Site Update - 14th of May 2025

[Yanqui9]

I also am not going to be surprised if some of the smaller 'friendly' countries for hosting suddenly aren't so friendly, either because they start catching pressure from Japan/Korea (or from the west backing them up) to defend the international copyrights that they are technically obliged to protect under several agreements they're signatories to, or because a group of JP/KR companies get to the right person in a government ministry somewhere and ask 'how big a check do we need to write you to make this a priority?'

What I don't think those "teenage hottakes" referred to realize is that mutual respecting of copyrights is very much deliberately mentioned in any international agreements. Even in the 1952 peace treaty that normalized US/Japanese relations (I looked it up once because I'm a history geek), there's a clause in there about mutual respecting of copyrights. So, anything copyrighted in Japan is copyrighted in the US. (I know some try to say 'this ain't Japan so we can get away with it!).

I know, it sucks. I'm an old geezer and I was bootlegging online before many of you were born, but... well, if they decide to put the spotlight on, there's nothing you can do about it, unfortunately. :-(

 

[Angry_Panda]

I know, it sucks. I'm an old geezer and I was bootlegging online before many of you were born, but... well, if they decide to put the spotlight on, there's nothing you can do about it, unfortunately. :-(

🍻

The first game I can remember pirating was Wolfenstein ( ). I think it fit on about four 3.5" floppies? Might be confusing that part with Doom.

The first show I can remember pirating was South Park season 1, which was coming out my senior year of high school. Somebody put up a... RealPlayer? compatible file for each show on a site somewhere (no attempt to hide those or make it hard to find them - it was 1997 and there was literally no precedent), and we pulled those down onto a Mac in the Talented and Gifted room and stashed them in a folder buried someplace way down in an application folder.

Nothing has really changed that much in the intervening three decades.

 

[Wylie]

Can we get a "DMCA" tag next to the Ongoing/Completed to make it easier to triage our libraries?

 

[cokelemon]

How nice to see almost everything I was reading get nuked. They couldn't even leave Cooking Papa alone. Kodansha, only 24 chapters were translated OUT OF 1600+, WHY BOTHER?!

Knowing that I've only read 24/1600+ of this gem leaves me with mixed feelings

 

[JasonBourne117]

this is certainly one of the threads of all time. Guess I shouldn't have stopped saving the stuff I read in my bookmarks, now I gotta wait for that library exporting tool to come around bc I'm way too lazy to go through with it manually (and my list is fucking gigantic)
Future is looking bleak, but hopefully we'll pull through. See ya on the next one folks, fuck the brainless greedy corpos, fuck the publishers, fuck the Koreans in particular and their shitty slop and fuck this gay ass world for constantly trying to take away everything that I love and treasure.

where is the hug emote because you get all the hugs.

yeah, this is shitty. I think given the previous experiences we are much more resilient and will overcome this as we always do. Adapt and overcome. Roll up our sleeves and get back to it.

 

[Bronadian]

Still no word from the admins huh.

 

[Dor1tos]

Still no word from the admins huh.

What do you want them to say?
This site is dead now and they know it. Its corpse will shamble along for a good while, but scanlators will leave because their uploads just get scrubbed and the userbase will follow. As soon as an alternative site pops up, traffic here will fall off a cliff.

 

[T-sama]

What do you want them to say?
This site is dead now and they know it. Its corpse will shamble along for a good while, but scanlators will leave because their uploads just get scrubbed and the userbase will follow. As soon as an alternative site pops up, traffic here will fall off a cliff.

Honestly? Mangadex is possibly dead as a reading site, but I do think it could theorically survive as a scanlation and community hub, I mentioned that multiple times and even gave some suggestions of how it could work.

Cause really, in my opinion Mangadex was never  just about reading manga, unlike pretty much all sites the community here was just as important, better place to talk about scanlation, discuss chapters, find series and so on.

It won't be a easy transition, but I do think it's worth giving a shot, use Mangadex to talk about scanlation, chapters, find series, get feed of what new chapters are out, just gotta get the chapters somewhere else.

 

[xEternalSoul]

Honestly? Mangadex is possibly dead as a reading site, but I do think it could theorically survive as a scanlation and community hub, I mentioned that multiple times and even gave some suggestions of how it could work.

Cause really, in my opinion Mangadex was never  just about reading manga, unlike pretty much all sites the community here was just as important, better place to talk about scanlation, discuss chapters, find series and so on.

It won't be a easy transition, but I do think it's worth giving a shot, use Mangadex to talk about scanlation, chapters, find series, get feed of what new chapters are out, just gotta get the chapters somewhere else.

Well, remove all the manga and guess what? It's a hentai doujin site now! Unless the doujins are being removed too which I haven't read about.

 

[T-sama]

Well, remove all the manga and guess what? It's a hentai doujin site now! Unless the doujins are being removed too which I haven't read about.

Not necessarily, maybe Mangadex becomes Manhwadex lol

Hentaidex doesn't sound that bad though

 

[Ip0x0410]

I was someone who read from Manganato before it got nuked so I know a thing or two about getting my series back up from the experience. First, there are sites like everythingmoe that have a manga sites section which you can view. There’s also an extension called MAL-sync that helps you to sync your mangas from third party sites with my anime list and aniD. There are a lot of tools I found that are helpful, mostly from piracy subreddits like r/piracy and r/mangapiracy hope this helps some folks

 

[Angry_Panda]

I mentioned Battle Programmer Shirase above; the Wikipedia entry for that has a reference to this article from 2007 (which, for those who can't do the math, is 18 years ago at this point).

Concerning takedown notices and the community reaction:

For years this "fansubbing" community has believed that Japanese animation studios tacitly condoned their online activities, at least as long as the shows hadn't yet been released in the United States. But in early December, a studio called Media Factory began sending letters to a handful of big anime fan sites ordering them to stop distributing or linking to copies of its works online. News of the letters helped splinter Anime-Faith [a fansub group] and triggered an impassioned debate across the broader community. Some people wanted to stop translating and distributing Media Factory's works immediately, respecting the studio's request. Others argued that the studio hadn't sought out the actual groups doing the translating, and so might still turn a blind eye to their work. [...] Most groups like this fervently believe they are supporting the cause of anime by allowing fans to see otherwise unavailable titles, and building awareness of shows that would otherwise be unknown before their U.S. release. Most take their "fansubs" out of circulation when an American company licenses a title for distribution in the United States. The only problem is that it's not technically legal.

From ADV (LOL!):

"There's no gray area," said David Williams, a producer at ADV Films, one of the largest distributors of Japanese animation DVDs and merchandise in the United States. "It is technically illegal. When we announce a title, if there is a site that is distributing fansubs, then we contract them and ask them to remove it."

On the Japanese studios at the time:

That leaves the ball in the original Japanese studios' court, and except for Media Factory, it's not obvious what they think of their English-speaking online fans. Nolan said the directors are well aware that their titles are being translated and distributed here, however. He pointed to the recent final episode of a series called "Battle Programmer Shirase," in which the director included an apology for having to end the series, addressed to "those who enjoy the show on TV, and to those outside the broadcast area who took special measures to watch the show on their PC monitors, and to everyone who watched it subtitled overseas without permission."

There really is nothing new under the sun.

 

[Anonymous4245]

So anyone knows how I can export my read list? My read chapters data should still be existing right?

 

[havelmom]

The issue for me is not where or how to read manga. Its keeping up with manga with infrequent releases that may span several weeks or months. I tend to forget Im reading a manga title until I see it on my feed and find out the last chapter was 2 months ago. Its harder the more manga titles there are to follow.

Is there anyway for Mangadex to shift from hosting manga online and instead allow scanlators to post their DMCA'd manga to just show on feed that they have a new release? Like what MANGAPLUS or COMICKEY are already doing here?

I know about mangaupdates but its not the same as they don't filter releases to what Im specifically reading. Or at least I don't know how to do that.

piracy is always a service problem
they had an opportunity to partner with mangadex (or even buy it) to create a reading hub
now they're about to have 9999999 more pirate websites
because reading about the 2007 TPB debacle is too hard for these clowns

 

[NIB]

So the site is going to become a "zombie" until the "last dance", huh?

That's why some sites made the "smart" decision to change their IP and link, or to change their image completely. I suppose Mangadex will do what they did a while ago: "freeze" the site until everything passes (this site became popular again), thus avoiding the page going down, as happened to One Manga and Batoto.

I've several "backup" pages with me that have been around much longer than MD, and since I've had Bakaupdates providing updates on the manga I'm reading, I'm fine. Although I'll miss commenting on the chapters I read weekly, I think the admins can do something about it, some similar to the style Mangahelpers uses.

 

[Nick86]

It is unrelated. We have received a dmca request for those chapters.

Note that this is the first time a takedown happened on this scale. Before it was just singular manga on the direct request of the author, or Naver because they're scary.

The unavailable chapter listings (a v3 feature where you can see the chapter but can't access the images) will return asap.
For the users that care about the comments or use chapter read markers for tracking (please don't) don't worry; the comments and markers will return.
The users that want a list of what has been taken down will have to wait for said feature too.

Edit: We know you all have many questions. More information will be provided in due time.

Would be good to have an entry list in the main page of chapters removed from your database and the reason (example, chapter x removed requested by y), so people can keep a track of titles that they can read anymore here. I have many series i'm following but i forget about them overtime if they are not updated anymore, at least send a notification if something happen to x title.

 

[foxxreader66]

It is unrelated. We have received a dmca request for those chapters.

Note that this is the first time a takedown happened on this scale. Before it was just singular manga on the direct request of the author, or Naver because they're scary.

The unavailable chapter listings (a v3 feature where you can see the chapter but can't access the images) will return asap.
For the users that care about the comments or use chapter read markers for tracking (please don't) don't worry; the comments and markers will return.
The users that want a list of what has been taken down will have to wait for said feature too.

Edit: We know you all have many questions. More information will be provided in due time.

I have a few questions as well. First and foremost, where should we look for this provided information?

Very importantly to me, I think that the chapters being taken down is one thing and that is understandable, and okay (although it sucks) but, I did notice that whole titles were removed rather than just all the chapters and so they disappeared from my MDLists which I used to track specific titles and I noticed the loss immediately.

I just want to know if it will be possible to see what titles were removed from our lists, or if we would have to remember and search for them when (if) a list of all removed titles is provided.

 

[Tscheddov]

I have a few questions as well. First and foremost, where should we look for this provided information?

Very importantly to me, I think that the chapters being taken down is one thing and that is understandable, and okay (although it sucks) but, I did notice that whole titles were removed rather than just all the chapters and so they disappeared from my MDLists which I used to track specific titles and I noticed the loss immediately.

I just want to know if it will be possible to see what titles were removed from our lists, or if we would have to remember and search for them when (if) a list of all removed titles is provided.

Can you tell what titles you think were removed entirely ?
So far i only noticed missing chapters.

 

[VesperPie]

I just realized that since the purge it f-up reverse image search for manga images.

 

[bondejeger]

Can you tell what titles you think were removed entirely ?
So far i only noticed missing chapters.

False child.