Ominous

Grumpy said he will be working on some sort of follows export. But I don't know how it'd turn out.

I can't make you any promises, but I assure you that I'm also with you on this boat. 

 

My follows is shown below:

i have a REALLY  BIG  follow list (maybe around a hundred), so i'm currently on a nightmare...i don't want to live thru another Onemanga. that was already traumatic. this will scar me for the rest of my life

I'm also one of the silent readers and would like to give my thanks to all the hard work you and your staff had done in all these years, though it's sad to see this site disappear :'c It came as a shock and I'm happy to have found out before it was actually gone. I can understand your point of view, even if it is painful to see this site. It has been truly amazing with all the different language scanlation groups! Still, I wish you a good life and farewell!

Oh, but as to Silvermoment's original question,
 

Why IS everyone anti-trump? I've never actually seen a well structured argument(for either side) about how bad/good he's doing in office. I don't really care about what he says, I'm more concerned about what's actually happening.

I think part of the reason you don't see a structured argument is because his administration has been such a whirlwind of... stuff, that it's difficult to stop just reacting to things, to instead sit down and construct an overview of what's going on.

...This is going to be sloppy, maybe slightly biased (not that avoiding bias in this topic is possible at this point--I tried, at least), and maybe involve too much civics-lesson, but:

First off, in theory in American politics (though less and less in practice), it isn't really the President's explicit job to do much directly. (Caveat: Except in his role as chief commander of the military which used not to matter much except in wartime, though these days we're always at war or preparing for it, being the military superpower that we are, though aside from some sleep lost over the possibility of nuclear war, and diplomatic snafus hurting some relationships, Trump has done comparatively little that people object to in that part of his role).

The president is also our chief figurehead / diplomat, being the head of state and all, so the stuff he says does matter, unfortunately, as a matter of both national and international diplomacy. It's fine if you don't care about what he says personally, but the effects of his words are very real (if hard to pin down precisely). Given his position in the world, him saying something stupid at the wrong time can actually cost a lot of lives (for instance, indelicate handling of political situations in the middle east).

Next, the president, at least in theory, doesn't write or introduce laws (pretty much all he officially does in law-making is sign or veto them). But lately "executive orders" work way more like laws then they were ever intended to. Some of those that Trump has issued--like his self-proclaimed muslim travel ban (though he's denied ever calling it anything of the sort, like many such things he's denied saying after saying them on... public television... I don't even...)--are part of what people are riled up about. For a full(?) summary of his executive orders: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/here-s-full-list-donald-trump-s-executive-orders-n720796 (there's some commentary here that some would call biased but you can just pay attention to the factual bits). If you read through them, you'll see some are sensible, some are obviously going to be controversial, and some are almost Kafka-esque in their sheer absurdity (e.g. "The order states that executive departments and agencies must slash two regulations for every one new regulation proposed")--but that's just my take on it.

However, he also does--and is supposed to--have a lot of administrative power through the people he appoints: cabinet positions in particular (though also judges and other things). And plenty of the more (depending on who you are, of course) mind-boggling/terrifying actions coming from this administration are not from the president himself but from the very interesting characters he has chosen to put in positions of power. For example, they guy he put in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency that thinks the department should be destroyed and appears to think pollution regulations should not exist at all.

Honestly, though, depending on who you believe, it's even possible Trump doesn't do much at all, except for saying a lot of awkward things and elevating a lot of questionable people to power. There's some allegations (probably exaggerated and possibly fabricated, mind) that he spends much of the day essentially goofing off.

So... heck if I know what he's doing, really. But all in all, it's been a very stressful year to be following politics for a lot of us.

if you want quality chapters, then you're best option is too go to the scanlators sites themselves and read/download from there. Aside from bato.to there really isn't any other site that host the manga series in the quality that said group released them in. Sites like kissmanga are decent, but they usually reduce the quality of the scans and in most cases remove the credit pages form the chapters.

Well, some may have wondered why bunch of chapters / titles have been disappearing recently. Some might not have noticed at all... As part of METI thing happening, we're getting quite a few dmca requests. As our policy, we are complying with the requests and they have been removed. I do expect to get more notices in the future.

Please do not ask me or any other staff where to get them or if you can download them. The answer is no.

That's a given. Let's not forget that the US were built on the blood of entire civilizations. And that the aftermath to Hitler consisted in the Western Block summarily executing German officers at Nuremberg. And why not talking about the outrageous shame of the Tuskegee experiments (and too many others experiments of the sort...), which did the same as Hitler, but after taking him down as the Devil...

But I'd say that those who support Trump are the same trash that supports the US's most ruthless internal and foreign policies... racism, utter disregard for people of other countries, complete intolerance towards non-bigot non-christians, and so on. Clinton wasn't a satisfying choice, by no means, but all the young and educated voted her, because voting Trump meant voting for all the bad in America. Trump winning means that most Americans WANT to be Nazis

I'm not an american, the elections were interesting to me but I wasn't concerned (I'm saying this to Natureboy so knows that I have no pretention of knowing much).

You are foolish. Probably because you are young and probably see yourself as educated - I'm just picking up your comment about young and educated people voting for Hillary.

By your attitude and your fears, you are cementing the very thing you claim to be against. By demonizing all who voted for Trump you make them stronger because you miss the roots and because you present yourself as an enemy they can unite against. You are projecting your own racism and bigotry everywhere.

If you had said that a lot of Trump supporters, for instance the ones that suffer from the poor economic problems (coal regions, metallurgy etc...), are just useful idiots for the nazi wannabes (the people that would run Trump's campaign and "in the know"), then I could pretend you are being reasonable. Politicians lie, and poor gullible schmucks, common people, are not the evil incarnate. I think that half the americans nazis wannabes were just pulled out of your ass, because I didn't see them 4 years ago nor 8 years ago. To put things in perspective, I remember people like you saying that the sky was falling when Obama was elected, and I remember an initiative to secede Texas like California now

It is not a coincidence that some vehement anti-gay persons, including powerful politicians who end up hurting gays through their legislation, are gay themselves; that some "feminist" men who are shouting loudly against misogyny are, in fact, deeply misogynist themselves; that some anti-racism activists are deeply racists. The name is overcompensation.

I was meaning to make this announcement much earlier but hey it's still not the 1st where I live... *cough*

For everybody out there thinking of making an April Fools Day release there are a some rules we would like to be observed.

1) April fools day releases should be uploaded on the 1st April. (We will be lenient but it should be less than a week past.)

2) After April Fools Day is over please point out your April Fools Release in the Quality Assurance forum. This part is important since we are planning to gather all of this years releases into one "Comic".

3) The content Rules & Guidelines etc still apply - even to April Fools day releases.

4) April Fools releases are the only "fake" releases that we will keep.

 
Copy-pasted from the last year's copy-paste!

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.

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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.

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Edit 2:

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