The question is why do these groups feel so strongly about having an active community of their own? Honestly, my site is blessed with great people (some who have stuck around for the better part of a decade) who stay because they're friends... hell, a good portion of them don't even follow manga anymore, but stick around for the company. I think that if any group wants to have a thriving community, the only way to make it stick is to make it voluntary. If you create a system that requires participation to a certain level, what you're really doing is telling them that they need to fill your numbers and then stop. They have no reason to talk to anyone anymore, because no one there is actually interested in conversation unless it raises their post count. In the end, it's just a system that's so annoying that people are still talking about it a year after the first post.

Not to mention that these groups probably aren't even paying for their bandwidth to begin with. They're hosting stuff on the free file servers and just don't want to bother re-uploading it. So they're wasting their fans' time just to save themselves 5 minutes. These are the groups that will probably die before they finish your favorite manga.

Honestly. Coming from a group that hosts open file download (you can even hotlink to it directly from here or korea or japan or denmark or wherever and I don't care), there is no reason at all to be stingy with your download links. Being open doesn't hurt you.

Quote from SnoopyCool

The question is why do these groups feel so strongly about having an active community of their own? Honestly, my site is blessed with great people (some who have stuck around for the better part of a decade) who stay because they're friends... hell, a good portion of them don't even follow manga anymore, but stick around for the company. I think that if any group wants to have a thriving community, the only way to make it stick is to make it voluntary. If you create a system that requires participation to a certain level, what you're really doing is telling them that they need to fill your numbers and then stop. They have no reason to talk to anyone anymore, because no one there is actually interested in conversation unless it raises their post count. In the end, it's just a system that's so annoying that people are still talking about it a year after the first post.

(side note: i love your work, wear my man babies)

out of curiosity while i was answering to the reaction on my post on alice dreams board, i checked about the memberlist on their public forum, they had 12 pages containing 50 member each (well the last page missed 8 people to attain 50). And there was this tool allowing me to sort this list any way i wanted. So in short, among these 12 pages, 1 page have what can be considered as regular members, 1 can be considered as very very casual ad the last 10 are posters that else will never come back (a few got their 15 posts or forfaited right after their first post) or else that have just joined and probably won't even bother coming again.

basically, the community they have can be found in the top 10 posters of their forum (3 of them have an average of 30 posts per day, the rest have something like 10 posts a day. No wonder they want people to post, must feel cranky with the same 20 people that post (and the same 10 that seem to spend their life on their forum)

What i like about sarcasms is when people don't get it they think you are nice.