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Purple Library Guy

Purple Library Guy

Member Since 01 Nov 2011
Offline Last Active Sep 18 2018 06:05 AM

#1853820 Batoto will be closing permanently

Posted by Purple Library Guy on 08 January 2018 - 06:34 AM

Well.  No way could I have stuck it out as long in your place.  Thanks for all these years of hard work. 

It's strange to realize just how much of my leisure time I have spent on this site for the last few years.  It has been by far the best, both to use, as a place of community, and above all in its ethics.  I'm going to miss Batoto badly, and all the avatars I've come to recognize and appreciate the minds behind.  Damn, damn, damn, dash it all, now what?




#1651078 Batoto becoming registered only?

Posted by Purple Library Guy on 22 October 2015 - 03:34 AM

I'm starting to wonder how much of Batoto's traffic is organic...

None.  It all uses pesticides and/or industrial fertilizer.

. . . What were we talking about, again?




#1650880 Batoto becoming registered only?

Posted by Purple Library Guy on 21 October 2015 - 05:13 PM

I'm a bit late to this party.  Huh.  It's a tough problem.

Overall, I'm pretty sure I agree with the people who say that, basically, going all the way private will create an inverse network effect and in a little while the site will dry up and blow away.  Not instantly, but over time.  There's always churn on a place like this . . . new people come, old people go.  Going all the way private means most of the nonmember viewers will fornicate off in one big whoosh, which will be sort of obscured as some of them join up and start commenting.  But then as old members wander off fewer people will join because the source of new members, people who showed up to browse and stayed, will be gone.  The place will start to be seen as small and irrelevant, and scanlators won't upload as much, and ultimately it will be forgotten.  Perhaps a few diehards will hang out using it as a little community space for a long time.  But the momentum of the place will be gone from the moment the decision is made, and once it's enacted it will be too late to change tack.

I think partial private might not be too bad.  I suspect a lot of nonmember browsers mostly look at what's new, so it might be no biggie for them if they have to join to really dig the archives.

 

An alternative possibility, and I realize this is a counterintuitive and annoying notion, might be to actively help the bastards.  Make a little updater for 'em so that instead of them running a scraper you just automatically send every new chapter to them.  Send them all email saying "OK, your scrapers are soon going to cause this site to close.  Rather than losing your source, just tell me where to send it and you will receive each new chapter with metadata as it comes out with no need to mess around bypassing security and anti-flood measures and such."  Suddenly the sites in question represent a few hundred downloads for each new chapter rather than a crippling server burden.  If you can't beat 'em . . . 




#1355563 Option to view normal manga like webtoons

Posted by Purple Library Guy on 04 September 2014 - 03:44 AM

I notice that when you're reading webtoons they stack vertically, which is as it should be.  And on the right, it says, "Want to see this chapter per page instead?"

If you pick that, it says "Want to see this in a long strip instead?"

So that's cool and a good feature.  But you know, it would be kind of nice if you could do that with regular manga too.  Just have the defaults reversed, right?  So you'd normally see them the way you see them now, but there'd be a "Want to see this in a long strip instead?" thing and if you clicked on it you could have the whole chapter at once and just scroll down.  I kind of find that a quicker more convenient way to read.  Since the capability is there for webtoons, presumably it would be do-able.

 

There are these manga reader browser extension thingies that do that and that's like their main attraction, so it might reduce the use of such things if this feature were available . . . I have tried such things but I understand they're annoying to the site and they're annoying to me in other ways (I don't want the bloody thing to take over listing my manga and keep popping stuff up at me and other weird stuff like that, I just want to read the chapter all at once).




#1219380 Draft for Comments Section Guidelines - Post your Feedback!

Posted by Purple Library Guy on 23 April 2014 - 09:20 PM

Quite the discussion.

Overall I'm finding I'm with people like Maffa philosophically, but somewhere in the middle on the actual proposed rules.

 

On the philosophical side, I don't care what the comments section is “supposed to be for”. What's the overall objective of having any kind of discussion-enabling in a place like Batoto?

To create as large, rich, and welcoming a community as possible.

That's a Good Thing in itself, it's what satisfies the most people, and on a bottom-line level it implies the most eyeballs pulled to the site. Any intentions or rules whose enforcement would interfere with that would be better off modified or forgotten. An obscure quote from I don't know exactly where, “Just because something doesn't do what you intended it to do, doesn't mean it's useless.”

 

So the question for me is what rules, if any, would promote that general objective rather than interfering with it. And maybe a little contrary to Maffa and some others (although I realize most of the positions are actually fairly nuanced), at this point I think things do get tricky. Just because a place is used a lot doesn't necessarily mean that it is maximizing popularity. You can get some very voluminous discussions in places that allow flaming, but they can tend to be pretty small in actual numbers of people involved or interested. Take a first look and it seems popular, but it may not be growing or sustainable or enjoyable for many people. On the other hand, people using stuff a lot rather than not using it is surely a clue of some sort . . . and while, as in any forum anywhere, I do see some of the usual loudmouths, such as my good self, posting an oversized share of the total, I don't get the impression that the only people posting on the comments section are a few usual suspects. It's fairly broad IMO. It must be doing something right.

 

As to what axe I'm personally grinding, some here may be aware that I'm a major purveyor of walls of text. On the other hand, I am aware that the comments page is used for the posting of little reviews because I've posted more little canned reviews on the comments page than everyone else I'm aware of put together. And every so often I get a touching PM from someone who says they found them helpful, so that's nice.

 

So. My take on the proposed rules themselves.

--More than 10 lines in spoilers. Perhaps to the surprise of many, I don't really mind. I do think a huge block can break the flow rather, and 10 lines-ish is surprisingly long. Five would have been pretty dumb IMO, but 10 I can work with. I'm assuming this isn't a rule that says if your whole post would be longer than 10 lines, you must put the entire thing in, leaving a post consisting solely of (spoiler) . . . (/spoiler). That would certainly be pretty deadly. Rather, I would be likely to use a 2 or 3 line teaser leading into the spoilered wall of text. I do that sometimes anyway, I can do it more of the time, if I want the eager public to read my immortal words I'll make the intro inviting, yes?

(Same goes for actual spoilers in spoilers. Hardly anyone posts a blank message just going (spoiler) . . . (/spoiler); you have something that gives an idea, so you know if you want to read what's in those tags.)

I will say that if you're going to have a rule requiring spoiler tags, make it easy to do. Have a button for 'em.

I do think putting long comments partly in spoilers would improve flow. I don't think there's any point trying to reduce the total amount of comments in the comments section in order to preserve the visibility of reviews posted early in the going. That would be deeply counterproductive, actually, actively trying to make the comments less popular just to preserve what has ended up, at least on popular manga, a pretty minor function. If the Batoto people want to preserve them some reviews for the use of first-time readers, maybe have some kind of “sticky” function that mods could tag a post with, such that it would always stay at the bottom of the front page of comments. Having cakes + eating is good.

Small side note: People complaining about individual pages of comments getting too long. If that's a problem, define a “page” of comments by total length rather than number. That's another problem better solved technically than by a rule.

 

--All pictures in spoilers. This is a terrible idea. I would point to exhibit A, Catbug. That guy posts practically nothing but images. Ever check his profile? He has 28,000+ likes!!! I'm one of the most prolific posters I know, and by the standards of text postings I get my share of positives, and I don't have anything near that many. People like the pictures. Hiding them all would murder the atmosphere.

 

That said, they can get a bit out of hand sometimes; too huge and such. The ideal solution to this would be mostly coded. Have either one very smart image button or two different ones. The plain image button would simply refuse to allow images/gifs larger than a certain size to be linked. The big image button would allow everything but automatically stick spoilers around the dang thing. Problem solved. The single, ultimate button would contain an if/then such that if it detected a too-big image, it would automatically put it in spoiler tags. Badabing, problem solved—images still around, some sense of perspective regained, but no need to hassle people about rules all the time it just happens.

If you want a rule about images, I suggest don't let people quote them, at least not without putting 'em in spoilers. It gets stupid when there's like three in a row of the same picture because people keep quoting the thing to comment on it.

 

--Rule 4, Posts not related directly to the manga should be taken to the Respective Forums, or PM.

People haven't been talking about this one very much. I think this is perhaps the most important one, is deadly wrong as it stands, and if any variant is not kept very soft indeed it is the most dangerous. Conversations naturally veer. The last thing people need is to be having a talk that moved so that it's only tangentially related to where they started and have some officious type come along and go “Ahem” or, worse, amputate some of their speech bubbles so they can't tell what they were talking about. In “Donyatsu”, the one about the cat-with-doughnut-body in the post-apocalypse remains of human civilization, there was recently a little conversation on the nature of money, because a bad-guy character brought some in and claimed the stuff created value. OK, so I posted a wall of text there which should probably have been a bit truncated or partly spoilered. But the overall conversation was pretty cool, and made a nice contrast with some of the silly jokes and simple reactions. It's like the manga itself, which is silly, nonsensical, bizarre, but glances at some oddly deep issues. But a strict “conversations must be about this” control would stifle such things, would stifle most real conversation.

I've seen the reaction that real conversation should go into the forums. My response would be too bad, it's not going to go into the forums, and I'm absolutely with those who say killing conversation on the comments section in hopes that it will go somewhere else less convenient is foolish and counterproductive. The original assumption that prompts such rules is presumably that the general objective I bold near the top would be best served by sticking largely to the traditional medium of the forums. I can see that assumption. Forums are definitely more common in these sorts of places than things like this comments section. And an organized mind would find it reasonable that forums, which sort nicely into topics so people know what they want to participate in, should be the main place and the new comments section just a relatively minor afterthought. Clearly nobody realized when it all started just what dynamite they had in this comments section thing, and some were doubtless taken aback when this upstart, simplistic mini-forum thing grew like kudzu to dwarf the “real thing”. But the fact is it did, and that distinction in format is probably a significant drawing card for Batoto as opposed to other places such as (ritually spits over shoulder) Mangafox. I know on the relatively rare occasions I go somewhere else for a title Batoto doesn't have (because too mature or whatever), I find I quite miss the comment section; I'll be thinking something or other I imagine to be interesting about the manga, go to post about it, and . . . hey! No comments section!  Or I'll be wondering what people made of it and . . . ah.  Guess I won't find out.

 

So yeah. It is a bad idea to make rules restricting the popular thing in favour of the unpopular thing. The content rule is something in part precisely designed to try to hobble and restrict the comments section so fewer people will use it. That basic position needs to be rethought; given the relative popularity, if you're going to make restrictive rules it would do less damage for them to be against the forums and for the comments section. Not that I see a need for that either, I'm just saying what we have here is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog, because those making the rules have not realized which is which.

 

Well. In a conversation about walls of text I have produced rather a doozy. I hope people find the meat is worth the slogging.




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