Minimum Quality Standards

[99wattr89]

While there is a wide range in quality between different releases and groups, I believe that most users would agree that there is a minimum standards of quality needed for a scanlation to be readable. Extremely low-effort work on a series using incoherent unedited machine translation and lazy editing serves only to spoil future chapters of the series and drive away other groups who might have considered picking the series up.

Scanlations that are so low quality that they cannot be read coherently and are met with near universal protest should not be permitted to remain on MangaDex, as they reflect badly on the site for allowing them and on the series subjected to them. MangaDex represents a quality site run with care and effort, so please do not allow these zero effort, useless scanlations to spoil the MangaDex experience.

 

[FireFish5000]

@99wattr89
These are already removed rather promptly, although I cannot really pull up a rule for them. Closest thing is "troll releases".
In general, MTL is ok with proofreading. Bad grammar is fine. Completely incoherent text that looks like a random compilation of what a class full of 2yr olds said is generally removed within a day.

 

[99wattr89]

That's encouraging - I also just saw that one of the staff fixed the series that spurred me to post here. Is the best course of action just to report unreadable releases with the report button for the series?

 

[FireFish5000]

@99wattr89
Is your loli invincible? I bet she is.
I would say reporting it as incomprehensible MTL is probably the right move.

 

[99wattr89]

Sounds good. Hopefully rather than being discouraged from scanlation, those interested in making MTL scans hook up with some editors and learn to do some deciphering of the more incoherent outputs. 🙂

 

[FireFish5000]

Agreed. If nothing else, this was a good demonstration of automatic cleaning. I am incredibly curious of what it would have looked like if he used content aware fill instead of normal box fill.
Box fill turned transparent backgrounds into white boxes with text on them. Content aware fill would have instead done automatic redrawing. I have no clue how passable that would have been though.

Examples from the link.

Spoiler

A lot of these assume some level of human intervention to ensure quality, but sane defaults would limit how often thats needed (eg. optimize for patterns and gradients. assume sampling range like 2x the width and 1.5x the height)