First, sorry about being a day late with updating the poll. I've been too busy the last few days to manage much, but here I am!

The new poll is Who knows you read manga? I realize most people have some sort of mixture of the options, but please just choose the one that most applies. There is also no "other" category, or else most people would vote for that one (probably), and we'd not really have much of a poll there, would we? Personally, I'm interested in knowing how many closet readers we have.

As for the old poll:
Question: How do you get most of your manga?
Choices:
IRC - votes: 1207 (17.5%)
Torrents - votes: 386 (5.6%)
The scanlation group's website - votes: 2213 (32%)
Manga hosting sites - votes: 2496 (36.1%)
I buy most of my manga - votes: 480 (6.9%)
Other - votes: 128 (1.9%)
There were 6910 total votes.
The poll ended: March 9th 2008

Torrents are dying for manga releases (although I wouldn't say the same for anime releases). IRC interestingly enough still has plenty of people using it! If you haven't already, visit #lurk and you'll be in heaven. As for the top results, scanlation group websites and manga hosting sites ran neck to neck. Quite an turnout, I'd say~

________________
A just ruler amongst tyrants

wee first one! hmm im pretty suprised with the fairly low irc votes.. i thought it was like the norm of manga dl. for me i usually use irc cause now adays im too lazy to go into scanlations groups website >< sad to say.. but yea i just check mangaupdates and to lurk i go.

Nah-a lot of people ('specially newbies) find IRC too hard to use and don't wanna bother with it, so they just go to the scan groups site or wait 'til the release is posted up on a hosting site. *shrugs* I use trillian for IRC and run into trouble all the time, so I often just give up and find it elsewhere-I expect there are other users who do likewise.
I go for IRC 'cause I don't have the time to make a posts in a forum/don't want to be registered at yet another place-but I figure some people would rather just sign up and make a few posts.

i think it's easier/faster with DDL no? IRC is pretty easy to use too, i mean just find a tutorial out there and bam you'll know how to download manga, some people are just lazy =P the only thing i don't use is torrents... people don't really seed much anymore, only thing i download with torrents nowadays are drama. the new poll is interesting... as far as i know a lot of people are open about them reading manga ^__^

________________
Don't Be So Kind
</3 cus of you.

Hmm I don't know. I mean, its not like im embarrassed to tell people that I read manga, but i don't go out of my way to tell people that I read manga, so not many people know that I do read manga. Also, I feel odd when I read manga in presence of people I don't know... i wonder if thats true with everyone else.

Not everyone who doesn't use IRC is lazy. I've tried to use it a number of times with different clients and bunch of different tutorials, but for some reason I can't make it work. Why this is I don't know, because I follow the tutorials to a T.

There is also the problem of IRC being blocked in certain places. For instances, many college campuses with their own internet services limit ways students can download stuff, for whatever reason. When I was at the University of Cincinnati it was near impossible to download anything with bittorrent or IRC. Direct download the best choice I had at the time, and even then it was slow.

If it's something "rare" or not easily obtainable (like a new release that a group only releases on IRC for the time being) then that's when i use IRC, other that than it's manga hosting sites, which are usually the quickest to download from and aren't blocked by everyone...

I think I heard a while ago when the RIAA (I think that's the correct abbreviation), the music association that's been suing dead people and minors a few years ago (and probably still fighting the case because they had money and if they *win*, they'll scare a good amount of people) was commenting that music was being illegally distributed/uploaded via universities' high speed internet. So this might have been the school's way of not being sued or made an example of.

________________
My avatar was Yves Saint Laurent's The Black Evening Dress (with big bow) first shown in 1983, photographed from his 2002 retrospective and final show. [color=#CC0066]Check out some of his collections for free (pre-2008) HERE[/color] courtesy of FirstView.

And though I haven't downloaded manga for months (I haven't been online for more than minutes or less than 3 hours at a time, and the 1/2 hour or more that maybe I need to find manga that isn't distributed by Lurk...) but looking for manga that's isn't on Lurk can be possibly a pain and it takes awhile. IRC requires a person to follow protocol because one is interacting with other people, even if the other people are totally lurking and away from the keyboard, so depending on the group a person goes to, there are different rules to follow and watch out for, otherwise things could get ugly with automated kick/bans. That's obviously extra work. ;) But anyhow, avoiding the matter of "Geez, why are people so lazy to say thanks and have manners in the group's channel (and not be a blatant leech) when we put 40 hours into a 20-page manga chapter," that's a reason to avoid the interaction of IRC.

________________
My avatar was Yves Saint Laurent's The Black Evening Dress (with big bow) first shown in 1983, photographed from his 2002 retrospective and final show. [color=#CC0066]Check out some of his collections for free (pre-2008) HERE[/color] courtesy of FirstView.