@retzikun
When a scanlation group has a delay policy, they usually link only to the homepage, but wouldn't it be better and more convenient to link directly the chapter on the scanlator's site? It could become the new norm to help scanlator get traffic to their sit while simultaneously save bandwidth on mangadex.
It wouldn't be more convenient to our readers to have every chapter linked directly to the chapter on the scanlator's site because it would mean constantly being redirected out of the site. Their site may have less features than our reader, no comment section, ads in their reader, or slower load times. It's also not reliable as a source going into the future. If they ever decide to quit, which is normal since scanlation is a hobby, and their site goes down, we would suddenly be left without their chapters at all. This has already happened before. Their site could also require another account to use, such as groups that operate on NSFW Tumblr, or they may not even have an actual dedicated reader at all. Just download links. This experience is already worse than a typical manga aggregator. Keeping the site convenient to use is one of our top priorities to keep users coming back or donating to the site because we make no ad money at all. Since we already host the images, we even offer to host blogs for scanlation groups for free rather than having them pay for a dedicated server to host their blog and reader (some groups cite monthly costs between $40 to 100 for their websites, saving them $480 to $1200 a year seems pretty convenient). This is already quite a bit more than Batoto did to try and support groups.
Bandwidth isn't an issue, we only hover slightly above half of our total bandwidth at all times and we serve about 3 million visitors a month.
Or if we treat mangadex as an archive, we could implement a rule to not release the new chapter until a week or a month after the chapter was released on the scanlator's site.
We won't make that a rule. If the group wants to delay their chapters from being uploaded to the site by that long, they have the option to do that themselves already. They can claim and lock their group to prevent anyone else from uploading before they want to. Active groups have full control over their releases on MangaDex. Jaimini's Box is our longest locked and delayed group on the website at a 14 day delay and people constantly complain about the long wait and how they'd rather just read it altogether on a different site rather than constantly get redirected each week for every chapter they want to read. Forcing that onto other groups who are fine operating on a shorter delay (such as 24 hours or 48 hours, the typical period in which they get a majority of their traffic before other aggregators scrape it) would be inconvenient to both scanlators and readers.
