Looks like I missed quite the heated debate about patreon and scanlations and the like.
My two cents: Scanlations are illegal, technically. Making profit off of them is a bad thing as it might draw people's attention to us. If the JP publishers came down on MangaDex or any of the teams, we would lose in the end. Heck, I'm surprised some of the EN publishers haven't come down on some series -- the guy that started JNovelClub mentioned on reddit there is a very distinct sales impact from translation projects.
However, almost all of the big scanlation teams take donations, and as a scanlation team founder that has had perpetual trouble finding and keeping JP->EN translators, I can totally see where being able to fund a translator's time would help.
The trick is, of course, that there's a difference between "making profit" and "taking donations," and that line has to be clearly defined. The guys that do "Lonely Attack on Another World" patreon-lock their translations for a day or two and do extra chapters based on a tip jar system, which seems reasonable. Ditto some of the other translators who use the "available in X days" thing on MangaDex to drive people to their websites.
Anyway, thanks for the work guys.
