Most Group Uploads?

[BestBoy]

Which groups have the most uploads?

Is it possible to determine which groups use AI or MTL based on the number of uploads and how long they've been active?

For instance, UTOON is up to 2300 uploads in 5 months. Scanlating and uploading 15 chapters a day? Something must be automated, right?

 

[Manko-sensei]

Regrettably there are no advanced search tools for groups, but I can at least check the ones that have more titles among the ones I read from. About which ones use AI or MTL, it's not that easy since some groups have been (or were) active for ten years or more, I can think about the anons /a/nonymous and /u/Scanlations but also other ones with their own webpage (not from 4chan) that also have quite a number of them like Yuri Project. And if you think about "how much can a one-man group do?" then you can check Hachimitsu Scans and What's Typesetting to name but few, they simply had great passion. You can even read an interview Plykiya had with Hachimitsu Scans. There are groups that staff and former staff were part of, like Danke fürs Lesen.

 

[BestBoy]

Thanks for the reply. All the groups you listed have a believable upload cadence, though. Most fall around 1 upload a day or less. The exception being /a/ but that might be explained by a mass upload when MD went live or the fact that anyone that translates a manga on /a/ can upload under that group. Even then it's 8 chapters a day. Almost half of what UTOONS does.
I think there's real potential for identifying groups that use AI or MTL if MD Staff implemented the proper tools.

 

[Manko-sensei]

In case of Utoon it's true that they uploaded a ton of stuff in less than half year, sometimes (specially for those that redirect you to their website) they upload en masse like that because they were already done but they want to fill the update titles of users by lumping a fair amount of them everyday, it'd be about checking their website and seeing the actual date they were uploaded. Since I've only been involved with scanlation groups that had proper translators and even six people per series I only know the nice face of it, also not now but in the past when I checked GDS because of a series they uploaded a bunch of chapters at once because the group leader did it once per day. Basically groups can go from one man group to a few dozens in their best era, but surely there are pages with shady guidelines that may or may not have the amount of staff they claim about but in case they do they may pay a few dollars per chapter but without crediting anybody. Every case has to be looked up separately.
About MTL/AI usage, it's banned when it's both the translation and the editing made with AI or when the work is created with AI, so simply having evidence of translations being machine translation ones is useless for MangaDex.
Edit: one example of a group I had blocked because of the insane spam, INKR comics.

 

[BestBoy]

because they were already done but they want to fill the update titles of users by lumping a fair amount of them everyday

This was pretty easy to check. Their earliest upload on their site is July 15. Their earliest upload on MD was July 20. I'd bet they have consistently kept a 15+ upload cadence for 5 months. They uploaded 27 chapters to their website in the last 20 hours.

INKR comics.

This would definitely fall under your first example of mass uploading previously completed chapters. MD staff are the ones who link official publishers and they tend to do a bunch of them at once. Very different circumstances.

MTL/AI usage

Yes, MTL isn't banned, but I feel like there's more than just that going on for groups that are uploading at a breakneck pace. I just do not see how it would be possible to upload 27 chapters in less than 20 hours without something being automated. MTL translating aside, they'd still have to clean and typeset manually.

Another example of groups like this might be Lua Scans. They've already picked up 175 series in 9 months. Many of them have 20+ chapters completed. Their recent uploads on their site are also huge dumps all at once too. 20+ chapters of a manhwa in a single day. Just go through their "Recently Added" and you can see it yourself. Granted, some of the uploads for that group on MD are huge dumps for series they worked on for a long time and dropped (I think they delete dropped series from their site).

 

[Manko-sensei]

When I said "check their website" I didn't mean MangaDex, even if the chapters are properly uploaded here they may have another site where they have the same chapters since much before, I don't know about the groups you're checking but others have either a site to read them or several Mega links.
I have no doubts that if someone do from scratch more than five chapters per day during a long time they must be either slaves or have automated parts, even if it's not allowed fully AI automated edit they can make appear the script very quick and do fast adjustments, what would take more time is redrawing in that sense. For that you need to check them quality-wise, it can happen that for some series they get ready to use pages, but in most cases you'll find white boxes here and there and no transparent bubbles to take no time getting them ready, a standard bubble page is clean in seconds.
It'll be easier to check the groups that are currently active, but for the others you'll need either to bumb on them, know about their previous existence or check every single group until you hit jackpock (I don't recommend this).

 

[BestBoy]

When I said "check their website" I didn't mean MangaDex

The reason I checked both their site and MD was to rule out the possibility of them having uploaded chapters on their site farther back in time and the mass uploads just being them batch uploading old, completed chapters from their site.

A hypothetical example being, a bunch of completed chapters from Feb. on their site getting batch uploaded in July. This was not the case as they very quickly started uploading to MD after they uploaded to their site.

I followed the same steps for Lua Scans and found similar results to UTOON.

I then tried a 3rd group that had uploaded a lot of chapters in a short time to MD and found that they had simply been uploading chapters to their site a lot longer than they had MD and folks were batch uploading to MD to catch up. This leads me to believe my methodology isn't flawed as it can catch false positives.

I agree, though, it's not feasible to do this manually every time. It took me 2-3 hours for those 3 groups.