I´m not trying to begin a controversy here; I'm sure the groups that lock their releases with passwords and have you register into a forum and then contribute a certain number of posts, have their good reasons for this. But, I'm not interested. I'm not gonna go through all that just to get something I'll be able to download elsewhere a few days later anyways.

So I'd like to see groups qualified according to this (such as "free releases", "requires registration", "registration and X posts required" and so on). Perhaps a little icon next to the group's name on the list of releases, or maybe a little padlock in the DL column? And perhaps we could just filter out the groups with a locking level we're uncomfortable with. For instance, I don't mind registering, but I draw the line at posting X times.

MU has already given me so much, so I feel a bit of a jerk asking for more, but... well, I'd just like to see this implemented, since the alternative (the groups giving up these, huh, DRM-like policies) seems unlikely.

What do you think?

somehow, i dont see that happening.

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the best security guard, EVER.

I can dream though, can't I?

A different approach would be to allow people to qualify groups. For instance, there are a few groups whose releases almost always interest me. I'd like to "favorite" these groups and have all their releases highlighted somehow, perhaps even ignoring the genre filtering ("favorite group" + "ignore filters"). On the other hand, someone might not want to hear about releases from certain groups. The releases from those groups would be marked in some way, perhaps even filtered out. I could "blacklist" all the locking groups like this...

I can understand what you are saying, but no, I don't think it is that necessary to do so. It's up to the visitors there to check the forum out if one needs to require x amount of posts or none to access a group's release in the forum.

You should know what some groups interest you, but its not very needed to favourite all of them.

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Let's say a yaoi group suddenly decides to scanlate shoujo manga as well. If you don't like yaoi and you block the group, you could miss a chance of reading that shoujo manga that you have been hearing about. Also, the genres that you have filtered out would not be listed in the release and be hidden, so you won't have any problem hearing these releases that have those genres be released by a certain group.






Last edited by holy`bell at 8:35 pm, Nov 9 2007

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I understand. What about favoriting/blacklisting groups, then?

i think well have to wait for a while to get those ^_^,


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the best security guard, EVER.

Every user could block or favorite (favoritize?) groups as they wish. Of course there are risks such as what you describe here, but that's up to everyone to decide. Me, I wouldn't block a group because of the genres they release, since there are already genre filters for that. I would block groups that lock their releases. On the other hand, I'd favorite groups that I really like.

For instance, I happen to like Kotonoha's releases. They do stuff from almost every genre, so a few times, new series have gone unnoticed to me for a while because they didn't belong to a genre I had highlighted.

I'm thinking of a favorites/blocked system that takes precedence on the genre filtering system. That way, if you filter out yaoi and a group that's on your favorites list releases yaoi, it would show up; conversely, if you highlight shoujo and a group that's on your blocked list releases shoujo, it wouldn't show up.

Actually I saw... thank you so much for taking the time to deal with this. Seriously



Agreed. I'd only favourite a handful of groups, those that consistently deliver stuff that suits my tastes. Kotonoha, Lililicious and Dynasty Scans come to mind; also Solaris-SVU and Anime Waves. If any of those groups realeases a new series, no matter what the genre is, I'd like to give it a look.

Of course I could just check their homepages, which I do, but MU is so much more convenient... before MU, I had to run through a bunch of bookmarks, then go through each page and read the news, and so on. MU beats the hell ouf of that!

This is one of the most fruitless suggestions I've ever read.


First, it's not MangaUpdates' business to list the way scanlator's groups distribute their releases or manage their site's policies, much less to point out whether or not their original releases are password protected.


So, are suggesting the implementation of a scanlator's bashing feature?



Are you aware that this site has a Group Information page for almost every group that lists all the series they had scanlated/ are scanlating?


This part doesn't really makes sense (for me, at least). First, If you don't like yaoi, why would you like to put a group that releases such kind of manga in your favorite's list? And also, if you just don't want a series to be filtered because it belongs to a genre you've blocked but you want to read because a certain group have scanlated it (?) you can just go to your favorite group information page to do so...

Well, in short, this commentary summarizes it all:


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That's already been established, which is why I changed the suggestion from filtering to favoriting/blocking.



No more than blocking someone you don't like in a chatroom is a "person bashing feature." It would be a personal setting; if I block a group, it would only affect me.



I'm aware, I've added a few series there myself. This idea, if implemented, would affect the releases list. I want to avoid having to regularly check each of my favorite groups' pages to see what they've released, then check each new series to see if I'm interested. Some of these groups have dozens and dozens of series, so even finding out if they've released something new can get tricky, and it's certainly time consuming. The releases list has most of the information I want already, and highlighting the releases from the groups I choose would simply make this process quicker and easier.



(Yaoi was just an example). There are some groups that focus on genres (Lililicious), and some that don't (Kotonoha). To me, if a group I like releases something from a genre I'm not interested in, I'd like to know, and maybe give it a try. But, yeah, if a favoriting system was in place, it would be arguable whether it should take precedence over the filtering system or the other way around.

And, again, I could get that info from the group's information page or from the group's site if they have one, but this is about convenience.



Again, it's not necessary, I just think it would be more convenient. For the most part, the whole of MU is unnecessary, since you could just get the releases from the groups' sites, or hanging around their chatrooms, or checking their forums. Which is exactly what I did until I found out about MU. MU is just extremely convenient, and this suggestion is about making it slightly more so.

I have a better suggestion:

Ban all 7,000 shitty lq scanlators of Bleach, One Piece & especially Naruto.

It's overly annoying

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-GGpX

I run Illuminati-Manga. You're welcome.

Really? When?


I really beginning to have a problem with your attitude. Scanlators work for free, and they generally get their motivation from just the simple support of their readers. But instead of being thankful to them you want to implement a feature to bash them just because some of them want you to register in their site and show your interest for all the hard free work they do...
Or maybe you simply don't really realize the huge value of what they're doing. Look, just go to a search engine and type in "Japanese translation costs" to see how much a translation from Japanese to English cost. And if we add the cost of the rest of the scanlation process (like editing) you can pretty much imaginate the magnitude of what they do for free. Really, is spending a few minutes of your life showing your appreciation too much to ask?

And about your reply...that's a terrible analogy. How can you compare a chat room, that is, a site of personal social environment with MangaUpdates, a site that, on this case, classify information about groups of people that deals with the process of scanlation?

(And by the way, I thought that MangaUpdates had an unspoken rule against bashing Scanlators...)


There is a difference between having a "bashing/favorite" feature and a tracking one. For what you're saying there's no need to have a "blocking" feature since you can just suggest a "favorite highlighting group feature"...(unless, of course, you'd really want to bash those groups that password-protect their releases.)


That's not the point. The point is the contradiction in your statement (to unblock a genre you don't like from the release list just because somebody you consider special happens to be the scanlator. It really makes no sense to me that you like a genre just when a certain group scanlate it and dislike it so much to the point of blocking it when another one do it.)


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Again, that makes no sense to me. If you want to try something then don't block it.


Convenience? what are you talking about? It would take around the same time in load both pages in your web browser and you'd have to go to the group's site anyways to see their progress, actualizations, status and the very latest updates. Or you also want this site to list all of that too?


Unnecessary? MangaUpdates (as you should know by now) it's not limited to releases. It's a whole database that lists things like series, reviews, magazines, publishers and mangakas but that also has a manga list feature to allow its users to keep track of the manga they'd read/ are reading/ want to read. And you're also forgetting about the whole community here in the forums? How can you reduce MangaUpdates to a simple manga release-listing page?

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NeoFireHawk summed it up quite nicely. I don't plan on doing any features like this. Locked.