Batoto announced that they are closing their doors around January 18. This will be a sad day for the scanlation community.

In case you didn't know, they were a manga reader site that actually played nice with the wishes of scanlators. (Man, the old days with the Tazmo sites...)

On a personal level, I really understand Grumpy's reasoning on why he wants to quit. I've been helping run MangaUpdates for the last 11-ish years, and I've wanted to quit several times. In fact, I want to quit now still... but that's another story.

Batoto, you will be missed.

Edit:
This affects MangaUpdates somewhat due to our group policies. In case you didn't know, releases are only listed on MangaUpdates if they were done by a group that's in our database. (The term "group" is a misnomer because it could just be a single person.) A group would only be approved if it had one of the following: website, IRC channel, forum URL, Twitter, or Facebook page. A Batato group link could substitute as a website (but a link to a specific user could not be used, which is why any Batoto release filed under "No Group" has always been rejected).

This adversely affects smaller scanlation groups who don't have their own sites and exclusively hosted on Batoto. However, we're not changing our group requirements. If a new thing arises that replaces Batoto, we'll consider allowing that to be used as a website when listing a group.

FYI, in case you didn't know, the website listed for a group will never appear for you because of this development.

A just ruler amongst tyrants

See You Space Cowboy...

A sad day indeed 😢

That is going to complicate a lot of things...

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown"

Thanks for the heads-up 🙂

A shame, not entirely unexpected, but still a shame.

Oh well, it was good while it lasted, we'll all just have to "endeavor to persevere!" 😀

man that's kinda depressing. one of, if not, the best manga site on the net imo. I'm gonna do some binging there for old time's sake.

Hopefully someone will take up the reigns. I don't see why the owner doesn't pass it on instead of just closing it down because they don't "feel like running it anymore".

You can't leave lambchopsil, it'd be a sad day if you did. 😢 😢

Quote from SangMo

Hopefully someone will take up the reigns. I don't see why the owner doesn't pass it on instead of just closing it down because they don't "feel like running it anymore".

He explains his reasons for why he's doing so in the annoucement post.

Sad day. But at the same time, I'm confused on the reasoning about having to always be on call 24/7 (even while sleeping) and never being able to take a vacation. Wasn't Batoto run by a group of people? If so, the problems Grumpy listed seems like they could've been dealt with by delegating some responsibilities and setting primary and backup people for various roles. That's generally how organizations are run.

most likely only he had root access to everything. situation was the same with moot when he still ran 4chan.

Quote from Skull_Leader

Sad day. But at the same time, I'm confused on the reasoning about having to always be on call 24/7 (even while sleeping) and never being able to take a vacation. Wasn't Batoto run by a group of people? If so, the problems Grumpy listed seems like they could've been dealt with by delegating some res ...

I certainly don't know exactly how things were/have been most recently set up as far as day to day running that site, but as far as "run by a group of people" goes, of the small core that originally founded Batoto, the vast majority of them besides Grumpy have been gone for a while now. I started noticing some of the other main people disappearing as early as 2013 and '14.

Wow, thanks for the heads up. I completely missed the announcement.

I've been on Batoto practically since day one, and to see it go like this is definitely a sad day. I expect this'll be some kind of milestone for the manga scanlation community, but I'm sure it won't be all bad. I wish Grumpy luck with all his future endeavors.

(Also, thanks to all the mods at MU for sticking with it all these years. We might not always say it, but know that we really appreciate all your hard work!)

wow, I've been reccing Batoto to people for years specifically because they played well with scanlators and had such a nice layout. I hope none of my favorite re-reads are lost with this change 😔

I am really scared about individual runned series.They only uploaded to there, so what will happen to lots of series such as them a big question mark.