Nocturnion

I've been getting notices from various users about fake Batoto sites that's out there.

It looks exactly like us (pretty sure direct copy of everything), but with their own ads.

 

DO NOT LOGIN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE on the fake site. They're stealing your id/passwords. If you end up on that site for any reason, LEAVE IMMEDIATELY.

If you ever logged in to one of those sites before, change your password on EVERY SITE that uses the same password, not just here.

 

Our domain is bato.to. Anything else is fake.

Well, this is certainly a unique announcement. I've been contacted by an employee of Lezhin to pass along this job posting. So, here it is. I have also suggested the recruiter to register, so they can respond directly to any questions if arises.
 
DISCLAIMER: I have no affiliation whatsoever with Lezhin or this recruiter. I cannot confirm or endorse anything with regarding this job post. This post is a verbatim copy of what was sent to me of the job itself. I did not include greetings, name of the recruiter, and other segments from top and bottom because I do not know if this person wants me to make that public or not. I have also stripped formatting and redid it for forum code reasons.
 
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Hello everyone!

 

Since the last announcement about image servers, I have unexpected and actually received an offer. RKenshin has generously offered us to use his (business) network to distribute the images.

 

What this means:

• More distribution nodes, including Asia! The biggest boost in speeds should be felt by Asian users as the CDN offers nodes there--something we couldn't do due to costs until now. (Side note: optimization is not yet complete, still copying over some files to singapore location)
• Reduced cost! Over long term, if we are able to load more and more onto RKenshin's CDN, we'll be able to reduce the server costs that we currently pay, which in turn means even less ads that need to be on this site.

How to use it:

• When reading, press the gear icon and select CDN, then submit.

 

Please note that this is a testing phase, but should be fully functional. Any issues you see with this should be reported here so that issues can be resolved.

 

I would like to welcome everyone to try it out and tell us how it works.

the last chapter, ch 19, posted in Gepetto (http://vatoto.com/comic/_/comics/gepetto-r3715) is actually  a chapter of Red string (http://vatoto.com/comic/_/comics/red-string-r12448)...

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-pasta'ed from mhh's last year's post. All still true. Even comment about how this is late and not yet april 1st for me!

 

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Please don't message me regarding April fools stuff. Use the appropriate forums.

I split out the replies to a discussion forum. Locking this thread for announcement only.
 
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I'll just write few things.
 
The take down requests are made per chapter. So, it's not like they're giving me a list of titles. And sorting through the last ~5000 chapters removed to see which titles isn't all that pleasurable right now. Though I imagine I'll figure a way to compile a list later.
 
To those bringing up legal requirements of dmca and netherlands / etc...
- Before any law, it is our policy to abide by dmca requirements.
- Licensing has absolutely no relevance to any of this.
- Localization has absolutely no relevance to any of this.
- Copyright is international, it is not dependent on which country. Unless you happen to be in Western Sahara and never agreed to the whole international copyright thing.
 
I write DMCA because that is the technical letter that we have received. But the American law is not what I intended to highlight. If they just sent an email explaining, it would have been acceptable as well.

 

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Last removed batch involved titles with:

http://pastebin.com/cY2TVLNr (this is not a full list)

Grumpy, Mangafox are also stated in Netherlands, but they do not abide by the DCMA takedown requests. Any insight on why you do ? Yes, i get it that is your decision, but cutting the branch on you are sitting on is not smart thing. As in my first post here ( and previous ) , unless the other side have Legal claims, you should not abide by them. Them being offended by content published here, doesn't have to worry you. There are alot of people who dislike Mangafox and Mangareader, and see they are still fine, just by ignoring the DCMA requests.

 

Mangafox actually blocks you from being able to view all manga on the site if you have a USA IP. which was/is their attempt to avoid taking down things.  Mangareader also has a similar system in place, as the more popular manga there are unviewable by US IPs.  So they only somewhat ignore those DMCA requests.  Of course both of those sites went and created another manga site to get around those blocks they put in place. (MangaFox -> MangaHere / MangaReader -> MangaPanda)

You know, the fact that they even left early chapters is getting overlooked here. This is an interesting strategy.

 

What they're doing for SOME series is leaving some earlier chapters of manga available for longer series, and then only removing recent chapters for them. This keeps the interest garnered from manga fans who read new series on the net, but still makes you buy the manga to read the story.

 

If they do this right (from a business standpoint), this could end up being the future of the manga publisher/scanlation host site relationship.

Just move the server to Western Sahara and don't give a flying fuck.

I'm not sure you get what kind of country is western sahara...

 

Again, this isn't a discussion about the laws. I've already stated that before law, it is our policy. Our policies on how we choose to deal with copyright claims have been set day one of Batoto and it hasn't changed, nor is it going to be changed.

I'll just write few things.

 

The take down requests are made per chapter. So, it's not like they're giving me a list of titles. And sorting through the last ~5000 chapters removed to see which titles isn't all that pleasurable right now. Though I imagine I'll figure a way to compile a list later.

 

To those bringing up legal requirements of dmca and netherlands / etc...

- Before any law, it is our policy to abide by dmca requirements.

- Licensing has absolutely no relevance to any of this.

- Localization has absolutely no relevance to any of this.

- Copyright is international, it is not dependent on which country. Unless you happen to be in Western Sahara and never agreed to the whole international copyright thing.

 

I write DMCA because that is the technical letter that we have received. But the American law is not what I intended to highlight. If they just sent an email explaining, it would have been acceptable as well.

Let's go ahead and stop this fighting and lock this now.

 

In summary:

 

1) Batoto follows DMCA requests not just out of possible legal necessity, but due to our founding mission. We are completely aware of what is legally necessary and what isn't.

 

2) We'll try to get a better list of removed chapters up when we can, but since as of a couple days ago 2477 chapters were removed, and by different people at different times. Since this entire site is run by volunteers in their free time, it might be tomorrow or it might be awhile. Also, the takedown requests keep rolling in.

 

3) Please be respectful of all opinions, even if they aren't your own.

Well, I guess I'm most suited to answer this one. Bit of history of Batoto involved because it has changed over time due to unfortunate circumstances.

Originally, Batoto was made to give the participating groups 100% of the ad revenue by hosting their ads directly. That allowed 100% transparency in what we do since we do not handle any money exchange. The key is "participating", we certainly can't give ad space to groups who simply doesn't want to participate and we cannot give give the ad space to no-longer existing ones either. So, we used to put our ads there. So, regardless of what the remaining percentage if "inventory" is, we use that to pay for the servers. Because with good ad prices which we directly controlled and provided by google adsense, and current bandwidth costs, this was perfectly viable in the long run. Though, of course when Batoto just started out, I paid from my pocket since with tiny amounts of traffic, the ads did not bring enough to offset the costs.

Then comes the google's algo changes, a time when all manga readers stopped using google ads (well, sorta). They pretty much kicked us out, likely because we don't generate great profit margin for them (you can see the full story in the announcements from a while ago).

Switching to another ad provider was a huge issue. Because other ad providers doesn't offer the type of application interface (API) like google does with ads. It makes hosting multiple ads on a single website really difficult. To make it worse, it's impossible to do quality control of the ads and also exposes huge security vulnerability to Batoto as the participants can add any ambiguous code they like and there'd be no way for me to check them as it could change at any given time. Also, as Google hosts roughly over 2/3rds of the internet banner market share, they are the only grade A when it comes to pricing (with few exception, won't bother getting into). So, we're now at a much lower paying ads and unable to put others' ads. ( <-- double frown. That's why we've (more like I've) tried to create additional methods to increase revenue so that there's more to share and more viable ways to support scanlators financially. Though, much have been futile.

So, in the end, the ads that are running support the runtime of batoto. If the ads are insufficient (I would honestly like to avoid 4x + ads we're seeing on other sites now. I think that's a bit too much. 2 banners are maximum in my opinion to keep the site fairly clean.), we'll likely switch or add a donation campaign (which we did for extremely briefly when Google ditched us [without paying], putting us in the negative -- which I just paid from my pocket).

Changed to descending date order again in comment. It's very unfortunately not a setting, but rather my mod to IPB because desc order was never supported and gets overwritten with patch.

Just finished the update to 3.4.7. Sorry it took so long. I honestly expected it to take like 10min of downtime and said 30min on twitter for comfort. Yeah... Took 2hrs to get it all running. That's what happens when there's bugs hiding in places.

 

 

IP.Content (the portion which you see comics, front page, follows, groups, chat... everything minus forums & members & donate) actually didn't even get updated. So it was really weird how IP.C was the one that was breaking from the update. I still don't know why it exactly happened. I just know that I stopped using the little thingy that broke entirely. It was previously used to hide the "breadcrumb" which is the thing at the top that goes Batoto Forums > Batoto > Announcement > etc on IP.C pages. Now it's just off. Anyway, I'm guessing people don't really care about the details, I wouldn't care either... though was frustrating to drill down.

 

On actual reasons to updating. The update actually has very little contents that may be interesting. I mostly did it now for security patch in case I missed anything in the past. Also, bug fixes. Minor bug fixes doesn't get listed separately on IPB's release notes I linked above.

 

Done