MangaDex Two Year Anniversary

[Teasday]

@Nick86 Like I said, we haven't deleted a single chapter. Rapeman deleted all his chapters on his own. We can't restore his chapters because it was his choice to remove them.

 

[Nick86]

@Teasday - nope, is not how it work, with such rules and the fact you cancel Himenospia chapter 8 (an admin told me so so you lie if you say otherwise), so what's for him the purpose to stay here? To have all his work cancelled after the publication? You indirectly censor him with this rule so the only logic solution is to leave and stop publishing here but publish elsewhere where such restrictions aren't in place.

 

[Teasday]

@Nick86 We removed only the credits page from chapter 8, Rapeman deleted the chapter. He's not banned, he's welcome to resume uploading any time he wants.

Either way, we've been over this whole discussion and I've been allowing this offtopic for long enough, so if you have something new to bring up about it, make a new thread in General. This is not the thread to keep going on about this subject.

 

[Draggador]

Affiliate sponsorship and non-intrusive ads: both sound good to me.
I hope that MangaDex gets to celebrate its 1 decade anniversary & beyond without anything "unhealthy" (like censorship) happening, growing to host scanslators from all languages of the world.

 

[Nick86]

@Teasday - You censor and remove part of his works, i see no difference here, he should have accepted this or leave. Make sense. Anyway, you confirm what i already suspected. You censor scanlator works based on people reaction and moral. Said that i stop the OT, have a nice day.

 

[threeflappp]

I think Ads are fine even for member, but let people donate to remove them. And most of us on PC use adblock anyway so no huge difference.

 

[BraveDude8]

@Nick86 What part of "not the thread" did you not understand?

 

[LoliShinobu]

The page was removed because it ruined the path of the long-con plan, it existing would hurt the goal of having ads running on this site (which current pool is there to have it show up as a "community" decision) and eventually getting rid of unpopular stuff quietly while selling off select popular stuff as a subscription service. Now stop asking questions and consume media.

 

[Plykiya]

@LoliShinobu Although you're probably shitposting, Rapeman of all things is less of a concern than the loli hentai on the site that WE OURSELVES scanlate if we're going to be talking about things that would be unappealing to an ad network. The first chapters that were uploaded to the site were our own loli doujins. Hentai doesn't have any plans on going anywhere anytime soon, so banning political content (not even Rapeman specifically) obviously isn't a move to appeal to ad networks

 

[LoliShinobu]

Carry on then, viva la loli.

 

[Beregorn]

Is it possible to implement a shop with symbolic mangadex merchandise (artworks and avatars for example) or it has the same problems of PayPal?
How about a totally legit and unrelated site that could accept PayPal donations?
Safe ads for aggregator sites is not a thing that does exist, and people voting for that are just deluding themselves...
If manga scanlation is a business so shady that it is not even possible to run a PayPal account, who do you think is willing to put ads on it and possibly be linked with them? Only other business that doesn't care for trifle things like legality, privacy and your pc wellbeing...

 

[ixlone]

@Nick86

Doki and Mangadex are two different things. You will notice that Doki is treated EXACTLY the same as every other group on the site

 

[PantsMan]

These all seem like shit options, frankly.

People seem mighty on board with ads since it gives the illusion of not requiring them to pull out their wallets, but that shit can burn a hole through a website really quickly. Nothing is free. You're not going to have much of a benefit of choice in regards to having "safe" and "unintrusive" advertisements; you guys run a pirate site, and you host porn as well to boot. You'll have to resort to weird splits like "removing advertiser-unfriendly content", either permanently or to another site like SadPanda did. You'll be chasing advertiser's whims just to stay afloat, especially since donations will dry up even further, and the site will continue to suffer as a consequence. Forget "safe and unintrusive banners", you'll barely have a say on what you get with seven servers and counting.

All of this counts doubly so for affiliates, who are likely going to be even more scrupulous about content.

Crypto is garbage however, and if you were having trouble before with donations expect even the slight barrier it takes for people to learn how to pay through it to turn off 95% of potential donators.

The best option would be direct server donations, but 50-70$ a month is a hefty price for an individual to cover. Discounting 2-3 charitable Samaritans with plenty of disposable income, you'll be paying for most of it out of your pocket.

I won't vote for an option, since I can't say I like any of them. I'd suggest continue looking for alternative routes where there isn't as much a barrier for direct donations. Maybe set up a phony Twitch stream/podcast reviewing scanlator groups/manga (with no technical affiliation or links to Mangadex), set up a Patreon for that but use the gains to fund the site? Or that Minecraft server that was suggested. They're goofy ideas, but frankly I'd still find them preferable to any of the proposed solutions.

 

[deltarayedge]

Is ads even going to work given how much of the manga leecher demographic uses adblocks? iirc grumpy@batoto posted stats years ago

perhaps you could clone your site, and remove the "d" from your URL, if you get my meaning. wink though that is unlikely to sustain itself given the finances of the example in question

 

[Vedtraed]

I very much agree with @PantsMan and, and to some extent @deltarayedge here.

Crypto is a pain to deal with, even if you're perfectly comfortable with the technical aspects of it.
There are tons of convenient donation platforms these days, there must be some kind of setup that would work out, no?

And as previously pointed out, many people see ads as some kind of magical free money feature. In reality, it's not that simple, and I agree that it would probably hurt the site a lot.
Then there's the whole thing with adblockers, which a lot of people will start using once the ads show up.

 

[GigAnon]

I voted for the cryptocurrencies, because even though it'd be a pain, I *loathe* ads with a passion and I'm always running several browser extensions to make sure none ever see the light of day on my screen.
I would love to support MD but I wouldn't disable those extensions, so really it doesn't feel right.

Alternate options: a few years ago, there was a scandal on TPB (I think?) because there was JS code on the main page mining Bitcoins on clients' computers. You could have this as an option - "mine cryptocurrencies for MD when I'm reading mangas on this machine". No setup required on the clients' part, they just pay with machine time.

 

[deltarayedge]

The issue is that the more convenient that something is, the more it's likely to get moderated or abused.

Payment processors are no exception. So paypal/patreon is off. It's why some needlessly complicated things exist, because they are stable or trusted.

I'm sure we'd all like our "press big red button to instantly and securely pay money to mangadex" but we don't live in that world.

 

[kenx]

@threeflappp
Oh yeah, that route could work too. Royal Road does it too, donating rids you of the ads.

 

[kevinmul]

I mean... How about extra options:
Give ads as an option for each users
I want to contribute so this site will survive, so I, seeing ads is not a big problem.

Or heck.. make it as achievements for lols:
First time seeing ads
1000th time seeing ads

Love it or hate it, ads is the easiest thing to make most sites sutainable.

The profit from the ads (after some budget buffer) can be given back to the communities as prizes for random competitions. I can think some:
1. Most favourite translator.
2. Most read titles.
3. Design competitions.
4. Most contributing users.

The price can be a donation to the translator group.
Believe me.. I want to contribute something, but money is something that is hard to give by most of users.
For instance.. I came from a country that with USD 10 you can get more than decent meals for the day.
We read the pirate because we literally can't spare or don't have any access to buy it. (or some just don't care at all).

But yeah... if you think about sutainabilities, ads is the way and you can test the water with it.
Then see how the communities will react, When I voted, more than 50% agree to have ads.

P.S. Or somehow you can combine everthing.
If you really need to put the ads, please make it a different page before access the manga itself, so you get the revenue, while the reading experience is not that much disturbed

 

[blackmagekt]

I don't mind ads as long as they're not those lewd ads/pop-ups (hello k*ssani**). I would love to donate as long as there's no minimum amount required.

Please notice >.<
👇👇👇
Didn't read all the replies but i hope you guys could go both on donations and ads. With donations you could lessen the ads (or something? Not really sure how much money ads rake in).

Anyway, long live MD!!!