:29 PM

I write this announcement about becoming private, meaning that only members will be able to browse this site (or a portion of it).
 
I post this with quite a bit of reluctance because it's something I wanted to avoid. Since pretty much the beginning, there have been requests to make this site private or to increase security of this site so that it doesn't become simply the source for all the other manga aggregates. But I have always said no because I envisioned this site being as open as possible and available to as many as possible. That principle is why, for basic reading, this site even runs without javascript, flash, or pretty much anything beyond most basic requirements--something few sites do today. These two goals of openness and security are both something we want to achieve but they are contradictory to the other and in the end I've chosen ease of use for the users. Times are changing though and it's getting increasingly difficult to maintain this site while being as open as it is now.
 
Currently, Batoto is undoubtedly the go-to source for hundreds other aggregates. Changes and additions made on this site gets automatically updated elsewhere, like this love of ponies (if that link stops working). People uploading here did not intend for their works to be copied everywhere else. Complete prevention of a copy is not an achievable goal, but making it inconvenient--creating a deterrence is possible. And that is making contents viewable by members only.
 
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.
 
I feel the change is (most likely) inevitable. However, the question of how it changes is not certain yet. I'm open to hear suggestions and ideas on this.

 

Few things.

  • We don't really care about SEO. Bare minimum of it is sufficient. It has never been a big thing for us. So, don't worry about that.
  • The easier the hurdle to pass, the less useful it will be, but more user friendly.
  • This change will break a lot of other sites and apps that rely on Batoto to function.
  • Opting for partial private may also be possible. Like newly uploaded are visible for few days without registration.
  • Objective: No more crawly crawly on this site.

-------------------------

 

Edits:

 

Well, this is certainly the hottest announcement topic.

 

I want to clarify something. I post this now and here not because I want to play police, ego or some stuff like that. If it was, I would've changed a long ago. I post this now, I change my objective as someone who maintains this site. I want to shave off a few million page hits a day. With great thanks to kenshin, our bandwidth costs don't increase that much with increased traffic. I still maintain my original image source nodes, so it's not a big shave off in cost, but it is completely manageable. What's biggest (always has been) cost is the HTML of this site, processing the pages that needs to be served. These run on farm of really beefy CPU servers with SSD and I'm currently looking to see if it's necessary to purchase another to handle the load. And one of my ad networks haven't paid me in 3 months. So I'm running on a red.

 

We have over 10,000 comics. And over 300,000 chapters. When 100 other crawlers think they need this content, some of it on a few minute basis (to check for new chapters)! Numbers REALLY add up. Humans don't do this. Because there is follows. You don't need to visit 10,000 comics just to see if there's something new.

 

There are number of anti-crawl features on this site already. All of which I tried to make that doesn't hinder normal users at all. It has caught a few real people using download scripts too. But it's insufficient; it's too lightweight. Pretty much since year 1 of Batoto, other crawlers have been using IP distributed crawls. Without further tracking tools for me, they're just not possible to track.

 

Hitting some of the new chapters are less of a concern. It's the deep crawl that concerns me.

 

-------------------------

 

Edit 2:

 

For those saying just don't do it. The alternative is to shut down. Crawling is non-sustainable. Have to do something.




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