I dont know if this is the real Problem on MangaDex , so im just posting this

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Oh boy, I thought I wouldn't involve myself in this mess any further, but it seems like curiosity got the best of me and I ended up going down deeper into the rabbit hole. With that said, I think that for most of us, this drama came completely out of nowhere. In an effort for me to try and understand the situation, I've thoroughly checked the thread, analyzed logs of discord servers and also interviewed the key players that were involved.

This story will mostly focus about the thread that appeared on June 13th 2019 and 2 of the biggest scanlators that are involved: Meraki and JB. The goal of this little investigation is to find out as to what really happened and what eventually led to the decision for the scanlators to leave en masse.

Let me remind everyone that I am not a journalist. As such, do not expect this article to be unopiniated. However, for any claim I make, I will try and make sure that they are properly supported by facts and evidence. My hope with this article is it will be able to clear most of the questions people currently have, especially with all the fakenews floating around. More importantly, I hope nobody gets offended by this and I hope that this serves for the community to strive for improvements.

##First conflict - Jaimini Box
Way before all of this happened, an incident occurred in March 2018 in which a member by the name of "das" has uploaded JB chapters without their permissions. His ambition was to become a MD staff member and saw an opportunity by uploading work that were done by others. Obviously, members of JB aren't amused by it as shown here: https://i.imgur.com/puceNn4.png and Holo contacted them afterwards, clearly stating that "das" is not part of their staff: https://i.imgur.com/iML5dDs.png

A month has passed. Jackladd, who was a member of JB at the time, was sent to delete all those chapters that were uploaded on MD without their permission. The community wasn't exactly happy that their content were being removed from MD, but what infuriated them even more is that the representative of JB actually suggested them to go use kissmanga instead, as shown here: http://prntscr.com/o04j61. Jackladd obviously didn't survive this unscathed as most people thought he did it and also thought that he was an admin of JB, resulting him receiving things ranging from insults to death threats. The JB scanlations obviously aren't amused by this attack on one of their own and made double effort of preventing any JB work from appearing in MD.

##What exactly happened?
What people apparently didn't know (or apparently, they know, but they don't care), is that the original message was this: http://prntscr.com/o04h30. Lymus, a MD staff member quickly pointed out in the same channel that day that the message was in fact tampered by another staff member http://prntscr.com/o04jfh https://i.imgur.com/lv4NSgC.png. Although the logs did not say who it was, they know for a fact that it was a staff who did it https://i.imgur.com/vwvbwT3.png . Holo chimed in during this moment, but he did not help improve the situation as he encourages people to attack the JB admins instead. https://i.imgur.com/TOBaIO1.png

##Who were at fault?
Let us begin by stating all the obvious, the community's behaviour is completely crap. The moment the community went "muh manga", they mercilessly executed someone who at the end of the day was just a messenger. An MD staff was seen abusing their powers and although a few valiantly tried to stop people from ganging up on Jack, everything was moot in the end due to the mob mentality. Then Holo came along and made the situation even worse, by encouraging to vent their anger against the admins from JB. Lets just say that if your goal was to get JB to release their mangas on MD, all these actions are detrimental to that and would deter people from wanting to go to your site.

##Intermezzo
Some time passes and for some weird reason, Holo actually managed to convince the JB group to upload their stuff at MD. I don't know exactly what was discussed, but a delay of 2 weeks for all the new uploads was apparently one of the demands. We all know how readers are at this point and obviously, having to wait for 2 weeks doesn't sit well with some of the community members. Thus, the harassment of the JB members continues. Although Yuno provided his explanations as to why the delay is 2 weeks https://imgur.com/4cs4bQ0 , I can completely understand why people would get angry about it. Does JB deserve the shit treatment for this decision? I leave this up to you people to decide.

##Second conflict - Meraki
On 01-06-2019, the Hatigarm scans were minding their business when a series they have been working on has been sniped by "Facepalm scans". The series in question is "Yancha Gal no Anjou-san". While rather innocent at first, later credit page chapters of Anjou shows them openly mocking all scanlators who asks for donations, going as far as calling them scammers. Anonx, the group behind Meraki scans, took an exception to that and called them out on their provocations in the comment section. As the MD did not think that "Facepalm scans" broke any rules, Anonx got warned for trying to stir up drama (https://imgur.com/jQ7uBeT). Anonx insisted that the credit page was the cause due to inflammatory comments, but the rules at the time didn't conder the credit page as part of the chapter. Again, they did not consider that "Facepalm scans" broke any rules. The situation escalated as tension rose, and Anonx eventually made the decision to pull all the mangas from the website (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/588381556561936385/588390350746288137/unknown.png).

##What exactly happened?
With the MD Staff's mentality to follow all the rules to the exact last detail, you're basically begging for someone to loophole the rule at some point and cause damage at your expense. A quote from Anonx based on what happened behind the scenes: "After that conversation, we went to sleep as we were pretty sleep deprived. We woke up to find out that we were removed from group leader chat and that Zephyrus was giving his own version of events in there to other group leaders. When I asked Lymus about it, he told me he can give me the access to defend myself but I plainly told him if that's the practice they do with every group that leaves, then there is no need however if we are exception then by all means give me the access. To which he told me that that's the practice. But, I did call Zephyrus out on our public chat for spreading half truths and I linked screenshots from celes' DM with him as well as the ones from group leader chat which were sent to me".

I cannot confirm whether Anonx's statement is true, but that is completely irrelevant. Zephyrus apparently even admitted that there was a nice working relationship (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/501436435673645066/588191066524483584/unknown.png), why was this situation allowed to happen anyway?

##Who were at fault?
Some argue that Anonx was too thin-skinned over some little provocation. I, on the other hand, want to point out that rules should always be guidelines and never bibles that should be followed to the last detail. Why are scanlators even allowed to add inflammatory comments on a credit page of a manga anyway?

##Sayonara Mangadex
On 11-06-2019, an Anonymous user representing a numerous amount of big scanlators, has made the declaration to leave Mangadex behind with the following reasons:
- They feel like Mangadex has become a breeding ground for hating on scanlators who fail to meet the demands of MD staffs and their allies. Any teams that decided to leave or not support MD, has allegedly been head hunted by the community.
- Holo has spoken about his idea of making MD legal in the future. This does not set well with the scanlators, because they know well what happened to Fakku. Their fear is that they are being exploited until MD has reached their goals, in which they will proceed to remove all the scanlators in favor of licensed works.

##Was it really greed all along?
The initial accusations thrown at the scanlators was that they were greedy. Honestly, I initially considered it to be pretty plausible, but the more I dug into the matters, the more unlikely it became. I would've believed if it were a few groups that were involved, but no way in hell I believe that to be the case if there are more than 6 scanlators involved in this (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/588336704939753472/588389164366430209/unknown.png), we're not dealing with groups here that have the spending powers of an epic games store here.

##So, what was the cause?
Ahh, the community. Why am I not surprised that they want to feel self-entitled about things on the internet? It's always funny how everyone tries to make the scanlators the bad guys, but consider the following:
1. You probably live in a place where its hard to buy manga.
2. You probably can't read a lick of a Japanese.
3. Guess what, the people you call bad guys allowed you to read them translated "for free".
4. Realize that scanlators are people too and they won't hesitate to screw you over for acting like a self-entitled ass while abusing their goodwill.

##Wait, and the going legit thing?
I don't even understand why people even seriously thought that MD would be going legit any time soon. We've seen how Fakku does it and it has gone to shit. We've seen Crunchyroll's attempt and they still use Flash for their reader. If anything, the primary reason for this debacle is because they all agree that the MD vocal minority of the community is shit and needs to cleaned up.
 
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For anyone glancing over and wondering. This does not appear to be another troll/drama post, but an attempt to actually document it. I, of course, spent 0 time verifying anything. Just the feel of it.

Agree that it felt like all the drama came out of nowhere. I understand various scanlators have problems at various times with the community. For instance, my favorite loli knight is constantly attacked(in the very civil "get a proofreader" kind of way) by the community due to his imperfect english (really not that bad tbh. Better than many Americans I meet in south). That said, the community/threads really weren't that bad until a few days ago IMO. However, people love drama, and it looks like it didn't take much to start it.

But, well... many of the groups I follow have had fires to put out and damage control to do (or damage to ignore in case of loli knight. seemed to have largely taken a no crap policy). I guess with MD being so large, the fires, when they start, are bigger. And putting them out takes a bit longer.

Also, while somewhat off topic, I cannot stand crunchyroll (for anime subs). I mean, I pay for it but.... during prime time (like 8-10pm, 4-5pm on school day, etc) it does not work. If you use a computer, you have to have to use flash (Yes, that thing that all your browsers have long since disabled by default due to numerous security vulnerabilities).
Even with the app, the organization is horrible. For instance, they now translate into multiple languages. They give NO option to filter out the ones you cannot read. I am sick of seeing Portuguese and French translations of things pop up. I really do not recommend it.
 
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@Serelanordir I find your attempt to recap everything very intriguing and admirable for some reason. I suppose because no one really enjoys having to wade through this much drama and yet you went to all the trouble to create a summary of it anyway. I can't guess what compelled you to do this, but I applaud your efforts.

And for that reason, I'm going to include an explanation of a small role in things I (believe?) I had, although I can't guarantee I really contributed very much. It might even be conceited to think I contributed at all, but I'll let others be the judge of that. I don't entirely regret becoming involved and so I don't want to hide that I did or it may seem that way.

Three days after the incident with "Yancha Gal no Anjou-san" and chapters across the site being pulled as a result, I was very confused and curious as to why MD staff had apparently chosen to ignore what had happened and in turn leave a pretty significant portion of the site's users in the dark about why some manga series were suddenly losing chapters, in some cases more than a dozen at once. Staff was clearly aware the chapters were gone because they'd helped in pulling them, and they definitely knew the reason it had happened, so for them to make no statement or clarification struck me as a questionable choice (I also felt it was callous for Staff to just watch the scanlators leave, but in light of other recent events I get the impression these groups were planning on leaving for other reasons anyway which definitely changed my perspective some). Rather than pull my own chapters or try some other form of leverage, I decided instead to mimic what Facepalm did and post a chapter to one of the manga I work on with some credit pages of my own, below (no longer live because I edited the chapter to a normal state after receiving a response):
Ha9LOKs.jpg

211MadP.jpg

Unsurprisingly, it did not take long for some members of Staff to take notice and get in contact with me, although it mostly occurred in the chapter's comment thread (Ueno-san wa Bukiyou ch 1). I won't summarize what happened over there because anyone can go read it themself, but I believe it was because of my urging that they posted the first explanation thread when they did (https://mangadex.org/thread/90179).

Many people, understandably, are simply not interested in the "drama" and I don't insist that they pay attention if they don't care to. I myself think it can be annoying sometimes too, so I don't fault anyone for that. But I still believe it was in the best interest of the community for MangaDex to go public with all of the announcements that they have so far, and in the aftermath there has been a substantial amount of discussion about the implications of these kinds of incidents as well as numerous suggestions for how their impact can be mitigated (for example, improvements to the Missing Chapters feature and other means of communicating to users that manga on the site have had chapters pulled). I believe it was important that the community become aware of what was happening so that everyone would have an opportunity to decide for themselves what they felt and where they stand, and also simply so they would know when and why manga sometimes disappears. Because, y'know, that's kind of the main reason they're here to begin with.
 
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Indeed it's a wall of text. But it's much better to read for those who are curious. Pretty sure most will avoid wall of text though XD

But seriously, many thanks for concluding everything so far
 
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Jan 4, 2019
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Agreed. Thanks OP.

I'm sure this is a hot take, but I don't care when a chapter gets uploaded to MD, or wherever. It's the group's decision when they want to upload, if they do so at all. You can question the decision's rationale, but the decision is fundamentally theirs to make, and not a reader's.

Hopefully, an agreement can get worked out... eventually. As a passive reading party, I can wait.
 
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he encourages people to attack
Dude said the JB admins made the decision and to not attack Jackladd. Is this encouraging people to attack JB? I'd say no. Is this saying to direct any complaints people have about the decision to the people who actually made the decision? Sure.
 
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Hm I see, that's why I'm not seeing my fav list updating...
Smh feels like a forest fire here, branches rub on eachother and started a fire which leads to other trees getting burned.

Anyways thanks for the post. I'm not good at English but this is probs the cringiest thing I've commented.

IMO translators have the right to come and go, it's not like they're duty bound. It's just a hobby for some of them. And giving them something in return is a way to show appreciation for their hard work. if you don't want to donate and support their website it's honestly the reader choice it's not like you're compelled to donate to them.

Also, The reader who is complaining "why isn't it translated yet?!" are jerks with no appreciation whatsoever.

A simple sorry could've solved the problem and a little bit of cooperation could've built new roads.
 
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@Rift

TBH those groups who left didn't want to stay and left. There is nothing MD should apologize for, and readers should not apologize if a greedy move looks like a greedy move to them.
 
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Wall of text is necessary for the nature of this.

My only add is what did everyone want mangadex staff to do?

This is just a whim site for batatos death.

How would you have had written the rules? In full not just suggestions.

How would you have policed it? This is different community members flaming each other. The best would been readers and scanlators respecting each other and not flamming each other, second best is ban hammering both or the first to attack but being seen as Nazis is also bad for pr.

Mangadex's passive stance was bad and riled up the scanlators who left. But what could've been done to avoid this? Answer:Kill the forums, comments and basically the community and turn it into just pictures on a wall.

The going legit talk should have also been expressed in a visible place on the about page but not commented on (avoided like a plague in any channel) cause it's unlikely anyways just laugh and say "I dream! Lol".

Maybe its because im a leech. Had been from batatos days. But never thought of the staff as service providers just the neighbourhood geeks who made a cardboard fortress and asked others to join in decorating and adding in more cardboard boxes.

I would say that staff shouldn't have highlighted that most of these were donation asking groups as a come back. Only clarify the cherry pick screenshots and polite regrets but I'm assuming a few insults were thrown behind the scenes too
 
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I've seen many cases where readers openly insult scan groups. It's so rude and uncivil.
 
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Agree. The groups have the right to come and go; nobody forces them to upload here. I don’t know what MD and the scanlators should have done- that’s for them to decide and discuss, but what I do know is that the community itself is really rude. We’re literally passive consumers of stuff that borderline’s illegal, and the scanlators are doing us a favour. If they’re quarrelling among themselves, let them settle their spate in either public or private. We don’t need to come together and circlejerk each other on shitting on the scanlators who’re willing to do this service for us, and not restricting it behind a paywall.
If anything, it’s this toxic and self-entitled community who’s willing to create bot accounts to spam stupid memes and demand for their manga like a baby wailing for its milk bottle.
 
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Thanks for sharing, this wil probably be my first and only post on mangadex but if you ask me;

The internet's extistence is not new, there are pros and cons to the internet and people being hateful is one of its cons.

It requiers a certain degree of adulthood for a person to recognise when people are being idiots. You have to be patient and ignore the haters.

I think that the translator groups are reacting too rashly and are not thinking about the consequences that their action have on the whole. Owning and running a site costs money, the more traffic they get, the more they will need, the more money they need, they more they will try to obtain.

It wouldve been wise to stay on mangadex and not burden one self with extra costs and administrative work.

I also think that the community has to apologise for their bad behaviour, if we try to make amends towards these translation groups, maybe we can all enjoy their work on a single platform again.
 
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Meh. I'm sick and tired of this drama already....

At the end of the day the most damage inflicted is on us readers who just want to read manga and not worry about getting viruses, pop-ups, redirects, etc. etc.
 
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First post on this community, I've just been a lurker since the beginning lol. I also came to MD from other sites like mangapark, kissmanga, etc, and I never knew nor gave a royal fuck what groups were scanlating. I never truly liked batoto because of the design. However, when Manga Dex was created, I felt the UI was clean, robust, and easy to use, and as a result, I only read here today. In the process, I've come to see the many scanalators who put their work out. I have honest grown a sense of appreciation for what they do, and I thank them for sharing their hard work.

Now, it seems like people are getting their panties in a wad for petty reasons. The internet has always had hate, period. If you don't like it, then get off the internet and go find a safe space. Personally, I don't wish for MD staff to remove user comments or sniped series, because with that, comes a loss of freedom. I mean look at YouTube, who caters to some creators and fucks over others. ONLY thing MD staff should do is hold their own thoughts when it comes to opinions, as there would be far less confusion that way.

Regardless, I really do appreciate the MD staff a lot. Keeping a site like this is not easy. I have no idea if they are using their own physical server, but if they are, then hats off to them. There are just too many hackers on the web, and it becomes a constant cat and mouse game. Hell, this week, my own terminal server that I use for work was attacked 36,000 times by brute force with IPs originating from Greece and Turkey. I had to completely evaluate my system for breaches, so I can somehow relate, although mine is much harder to target haha.

Keep in mind, it also takes, at times, hundreds to upgrade infrastructure as the site expands its database. It's not a $10 manga lol.

At the end of the day, concerned readers should just get over it, continue to read, and don't give a fuck what people think. 😜
 
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I still don't understand the real cause for this dramah, being offended by "community" (let's not call it that though, it's just vocal minority that has close to nothing to do with vast majority of readers) and deciding to teach them by removing all the uploads sounds very hypocritical to me. It's the internet and freedom of speech, what's there to say?

And IMO MD staff is already doing way too much, most would just adapt "take it or leave it" stance with some policy changes when needed which will speak for themselves, where MD staff actually explains shit, has discussions and sticks stuff to the top even when they don't have to and that goes as far as helping groups, that pull year old posts to shit on MD, pull their stuff off the site.
Unlike making and keeping a good site (or anything else good) shitting on others is a very very easy thing and from what I've seen so far this is exactly what this dramah is about.
 
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I'd say that the unsurprising (but undoubtedly situationally controversial nonetheless) upshot of all of this is:

Pretty much everyone involved in this shares some measure of blame.

That's really been my issue with the whole thing pretty much from the beginning - not that it happened, but that it immediately came down to the scanlators insisting that they were pure and pristine and perfect and everything was entirely and completely MD's fault, to which MD's response was that in fact they were the ones who were pure and pristine and perfect and everything was entirely and completely the scanlators' fault.

The only thing I've been reasonably certain about all along is that neither one of those claims is true.
 
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Due to the fact that, like many others, I've been following this drama since the initial outbreak, and have therefore read countless threads and posts about the topic by this point, I do apologize if my contribution seems at least slightly uninformed, as I've taken to skimming a number of posts to catch the general flow of the conversation before moving to the end.

The only thing I want to add is this: I think one of the prevailing problems that falls on the community's shoulders (as plenty has already been said on the involvement of both MangaDex and the scanlation groups) is that scanlators seem to be--from my perspective, anyway--more commonly exposed to the negative readers and their criticisms than they are to the more positive-minded members of the audience and their words of gratitude. I can't remember exactly which user said it, as all the threads and posts begin to blur together past a certain point, but when there's such a large number of users on a site like this one, it's easy to perceive the community as "toxic" because the toxic users tend to be more proactive; someone is much more likely to speak up when they're unhappy than they are when they're satisfied. What this ultimately means is that, while there certainly are users who are thankful to and grateful for the scanlators and their offerings, they tend to stay quiet, or give a simple "thanks", and go on about their day. Meanwhile, the angry, unhappy, and impatient users are much more likely to do things like spam, leave walls of text explaining why a given scanlator or group sucks, and harass the members of any given group for more/faster/better uploads.

What we, as users, can do in the future to attempt to combat this trend, is be more vocal about our appreciation for the efforts a scanlator and their teams put into their releases. Now, that's not to say we should all be complacent livestock and merely accept whatever is handed to us, regardless of quality--no one improves if no one complains, after all--but we can probably all make a concerted effort to be more openly thankful for the content we do enjoy. Thank you for your time, consideration, and patience.

EDIT: Fixing minor grammatical typos.
 
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Internet community, The worst and best thing ever happen after the invention of internet :v

-------
Im going to talking about the whole going legit things
its surprisingly long :v
MD's plan to go legit really is just a pipe dream, everything that i read about this, just like things you said when drunk, or maybe even just some jokes.
and too bad this become fuel to scanlator to left MD :<

First, License. now they compete directly to company like YenPress. Seven Seas, Kodansha, Linewebtoon etc.
there's small chance that they had exclusive license to every English digital release. adding difficulty to securing license.

what make you think that Publisher will give license to bunch of people in the internet just because of their high traffic? and also site like this are their nemesis, they can simple reject your offer just because this site past.
they do care about money, but they also care about security. What guarantee can you give to make sure all raw that they gave to you not leak to the public?
Most platform edit their content inhouse to raise security, which mean "Im going to hire good scanlation" basically mean nothing, since all scanaltion member comes from different country. unless they got lucky live in the same city with your new MD office (Yes, you need office)

Buying one license probably going to cost a lot. but you can brought them in a bundle,
which mean cooperation between webtoon/manga developer and platform.
or deal between platform/publisher and platform.

And this traffic mean nothing, since once you go legit, you basically starting from zero. whole new audience and that also depend on what kind of business model you have.
Best business model for user now are subs base like netflix :v
you will have this zero content hours/months, after you flush all "pirated content" you need preparing all content to be released. you need at least 50 comics and 1000 chapters. no one want to use platform who only have 1-5 comics in them.
dont forget new site, and also phone apps. Phone apps is the they key to success!!
which mean zero income, but way too much expenses

So they need money for:
>New office and its content
>License
>Salary for: PR, Ads, Finance, Editor, Translator, Cleaner, redrawer, and many more~

With the state of MD now, its really is just a dream.

If they really desperate to go legit. just sell this site to other platform and saygoodbye to MD name :v

EDIT: TYPOS :<
 

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