I know this is long, but bear with me- it's important
I feel pretty damn guilty for only now deciding to pay attention to the scanlators messages in between chapters. You know the ones:"Mangafox is EVILLLLLLL!!!"
So I looked it up, and it turns out mangafox IS pretty evil and it's one of the reasons scanlating groups are dying off- which means less manga for us- cuz, shock! Mangafox isn't the source of scanlations! It's scanlators!

Look, I made a blog post about it, which I'll summarise:

What Scanlators do:
Their job (which they don't generally get paid for) is buying raws, scanning, translating, cleaning, redrawing, typesetting, quality checking, and then releasing! They also have to put up with annoying people calling them greedy, and that too after they put in time, effort, money, and dedication to something that probably won't even benefit them. Remember, they're regular people like you and me- they have lives, they're not exactly greedy for bringing you manga to read.

What Mangafox does (and other sites run by NOEZ):
They steal the translated manga from the scanlators without handing credit to them. By accumulating manga stolen from hundreds of groups, they’re able to generate millions of views on their site. Mangafox is the 1241st top visited site in the world. They literally make tens of thousands (or maybe hundreds of thousands) of dollars in profits for doing damn near nothing. They benefit from ads. They don’t respect the scanlators’ wishes, they no longer take down mangas upon their scanlators requests, they sell products and gain money from work scanlators did, and they add “Mangafox” watermarks to the chapters- leading readers to believe that they are the source of the scanlated manga- which they aren’t.

What MangaFox did recently
Only recently I visited a scanlators site (Surasplace, who's been scanlating since 2002 I think). She's considering giving up scanlating because MF benefits off her work and they don't respect her wishes to stop uploading her work. So earlier on today I checked on MF to see if they uploaded the latest chapter of "Nobody knows" against her wishes- they did. no surprise there. But then I noticed there were two forums in the discussion section asking for the manga to be taken down as per the scanlators wishes. Around 10 hours later I checked to see if the manga was still up- it was. But guess what? Mangafox actually REMOVED the two threads! WTF?? The threads were completely within regulations. Seriously, what is up with that? They've been spreading ignorance and this is just one of the ways they're doing it.

Side Note: What we can do to not support MF:
Read on the scanlators online reader if they have one (you can find their site by checking on Baka/Mangaupdates), or read on Batoto which respects the scanlators wishes.
So guys- what do you think about this? I only discovered it recently and I've got to admit I'm pretty pissed off. (Maybe I'm stupid for not noticing it earlier, but whatever, I felt like spreading the message, though I'll probably get hate for it)

Last edited by saffiredragon at 2:02 pm, May 14 2013

This kind of post shows up once a month, and nothing ever comes of it.

I was always under the impression these posts were made by their competition.

meh. Whatever, so long as the message is being spread bit by bit it's fine by me. Anyway, I came to my realization only recently so I felt like I had to do this.

@Cthylla
Sadly I was an MF reader. I'm just a regular person (though I've got no proof of that)- I'm no competitor. Just a person that came to a sudden sad realization.

Last edited by lambchopsil at 6:52 pm, May 14 2013

I already know that MF is a bad shit . But thanks to you man ,today i got to know that to which level of a really bad son of a bitch is MF actually is.
MF is just a mf***.
I really supports you.
We scanlators give our half a life to give peoples a non-benificial release and they take credit and make profit of it.


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hey

Just to argue the semantics...

Technically Mangafox and its ilk don't actually take credit. They list the names of the scanlators for every chapter.

So what. Mangafox still has the best user interface and an active community. If you can put up with the low rez images it's the mangareader to go. Batoto is still best cause of the high resolution but it's damn laggy in Europe and it doesn't host every manga.

You sound like those vegan extremists who say that eating meat is evil and call on people to boycott meat and other animal products. It's a reasonable request but I like meat so I'm not going to stop eating it. In the same way I like mangafox so even if they exploit scanlators their product is good so I will continue using it.

And I'm saying this as a scanlator myself. If you don't want your work to be pirated then keep away from this business. Cause it's gonna happen inevitably, if you personally boycott sites like mangafox or not.

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I don't really see how I sound like a vegan extremist. It's true that it's got an active community and all, but that's not really the problem I'm addressing. There's a big difference between benefitting from other people's hard work when they ask you not to and eating meat.

It's your choice if you use Mangafox, but I find it more morally incorrect to be allowing them to profit from other people's hard work (despite that being illegal too). If the author of a manga asked you to stop scanlating, would you? It's only natural to do so. But when Mangafox is asked to remove uploaded mangas by the respective scanlators they no longer comply.

And anyway, if reading on MangaFox means more scanlating groups dying off, I'd rather not read there.. Have fun supporting MF though.

I tend to use Batoto exclusively. I quit MangaFox as my main reader a few years ago due to this very concern. Batoto is slightly laggy, even for me in the US on a 20Mb connection, but at least they respect the groups wishes.

Oddly enough it was Prozess' rant that brought me to Batoto. I now read on the group's site if they have a reader, if not then I'm off to Batoto.

Just my humble opinion.

~~Dos

Sadly Batoto is pretty laggy. That's why I prefer to read on the scanlators online readers instead.

+1. I follow Entropy's footstep, and don't quite condone Batoto's way of working despite giving part of the revenue to scanlators. Anything with advertisements is just ugh...

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R-18 below

Detective Horror Series

Tracker BakaBT

And what do you do with groups who don't host their manga (anymore)?

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Well there is this thing calls Adblocker that everyone can download freely online without taking much space in the processor. Seriously, how many times has this topic been brought up yet those who are opposed of sites such as mangafox cannot just install the programm and be done with it.


I know some scanlators are getting even more upset than before and decide to drop some projects because of it, again. Mind you, I would really prefer that they wouldn't do that because I follow quite a lot of those works. Nobody does. However, it's not entirely the readers's fault. Scanlators are annoyed because their projects are being uploaded on such sites, while nearly all of the manga reader has nothing to do with the uploading. Some nutcases with too much time on their hands just like to do it either as their work for those websites or to annoy the scanlators.
Unless you have a way of finding out who are the people who keep uploading the projects on mangafox and forbid them to do so, I don't see how it actually has a possibility to stop.

I don't like the fact that they are profiting from other people's hard works either, but it's more practical for the majority of the readers. Furthermore it's unlikely they will change since the alternatives of downloading, visiting dozens different scanlators's homepages or waiting rather long for the pictures to load seem to be quite on the disadvantaged side to me.



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Man is more ape than many of the apes.

How can it not be the leechers' fault if they're the ones generating revenue for Mangafox et al? Well, granted, they generate that revenue through stupidity rather than malice, but it's still their fault.

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Active translations list
Completed translations list
Dropped translations

Thanks, now we all know you're an immoral asshat. By you're logic if someone enjoys murder it would absolutely ok for them to murder you.

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No one gives a shit what trite garbage you write here.