Combating Misinformation: Official Statement

[Jacough]

@Ti0

JUST FUCKING RESPECT THE TRANSLATORS AND CREATORS.

Yeah, stopped taking you seriously there. How much do you think the actual creators, specifically the mangakas, are making off of these fan scanalations? Probably a fraction of a fraction that these Patreon begging fuckwits are making from donations, ad revenue, and bitcoin mining, and that's only assuming they even bought a copy of the magazine the series was published in or a volume of it in the first place.
By the way, the shit you posted on death threats is just so fucking stupid I don't even know how to properly respond to it. You're a God damn idiot if you take someone from here sending PMs or emails threatening to blow up your house or some shit seriously. Unless you're some kind of idiot who publicly posts your personal information they've got no way of finding you to begin with and second of all, I doubt you'll find anyone here with the balls to go out and murder someone.

 

[ninjadork]

@TheOneWhoSighs First, thank you. As promised, I am either in your corner (you specifically) or neutral, since I don't fully agree with your second two points.

I agree with you that telling complainers to go elsewhere was not the right thing to do in this case. It is an absolutely correct professional business response to say "That's not my department, please direct your concerns here", but Mangadex is not a professional business. In this setting, saying "Group X chose to pull out" is fine, but "Here's their website, facebook, twitter page, and/or number" is not.

As for the second point, I think both sides got this wrong because they are looking at it from completely different angles, and with all the arguing I think it's likely that nobody's ever gotten to the point of looking that deep.

You came at it from the aspect of "What has already happened". You and several other scanlators have been nuked in the past by sites going legit and kicking you all to the curb, and have dealt with a great deal of aggravation from thieves using bots and predatory adds to steal your work. Obviously, you're willing to go to some lengths to not let it happen again.

But @Holo and company, near as I can tell, are coming at this from "Here's what we want, here's the limit for where we stop." Holo has repeatedly stated that going legit, in his book, explicitly requires that the vast majority (all of it if at all feasible) of your stuff must be kept, and any of you scanlators who want the option must be offered fair and gainful employment to keep doing what you love. He has pretty much made an ironclad statement that he is not going to stab you in the back, and given a (to me) convincing argument as to why and what that entails considering that neither Holo nor Zeph like fakku or crunchyroll either.. The Elon Musk money he's calling a necessity is indeed what would be required to keep that promise.

Now, he might just end up being a really clever con man and stab you in the back later with the "asshole legitimacy" you describe. But none of the behavior from staff I have ever seen in my time here (and go back and look at my early comments, I am definitely looking) indicates that as being likely.

As for the bit about toxic comments, I'm assuming the first part of that screenshot is what you're referring to. I pose you a question: in Official Legalese / Forum-speak, what is the rule you would write that stops that kind of belligerence without being so loose as to be acceptable justification for an unscrupulous mod / admin to fuck the forums?

 

[AddictedWeeaboo]

elon musk please slide them that billion

 

[victorrama]

What possessed me to even post this even. Maybe I got drunk? Whatever.

Not really replying to any other posts, just wanted to share some of my thoughts if it's allowed.

I used to do fansubbing and scanlation since 2007 until about 2014(?) And now while I stopped doing those, I still translate LNs (10 points if you know the series I'm working on).

The issue with going legit or money or whatsoever never changes since back then. But you know, our group always has a certain policy which is ' we don't give a f'.

We scanlate/fansub because we want to and we like it and we want to 'give back'to the community. Server cost buying raws and stuff? We pay from our own pocket. Coz again, we weren't doing this for money.

I mean admit it. All scanlation and stuff is illegal. Making money of illegal stuff is wrong. But we aren't going to condemn those with donation whatsoever, maybe they simply want some cakes or pizza while doing their stuff coz they are tasty right? But if you really are working for money or wanting to profit from this, well, sorry to say this, only dumb peeps would support such places ( Which unfortunately, most peeps are dumb. So they DO get money from copyright infringement or whatever the term is, you get the point. )

Aggregator sites and whatsoever, they are just a hub. They take our work and change the credits page and put it behind layer of ads (mangafox onemanga etc)? Not our business but that's not nice. No ads and no changes but they help us spread the love (MD batoto)? Not our business either but that's nice. Why does it matter peeps read our works on our place or other place? We just release our work on our site no delay no whatsoever, you can read it, upload it somewhere else whatever, we don't even ask for credits.

Isn't that why we started doing this? To do and share what we like? Well, that's just what I can say for now, hopefully no one replied to this so I can forget all this yearly drama and continue my work. Or turn on the TV and watch real drama instead.

 

[TheOneWhoSighs]

@ninjadork

But @ Holo and company, near as I can tell, are coming at this from "Here's what we want, here's the limit for where we stop." Holo has repeatedly stated that going legit, in his book, explicitly requires that the vast majority (all of it if at all feasible) of your stuff must be kept, and any of you scanlators who want the option must be offered fair and gainful employment to keep doing what you love. He has pretty much made an ironclad statement that he is not going to stab you in the back, and given a (to me) convincing argument as to why and what that entails. The Elon Musk money he's calling a necessity is indeed what would be required to keep that promise.

Now, he might just end up being a really clever con man and stab you in the back later with the "asshole legitimacy" you describe. But none of the behavior from staff I have ever seen in my time here (and go back and look at my early comments, I am definitely looking) indicates that as being likely.

All I can say regarding this, is that after everything I've read this will very likely not be the last time the issue is brought up.

And that it will probably escalate over time.

Which, good or bad I'm not going to be fighting that battle. While I understand the community dislikes those kinds of tactics, as a reader I lose nothing because MDex is just an aggregate. I'm far more invested in things that would cause a scanlator to quit than things that would cause an aggregate to collapse.

As for the bit about toxic comments, I'm assuming the first part of that screenshot is what you're referring to. I pose you a question: in Official Legalese / Forum-speak, what is the rule you would write that stops that kind of belligerence without being so loose as to be acceptable justification for an unscrupulous mod / admin to fuck the forums?

There's not much you can do at this point. It would be akin to asking what can you do to make the Apple forums not hyper defensive of Apple. It's part of the community that has been fostered here, and would need a change in stance from top to be more neutral as I've said in my first point.

Holo & Zeph need to not respond to things, and leave that up to Plyk. They're too knee jerky, and it riles their community up.

But, that's just an opinion. Take it or leave it.

 

[floatingsunfish]

I find it absolutely ridiculous how some groups want to take the "moral high ground" when scanlation itself is illegal in the first place.

Sure, we scanlators spend time, money, and effort on our end to make releases but that doesn't give us any right to make money from them.

In any case, I'm glad you guys decided to address this issue to hopefully put a stop to this nonsense once and for all, although I'm almost certain these shenanigans will happen again in the future.

Here's to a brighter, drama-free future!

 

[JaeScans]

"We are not gatekeepers of scanlation morality, but merely a platform for scanlators to distribute their work."

^ This

I hope more people read this, even if it's long. Thanks.

 

[Lecroz]

I fully support Mangadex in this crisis not because I don't sympathize with scanlation groups that went under harassment from certain readers but bcuz I feel that Mangadex has been wrongly accused in this whole drama.

 

[furopoi]

@Jinbou

When the first 3-4 replies from the staff to that thread are just "yes, we do want to go legit" and no proper explanation, how can I know this is not a serious plan? Not everyone knows you that well or knows about your discord/memes.

nobody outside of discord would be able to misunderstand the going legit meme to begin with if the groups hadn't posted it outside of discord. you should probably be more skeptical of what you see on the internet

If you really understand this, don't talk like having patreons or asking for donations is a bad thing.

the only reason trying to get money seems like a bad thing is because the groups framed it that way to begin with. all MD did was point out that the pot is calling the kettle black. you're imagining a lot of trains of thought that frankly don't make any sense. calm down a bit and don't get sucked into the drama, and everything will be fine

 

[Soulreapr117]

You guys just try to keep things fair between all the scanlators that post on your site, if they got a problem with how you run your own website shouldnt you guys just blacklist them so they can never come back?

 

[Acolytus]

@Soulreapr117 I suggested banning the scanlators who left after one of them showed up in the comment senction of the Solo Levelling prologue to stirr up trouble (and another one showed up somewhere to advertise his own fucking website without me knowing about it) but @Zephyrus told me they don't want to ban people just because they disagree with them.

For the record, I still think they should get banned. If they choose to leave this place then they should keep their own word, coming back just to cause more problems is an extremely shitty thing to do.

Even if a ban is too much, they should at least lose their scanlator status and any perks that might come with that since they don't plan to be part of this community as one.

 

[riflow]

Wait so the drama stuff in comment threads mentioned was off topic? I can understand wanting to address or clear the air but there must be better ways to do it...

The stuff with patreon is fair too, scanlations and accepting money has always been kinda iffy because of all the intricacies of copyright laws.

At any rate I've just spent around an 1 hr to an hr and a half trawling through checking the back catalogues of these groups. Their decision to not host here (which is entirely up to them and I wish them the best) means at least for ones with no readers (or also the case for me not having to check a million different sites) that I'll be going to other sites to read other series.

Hopefully the situation doesn't blow up anymore on either side.

 

[Insignificant]

I said it before I'll say it again.
MangaDex should just tell scanlators to fuck themselves and go full pirate mode.

 

[Keetonman]

Can't say I care who translates what, as long as it's timely and the English is sound enough. Loyalty is for suckers.

 

[TheDefend]

At this point, the way i see that there are going to be lots of empty spaces and to fix it is that :

1. Have the chapter button that is clicked linked to the scanlators site and chapters they host, basically become a pseudo-tracker.
Which would probably cause more scan team to host their own chapter. @holo

2. Someone rebrand all the removed releases and reupload them regardless of consequences

 

[Acolytus]

@TheDefend There is an option in your settings to see removed chapters, if you click them they show the same page as if it was a delayed release and you get a link to the scanlator's website.

 

[TheDefend]

@Acolytus Yeah. but soon there wont even be anymore delayed chapter or the likes. which is gonna annoying.
Also, don't tell me to use mangaupdates because that site UI is absolute nightmare and lots of them are massively out of date.

And there is a massive need to relink a lot of the chapters since there a lot of it that are permanently removed

 

[junonlee3]

With all the respect to the MD admins and scanlator groups, i saw many strong opinions are thrown out and I saw many magnification and overgenalization bias. Seems like humans are simply attracted and gathered around similiar views (echo chamber). Internet and WWW basically magnify this. Make me feel like withdrawing from communities on the internet. @.@
Sorry for those who seek evidences for what I said. I am simply too lazy.
Sorry for those whom I offended. Like who cares what I said. I am just nobody. Take it easy everyone. At the end, nothing matters. Cheers!

 

[HetZek]

I'm a huge fan of Jaimini's Box. They've done so much for the manga community, and they can make their own decisions and people should respect it. I think it's terrible that all these trolls are insulting them and making fun of them and their hard work for what they are. There's NOTHING wrong with being gay, and I hope they make it through these times of hardship.

 

[Acolytus]

@TheDefend No, I mean deleted chapters show up as if they were just delayed releases even though they aren't (I ignore if it's possible for them to dissapear if the time runs out, someone in the staff might want to check that) and you can click them and get a link to the scanlator's website. If you use that function all the gaps appear filled and you get an easy way to find the actual translated chapter.

I honestly think it's more kindness than these people deserve and I fear it might indeed convince others of leaving, which would turn MD into just another MU with some original content.