Our member kayue suggested the natural follow-up question for last week's poll, so I decided to just roll with it.

You can submit poll ideas here
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: Should scanlators ask for donations?
Choices:
Yes, since they work so hard to bring us manga - votes: 2181 (47.4%)
Yes, but only to pay for raws and server bandwidth or hosting - votes: 2028 (44.1%)
No, since it's all volunteer work anyways - votes: 393 (8.5%)
There were 4602 total votes.
The poll ended: September 9th 2017

Wow, that was more lopsided than I expected. Most people think donations are warranted for one reason or another.

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

'No, but I would if they were asking for money to translate something that I want to read (money to buy original copies)'
smth like that

No. Not Sure. No String Attached.

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[img]https://i.imgur.com/ERg8slD.gif[/img
[img]https://i.imgur.com/HphHlPh.gif[/img]
Tv Tokyo - Anime & Manga ~ MinatoAce

Uhm... I think I said TRANSLATION Groups... as in novels.
The scanlation question was proposed by someone else recently

I don't always use the exact same phrasing for a poll and its options. And in this case, we're primarily a manga site, so I would never make this particular question specific to novels

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

Okie dokie.

Donation? I wouldn't call it that. I've paid money to get something translated though. I guess I'd "donate" if they needed said donation to start translating a series I wanted to read.

But in that case I'd mostly consider it a commission as well.

I think you got to the crux of the issue here. Much of the disagreement on this topic comes from the fact that certain scanlators use the word "donation" when they really mean "commission", and then this confusion spreads to pollute any discussions of this.

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Active translations list
Completed translations list
Dropped translations

When sites asks for donations, it can for a number of obvious reasons. Paying for their website, buying manga/manhwa/whatever to be eventually translated, keeping up with scanning/editing/translating stuff etc. We may not even know if whatever is donated is guaranteed towards their scanning efforts, but I digress. Not everyone reads everything a group scanlates, so we don't know if what we're donating is necessarily going towards the series we want to read from the scanlator group. From what I've noticed, doujin groups largely take commissions, and it seems like they actively and regularly translate for commissioners. Your run of the mill scanning group (I assume) isn't going to drop what they're working on to scan something that you want, unless of course it's the next chapter of something and it was already on their list. I feel like they just go at their own pace (but why wouldn't they otherwise), whether or not someone's donation was meant to be for X series that they wanted to read. I would definitely want to donate (if I could) towards a series that interested me, but there's no guarantee that the chapters that I want to read would come out in a timely manner and would convenience me, the reader (but then you have groups like Mangastream that release lightning fast lol).

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