What is "sniping" means in scanlation community?
"sniping" in the context of the internet typically refers to the practice of quickly making a low-effort post to get in before people making more quality or on-topic posts. back in the day when forums were the premier way of interacting socially online people would "snipe" the top post on a page in a thread to make themselves prominent in a discussion without actually contributing anything to it. imagine someone using a sniper rifle to tag a target at long range while everyone else is running on foot to physically reach it. in terms of scanlating specifically, it's the practice of quickly regurgitating low-effort, usually machine translated scanlations with minimal (or zero) QC in order to be the first to release for a chapter and get as many eyeballs looking at their ads or watermarks as possible. since the targets of sniping were generally popular manga to maximize ad revenue, they generally already had other groups working to make higher quality scanlations. over time usage of the term expanded to include scanlations that weren't being made quickly to get in before the slower, quality scanlations, so long as the intention was to garner attention or ad revenue off of a work that already had another, more established scanlator.