Oh come on. Please stop this illegal things talk and something like that. Even hackers and game piracy "the scene" have their own rules and ethics. You are too naive to think that ethics only applies to good things.
I just checked the mangadex rules. It says 2 months inactivity. I'm sorry if i made mistake. But I believe it was 6 months before mangadex down. Mangaupdates also use 6 months for inactivity.
Hey, why do you sound so mad ?
I don't hate anyone nor I tell
pahayuuka4545 to stop.
Rules are needed to prevent dispute between groups. Because that happens often. The options are you start from the beginning and don't rely on other group's work or you contact the related group to get confirmation.
"just don't read it and wait for your favourite group" is not a solution and doesn't solve anything. You can say something like that because you think from reader perspective.
I actually don't want to argue and avoid conflict. So, I hope you understand.
Having your own doesn't have anything to do with ethics, you don't understand that word if you think it applies to bad things. Bullies can make rules that nerds have to give them lunch money,and say that if nerds hide it they're stealing from bullies, but if they claim it's about ethics they're lying or being hypocrites, those rules aren't ethical at all. If you're stealing mangaka's hard work by scanlating and uploading it, and then even dare to claim ownership over it, you're not only thief like the rest of us here, but also arrogant hypocrite usurping the rights of hard-working mangaka who created this, in your hubris.
As for Mangadex rules, they doesn't say anything about "sniping" at all. Mangadex rules regarding inactivity are all about that group's own chapters and their right to manage or remove the stuff they uploaded themsleves, just like most Mangadex rules, not about some made up rights to translate manga series. You can snipe as much as you want, even shitty MTL snipes of regularly updating groups are clearly allowed. The only times Mangadex will remove someone else's work is when it's the actual legal and ethical owner who demands this, via for example Cease and Desist letter. This happened with Act Age for example.
"Rules", or rather best practices, since word "rules" falsely suggests there is some authority behind them, can be useful to prevent shitty MTL translation that lower the value of original work and can even cause readers to misunderstand series or give it bad reputation, and to prevent unnecessary doubling of work when two groups do same manga, but your solution of "start from scratch" doesn't even have anything to do with this. This is just dumb wasteful make-work that nobody will even read, all to satisfy someone's fake ownership fetish of stolen goods. You can easly see what readers here, on 4chan and on Reddit and other sites think about primadonna scanlators who whine about bullshit "sniping" and their supporters. The only exception to that reaction is when group is regularly updating after raws, but someone uploads shitty scanlation, especially barely intelligible MTL, days before good translation would be put on Mangadex.
The reader perspective is the only valid one, since the only - and very arguable, I admit - moral merit of scanlation is to provide the access to manga to readers that couldn't buy it otherwise, and to popularize and promote it, leading to manga being officially translated and bought legally by more people. That's why many scanlators stop when official release arrives, to promote the legal way and to support the author, and to not steal from them, and why some scanlators give links and instructions to buy Japanese e-books of their manga in credit pages. That's why IMHO bad MTL translations are morally worse, despite both being stealing, since they can be more harmful to original author by spreading damaged version of their work. Every perspective that talks about morality but doesn't have anything to do with well-being of original author, the mangaka who drew this, isn't actually about ethics at all, it's just sniffing your own farts over the stuff you stole and arrogantly claim as your.
There was no need to snipe this, and it's kinda rude that you don't even plan on continuing.
This wasn't sniping, last group hasn't updated it in a long while by the time new scanlator worked, and even if they didn't put the rest of the chapters like they actually did, it would still be useful contribution. Stop criticizing people who do good work for us readers, in the name of made up arrogant and hypocritical "rules".