What exactly is sniping, and why does it make people so angry?

[assholescans]

I legitimately forgot about aggregator sites. If a series already has a better scan dealing with it, shitting out a chapter in a couple of hours is basically vandalism.

The Yowa Yowa Sensei case was obviously vandalism, but for what purpose I'm uncertain. There someone dumped like 10+ poorly edited MTL chapters to get the scanlation group to quit. That's probably the most extreme case I've seen ever.

 

[assholescans]

It's there isn't such a thing as bad practice then I guess I'll just start taking a shit on people's lawns. You call me delusional, but you think it's fine if people act like dicks just because they're online. There has to be etiquette, even if it's not bound by law, I think as humans we can freaking act civilized. Thinking that's impossible is twitter mentality right there. Hope it doesn't bleed into your everyday life.

Jesus.

The non written sniping rules are pretty loose, and honestly it's kind of random if the sniper receives a backlash or not. People are less likely to get mad if the quality is higher (especially in form of readability), the original scanlator is slow with releases (think bocchi, where the original scanlator probably released two chapters a year or something), and to an extent if people like the new group (popular groups are popular).

On the other hand people are more likely to get mad if it's low quality and MTL that's just made to get the original group to quit, the group is obviously going for patreons/donations/ad-infested readers to make money on popular series, and the original group is doing a more than good enough job and they're not far behind.

One of the hard cases are probably the ones where people only release by volumes, and are far behind especially with monthly releases. One of the most extreme cases is Touge Oni which is bimonthly, but the scanlator uses volume raws. Releases are usually over a year apart. Most people would've forgotten the entire manga by the time new chapters are released, but the quality is pretty good. In this case it's hard to say if sniping doing the magazine raws would be right or not I think, but there's a strong chance it'd cause the original scanlator to quit. So at least no one has done it yet. The next volume is out in two weeks.

 

[BuyVelomobiles]

The Yowa Yowa Sensei case was obviously vandalism, but for what purpose I'm uncertain. There someone dumped like 10+ poorly edited MTL chapters to get the scanlation group to quit. That's probably the most extreme case I've seen ever.

You talking about the early chapters (5-12) that 89ji_mayoi did? Because, if it makes you feel any better, I was dropping that series anyway. I went in for an ecchi romcom, not full-on erotica. The last straw was the time MC somehow ended up getting invited to a threesome shower with Sensei and his sister.

I'm all for trash and incest, but I refuse to translate it. Especially after that bait and switch. Though yeah, it wasn't very motivating to have some guy just shit out a few chapters "Because his friend really wanted to read it" (That was his excuse IIRC).

People are less likely to get mad if the quality is higher (especially in form of readability), the original scanlator is slow with releases (think bocchi, where the original scanlator probably released two chapters a year or something), and to an extent if people like the new group (popular groups are popular).

In my experience, the biggest factor is whether people like the original group specifically. The quality is irrelevant, since most people literally can't tell which of the two is most accurate. I've made it a habit to fix series where the "TL" outright makes shit up, or doesn't proofread his MTL; The worst backlash I've gotten was for Dorei Choukyou 48, even though the "TL" literally admits to making shit up in the forum.

 

[assholescans]

You talking about the early chapters (5-12) that 89ji_mayoi did? Because, if it makes you feel any better, I was dropping that series anyway. I went in for an ecchi romcom, not full-on erotica. The last straw was the time MC somehow ended up getting invited to a threesome shower with Sensei and his sister.

I'm all for trash and incest, but I refuse to translate it. Especially after that bait and switch. Though yeah, it wasn't very motivating to have some guy just shit out a few chapters "Because his friend really wanted to read it" (That was his excuse IIRC).

In my experience, the biggest factor is whether people like the original group specifically. The quality is irrelevant, since most people literally can't tell which of the two is most accurate. I've made it a habit to fix series where the "TL" outright makes shit up, or doesn't proofread his MTL; The worst backlash I've gotten was for Dorei Choukyou 48, even though the "TL" literally admits to making shit up in the forum.

No, there was someone that dropped a ton of chapters when hako and ent started working on it half a year ago, it might have been over 20 chapters actually. But there's a good chance it was the same people that sabotaged you I guess. Someone seems to purposefully want people not to work on that manga for some reason. Though why is beyond me.

 

[BuyVelomobiles]

No, there was someone that dropped a ton of chapters when hako and ent started working on it half a year ago, it might have been over 20 chapters actually. But there's a good chance it was the same people that sabotaged you I guess. Someone seems to purposefully want people not to work on that manga for some reason. Though why is beyond me.

He dropped them then deleted them?

 

[assholescans]

He dropped them then deleted them?

Yeah, he deleted them as Hako and Ent continued forward. You can see it easily by the comments, at volume 4 Hako and Ent got past the low quality ML scanlations.
They're still going to be what most people read on aggregators though.

 

[knight_evangel]

It's there isn't such a thing as bad practice then I guess I'll just start taking a shit on people's lawns. You call me delusional, but you think it's fine if people act like dicks just because they're online. There has to be etiquette, even if it's not bound by law, I think as humans we can freaking act civilized. Thinking that's impossible is twitter mentality right there. Hope it doesn't bleed into your everyday life.

Jesus.

You're taking this way out of context.

This is also something really common with this discussion. People get....hhmm...really sensitive? And forget what the argument is about midway.


There is a difference between "it'd be nice if you'd respect my wishes. oh you won't? okay I am blocking you."
and saying "I DEMAND YOU TAKE THIS DOWN. NOW!! WOW YOU SUCK.

10 days later "GOD YOU SUCK WILL YOU STOP THIS I WILL CONTINUE PULLING EVERYTHING FROM THIS WEBSITE UNTIL YOU STOP"

20 days later when they've already pulled all their chapters, they still come into a forum making snide comments and complaining. That rent-free grievance they have with the situation is entirely a personal problem, is what I've been saying.


That's the context I'm talking about here. There was never any other, and if I accidentally replied to someone who wasn't speaking on that context, then my bad.

 

[BuyVelomobiles]

You're taking this way out of context.

This is also something really common with this discussion. People get....hhmm...really sensitive? And forget what the argument is about midway.


There is a difference between "it'd be nice if you'd respect my wishes. oh you won't? okay I am blocking you."
and saying "I DEMAND YOU TAKE THIS DOWN. NOW!! WOW YOU SUCK.

10 days later "GOD YOU SUCK WILL YOU STOP THIS I WILL CONTINUE PULLING EVERYTHING FROM THIS WEBSITE UNTIL YOU STOP"

20 days later when they've already pulled all their chapters, they still come into a forum making snide comments and complaining. That rent-free grievance they have with the situation is entirely a personal problem, is what I've been saying.


That's the context I'm talking about here. There was never any other, and if I accidentally replied to someone who wasn't speaking on that context, then my bad.

I mean, I have my own sniping issues. I spend all the time doing every part of the chapter, fussing over phrasing, context, sound effects, etc. The other guy literally pastes all the text into Google Translate, then pastes the result into the page without even checking to see if it even read the text properly (There was a big, fat 21 on screen that he Google misreads as 22, and he just put it in anyway). In less than 4 hours, the chapter is up, the aggregator sites pick it up, everyone who doesn't know about the website is now stuck with the worst possible translation, lots of people shoot their interaction load, denying me my own interaction on the forums, and to boot, there's a small minority of morons who now thinks this is the "correct" translation and will complain when I upload the proper one.

Luckily for me, the guy this time doesn't speak English or Japanese very well, so his work is obviously bad. But what if he actually spoke English, and then just rewrote everything to sound good, but still be wrong? Is endless saltposting good? No, probably not. But surely you can see the problem here.

 

[TestAddress]

Sniping is a short term for robbers making house rules, which of course, will fall like the den of thieves they are.

 

[ThatSoulsGirl]

You're taking this way out of context.

This is also something really common with this discussion. People get....hhmm...really sensitive? And forget what the argument is about midway.


There is a difference between "it'd be nice if you'd respect my wishes. oh you won't? okay I am blocking you."
and saying "I DEMAND YOU TAKE THIS DOWN. NOW!! WOW YOU SUCK.

10 days later "GOD YOU SUCK WILL YOU STOP THIS I WILL CONTINUE PULLING EVERYTHING FROM THIS WEBSITE UNTIL YOU STOP"

20 days later when they've already pulled all their chapters, they still come into a forum making snide comments and complaining. That rent-free grievance they have with the situation is entirely a personal problem, is what I've been saying.


That's the context I'm talking about here. There was never any other, and if I accidentally replied to someone who wasn't speaking on that context, then my bad.

I was just saying that in general, but it's all good!

 

[assholescans]

Sniping is a short term for robbers making house rules, which of course, will fall like the den of thieves they are.

Honor among thieves. Though I do think that some snipers deliberately snipe to get groups to quit and especially get translators to quit scanlating completely. It's definitely getting harder getting translators than just a couple of years ago.

Scanlation in the form we know it is probably dying though. MTL is starting to get good enough that people can use AI tools to read manga themselves, and more and more manga is being licensed and available and even simulpublished. I think that scanlations will become somewhat what fansubs are these days soon if it continues this way. Scanlations will become more of a niche for people that want the best quality possible, for works that MTL don't work on and don't have official translations (most 4koma, heavy accents, lots of puns etc), and less known or self-published stuff that don't have official translations that the scanlators want to promote.

Considering that the main purpose of scanlation is promoting the manga, I think it's kind of sad and that you won't be able to advertise the stuff you like the same way anymore, but it is what it is I guess.

 

[NeoRetro]

A issue that isn't adressed enough is that nowdays: it feels like the term is misused way too much with people thinking "more than one group doing a translation= sniping" and scans groups use "sniping" as a excuse to maintain exclusive "rights" over a manga, which we all know how silly it is since scanlations aren't even official work in first place.
I think more variety is always a good thing and if you don't like one scan, having a alternative is a great thing

Really, people need to educate themselves more and stop just parroting words they read without bothering to look up what they actually mean

 

[BuyVelomobiles]

A issue that isn't adressed enough is that nowdays: it feels like the term is misused way too much with people thinking "more than one group doing a translation= sniping" and scans groups use "sniping" as a excuse to maintain exclusive "rights" over a manga, which we all know how silly it is since scanlations aren't even official work in first place.
I think more variety is always a good thing and if you don't like one scan, having a alternative is a great thing

Really, people need to educate themselves more and stop just parroting words they read without bothering to look up what they actually mean

Well enlighten us: What does it mean?

 

[knight_evangel]

I think his point was that it's demotivating when someone snipes you with a low quality release when you've spent a lot of time redrawing and making good looking SFXs, which takes a lot of time. Most people will only read the first release regardless of quality, and it's the first release that's going to be uploaded and read on aggregators.

I have two takes for this. (Or I guess three)

First of all, what's odd about this post to me is that I've seen an increasingly obscene number of posts on mangadex that are anti-MTL, anti-New Group as well as anti-Snipe in general. Like, even if it's a new group and NOT a snipe they still don't want it.

So it's always strange to me how it's a problem of exposure, when so much of the community themselves are constantly up in arms and are so obviously going to expose themselves only to the group they want to read it from.

This tells me it's all in your heads. Because if the scanlators are saying "most people will read anything" and comment section reply numbers are multiplied by EIGHT whenever a snipe happens due to disgruntled users who so obviously want to read the original group's release, then the numbers aren't adding up.

----

Secondly, I'm surprised to even see aggregators come up in this conversation. It's a bottomfeeding existence, thinking about them at all is like feeding a troll. We're talking about a website that's solely created to make ad revenue off someone's work based on someone freaking else's work with zero permission from either layer of parties. Whoever is reading on it doesn't give a crap about this entire convo to begin with, even if they are using an adblocker. Hell, I see plenty of users on THIS website who obviously wouldn't pay a penny for a physical volume, and I'm not exaggerating.


----

Now theoretically someone (and this WILL happen eventually if it hasn't already) could take an AI scanner/cleaner+MTL combo and dump a mass amount of chapters out, effectively completing an entire series' raw backlog in an extremely short time.

And somehow this just so happens to be a first timer, barely-English speaking, non-forum user who the scan group can't even contact.

They either-

A: Dismiss it entirely, knowing people looking for real scans will likely visit batoto or mangadex, possibly even bakaupdates on the search for an actual scan group.

B: Give up on the project since it will compromise their work.

What I love about this thought experiment is that people usually respond believing MTLers can't possibly scan ALL the manga. Just move to a different manga right? ...nearly 6 billion people in the world have internet access, yes they absolutely can sabotage just about every work in existence. For the record it's already happening (in the nsfw community), and as AI and MTL gets easier to access for the average person things will only get worse.

So do you just give up on scanlation altogether once it gets overrun with people who don't know what they're doing? If attitudes about this don't change then we'll be left with only MTL sooner or later. lol You might think this is pulling the argument out of context, but like I said this is literally happening right now.

 

[caprisat]

if the ones working on it arent great at the job i get it but they should ask

 

[assholescans]

I have two takes for this. (Or I guess three)

First of all, what's odd about this post to me is that I've seen an increasingly obscene number of posts on mangadex that are anti-MTL, anti-New Group as well as anti-Snipe in general. Like, even if it's a new group and NOT a snipe they still don't want it.

So it's always strange to me how it's a problem of exposure, when so much of the community themselves are constantly up in arms and are so obviously going to expose themselves only to the group they want to read it from.

This tells me it's all in your heads. Because if the scanlators are saying "most people will read anything" and comment section reply numbers are multiplied by EIGHT whenever a snipe happens due to disgruntled users who so obviously want to read the original group's release, then the numbers aren't adding up.

----

Secondly, I'm surprised to even see aggregators come up in this conversation. It's a bottomfeeding existence, thinking about them at all is like feeding a troll. We're talking about a website that's solely created to make ad revenue off someone's work based on someone freaking else's work with zero permission from either layer of parties. Whoever is reading on it doesn't give a crap about this entire convo to begin with, even if they are using an adblocker. Hell, I see plenty of users on THIS website who obviously wouldn't pay a penny for a physical volume, and I'm not exaggerating.


----

Now theoretically someone (and this WILL happen eventually if it hasn't already) could take an AI scanner/cleaner+MTL combo and dump a mass amount of chapters out, effectively completing an entire series' raw backlog in an extremely short time.

And somehow this just so happens to be a first timer, barely-English speaking, non-forum user who the scan group can't even contact.

They either-

A: Dismiss it entirely, knowing people looking for real scans will likely visit batoto or mangadex, possibly even bakaupdates on the search for an actual scan group.

B: Give up on the project since it will compromise their work.

What I love about this thought experiment is that people usually respond believing MTLers can't possibly scan ALL the manga. Just move to a different manga right? ...nearly 6 billion people in the world have internet access, yes they absolutely can sabotage just about every work in existence. For the record it's already happening (in the nsfw community), and as AI and MTL gets easier to access for the average person things will only get worse.

So do you just give up on scanlation altogether once it gets overrun with people who don't know what they're doing? If attitudes about this don't change then we'll be left with only MTL sooner or later. lol You might think this is pulling the argument out of context, but like I said this is literally happening right now.

The reason scanlators care about aggregators is because the first version out will be uploaded to the aggregators, and they rarely bother updating or switching out the releases. There are far more people reading on the different aggregators than on mangadex. So if someone release a low quality MTL chapter, most likely no one else except a small handful of people on mangadex will read the later good release. Which is demotivating for a lot of scanlators to be sure. Remember that mangadex is not as big and well known as people here make it out to be.

Like the yowa yowa sensei example, there are definitely people out to sabotage the original scanlation group. And even if mangadex doesn’t allow uploads of unedited AI MTL scanlations, they will still be scraped by aggregators if they’re uploaded to mangadex, so the harm is already done at that point.

There are probably more that are into manga now because it’s free and easy to pirate, on reddit for example a lot of people refuse to discuss the official simulpublished releases except from mangaplus, even though they can easily pirate and read them from aggregators. Somehow the community there has changed into that manga is something you’re entitled to get for free and that licensing is bad. So completely different mind set of the original basis and purpose of scanlation. Which is kind of sad, but it is what it is.

These people probably wouldn’t even bother supporting the artist or manga even if the manga they love gets axed without their help. Doesn’t help that these people would rather donate money to scanlators than to support the artist, because they think that at least the scanlators make an effort to make the manga available to them, not thinking that without the artist there wouldn’t be a manga in the first place. The mind boggling mental gymnastics of these self-entitled leeches are ridiculous to say the least.

 

[BuyVelomobiles]

And even if mangadex doesn’t allow uploads of unedited AI MTL scanlations, they will still be scraped by aggregators if they’re uploaded to mangadex, so the harm is already done at that point.

So wait, are you saying they currently don't, or is this a hypothetical?

These people probably wouldn’t even bother supporting the artist or manga even if the manga they love gets axed without their help. Doesn’t help that these people would rather donate money to scanlators than to support the artist, because they think that at least the scanlators make an effort to make the manga available to them, not thinking that without the artist there wouldn’t be a manga in the first place.

I mean, there is a point to be made about how difficult it is to do in general. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but if you don't live in Japan, getting digital releases for basically anything is a Sisyphean task. I've tried several times to pay, and it usually leads to dead ends. Hell, I've got one guy I'm desperate to support, to the extent that I've made it a point to actually tip the guy 30+ dollars a month, and I still haven't bought his latest release because he put it up on Fanza and DLsite, and payment processors think that they have the right to tell me what the hell I can and can't pay for.

I'm sure most people haven't tried this hard to pay for shit, but they shouldn't have to in the first place: Their reasons are probably shit, but they happen to have a point, if only by accident.

 

[assholescans]

So wait, are you saying they currently don't, or is this a hypothetical?

I mean, there is a point to be made about how difficult it is to do in general. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but if you don't live in Japan, getting digital releases for basically anything is a Sisyphean task. I've tried several times to pay, and it usually leads to dead ends. Hell, I've got one guy I'm desperate to support, to the extent that I've made it a point to actually tip the guy 30+ dollars a month, and I still haven't bought his latest release because he put it up on Fanza and DLsite, and payment processors think that they have the right to tell me what the hell I can and can't pay for.

I'm sure most people haven't tried this hard to pay for shit, but they shouldn't have to in the first place: Their reasons are probably shit, but they happen to have a point, if only by accident.

You get banned if you try to upload unedited AI MTL scanlations. Still if someone does and they get banned afterwards and their uploads removed from mangadex, they will still have been scraped from mangadex if they aren't removed more or less at once.
Though there was some barely edited AI MTL scanlation that were allowed a few months back for some reason, although they were pretty terrible. I think the uploader deleted them though because the backlash was huge, but I'm not entirely certain.

I mostly buy stuff on bookwalker which is fairly easy to use, and they take paypal. I can even use the app to pay, though since it defaults to the global store, I have to go through some extra steps to get to the Japanese store through the app, which is kind of a pain. At least it works I guess. Otherwise Amazon, Kobo, and CMOA are fairly easy to use, and definitely not a Sisyphean task. If you struggle with the Japanese, you can easily use just chrome with automatic page translation. Firefox has gotten it too now it seems, but it's kind of slow.

For some reason you're not allowed to buy magazines older than three months on bookwalker, so I had to use Japanese VPN to do that. So now that the free Proton VPN doesn't have the choice to choose country anymore, before you could choose USA, Netherlands, and Japan, I'm not able to buy them anymore. Unless I choose to pay for VPN, but yeah that ain't gonna happen.

 

[BuyVelomobiles]

You get banned if you try to upload unedited AI MTL scanlations. Still if someone does and they get banned afterwards and their uploads removed from mangadex, they will still have been scraped from mangadex if they aren't removed more or less at once.
Though there was some barely edited AI MTL scanlation that were allowed a few months back for some reason, although they were pretty terrible. I think the uploader deleted them though because the backlash was huge, but I'm not entirely certain.

Where is that rule? Because my own sniper seems to do unedited MTL pretty much exclusively (The OCR even failed to recognize a clearly-visible 21, and he kept the erroneous result). He's still uploading, though.

I mostly buy stuff on bookwalker which is fairly easy to use, and they take paypal. I can even use the app to pay, though since it defaults to the global store, I have to go through some extra steps to get to the Japanese store through the app, which is kind of a pain. At least it works I guess. For some reason you're not allowed to buy magazines older than three months on bookwalker, so I had to use Japanese VPN to do that. So now that the free Proton VPN doesn't have the choice to choose country anymore, before you could choose USA, Netherlands, and Japan, I'm not able to buy them anymore. Unless I choose to pay for VPN, but yeah that ain't gonna happen.

So I need a Bookwalker account, a Paypal account, then I need to go through "some extra steps" to go the Japanese store "through an app". And if I want to buy anything older than 3 months, I need to also make an account with, and pay for, a VPN. Am I understanding this right? And then I can finally spend money on manga?

Otherwise Amazon, Kobo, and CMOA are fairly easy to use, and definitely not a Sisyphean task. If you struggle with the Japanese, you can easily use just chrome with automatic page translation. Firefox has gotten it too now it seems, but it's kind of slow.

Do those even let you make an account if you're not in Japan? I'm pretty sure I tried the Amazon route and failed.

 

[assholescans]

Where is that rule? Because my own sniper seems to do unedited MTL pretty much exclusively (The OCR even failed to recognize a clearly-visible 21, and he kept the erroneous result). He's still uploading, though.

So I need a Bookwalker account, a Paypal account, then I need to go through "some extra steps" to go the Japanese store "through an app". And if I want to buy anything older than 3 months, I need to also make an account with, and pay for, a VPN. Am I understanding this right? And then I can finally spend money on manga?

Do those even let you make an account if you're not in Japan? I'm pretty sure I tried the Amazon route and failed.

Because he hasn't used an AI tool like ichigoreader or cotrans, he's typesetting edited MTL himself. Most likely he OCR it with google lens and run it through chatgpt or something. He's doing it according to the rules. I'm currently using edited MTL myself for my releases because I haven't been able to get a translator for my scanlations request releases, and some people even say that can't notice that it's MTL. Though I guess you can't unless you can translate it yourself.

You don't need to use the app, I just use it because it's easier. You can use regular credit cards with bookwalker and don't need paypal, but I mostly use paypal because it's simpler, or just pay in apple store. Fairly certain the 3 months rule are only for magazines, at least I've been able to buy anything else regardless if it's older in bookwalker. I haven't used Amazon, but at least CMOA and Kobo is fine outside Japan. My point being that it's not hard at all. Maybe it was harder a years ago, but at least for the past three years or something it's been fairly easy to buy Japanese digital raws. The Fanza and DL site only got harder recently a few months ago, but that doesn't apply to regular stores.