As far as I can tell, Harudaki has only had four publicly accessible releases since going fully private in August 2017: three volumes of Suzumaru Minta manga (one two and three) and chapters of Tekken Chinmi Legends (available on their IRC).

No doubt one reason the MU administrators have been hesitant to deal with the issue is Harudaki's complicated history: it was public on LiveJournal until 2013, then semi-private with releases downloadable through IRC until 2017, and now fully private for the last six years. Cleaning up the database to remove inaccessible, private releases would require combing through each and every listing Harudaki has submitted to this website, which is in the literal thousands. Perhaps we can make it easy for the admin team by crowdsourcing a list of Harudaki releases since 2013 that are actually available to the public? Can anyone contribute the names of a few titles? Or perhaps set up a spreadsheet/doc?

I think the first and simplest step would be to just deny their releases from being added, starting now. Don't releases have to be approved anyway? If they'd simply say, "This is a Harudaki chapter? But no one can see it, so who cares. Denied." It would at least prevent anything new from being recognized.

But this hasn't happened yet. There's been no acknowledgment of the issue so far by the admins, unfortunately.

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떡대수 supremacy

Totally.

No actual hate towards private teams, I’m sure they make some small group(s) of people somewhere very happy, but I’m sorry, I have to stand with the ones who believe Baka-Updates should be reserved for things that are open to the public. It can be specially disheartening and frustrating when you learn that something you actually wanted to read is technically there, but just perfectly outside your reach. I prefer not even knowing, save me the stress

A potential problem with this step is that Harudaki does continue to release one single series to the public, Tekken Chinmi Legends, with the last available release downloadable from their IRC channel dated 8/10/2023. It doesn't seem too hard to reject approving all Harudaki releases except for that particular series, but perhaps that requires a challenging level of mod/admin coordination (I am not sure exactly how modding/administration works on this site).

Otherwise, I really like your idea. It's simple and implementable, and I hope admins respond to it.

Does anyone know if there is any precedent for this issue in MU history? Are private scans technically allowed by the rules, and have they been debated before? Before a new release is approved, does someone have to verify that such a release even exists?

Last edited by calmpsalms at 1:43 am, Sep 14 2023

Please don't ban all of private releases... not all of them are bad.. I'm not defending Harudaki..

But some private group like Team Karaage releases only DJ. And you can only add DJ in the database if they have a legit release from a scanlation team.

Team Karaage are not stingy with their membership as long as you message them.

Im a huge fan of DJ works so I hope they don't stop being added to bakaupdates. 😢

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"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." <BR> - Albert Einstein

I just know from personal experience when I tried to add the releases of a scan group, and was told that they wouldn't be allowed unless I could show they were publicly available. Which I did, and they stopped blocking them. All of that is so painfully ironic, obviously, given that Harudaki is completely allowed without ever having to make their scans available. Methinks they're friends with the admins, so I'm sure none of this can be helped at this point.

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떡대수 supremacy

Is this true? I see doujins (assuming that is what DJ is) in my searches all the time that aren't scanlated.

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Harudaki releases are allowed. They are an exception to a rule that we normally enforce for releases and groups. Their stuff does exist.

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

With all due respect... where do they exist? Who are they accessible to, and how to get access? If it's just a few members who help with the scanlation, does it still make sense to allow them to claim the "yes" under the "completely scanlated" part of a listing? It's misleading if the point is to act as a directory to guide curious readers to a particular scanlated manga. Why are they an exception?

edited for typos

Last edited by Jessica_desu29 at 11:22 pm, Sep 15 2023

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떡대수 supremacy

Thank you for your response! I'm glad to know that the admin team are able to confirm the existence of Harudaki's recent releases through access to their private IRC channel/LiveJournal. I was wondering if anyone on the admin team could respond specifically to the solution Jessica_desu29 posted about earlier in this thread:

I'm not sure when the exception to MU policy lambchopsil describes was first granted to Harudaki, though it makes sense, as 10+ year long users of this site, that the group has a lot of trust and goodwill from the admin team. When Harudaki first went private in 2013, its releases were still accessible to the public through requesting membership in their LJ or logging in to their IRCHighWay channel. At the time, it was reasonable to grant an exception to Harudaki, as their barrier to entry was fairly minimal. As release moderator illya_ put it in a forum post back in 2014, the MU team usually approves releases from private forums as long as accessibility was reasonable:

However, Harudaki's accessibility has deteriorated in recent years. In 2017, Harudaki shut down the ability to download releases through their public IRC channel. As of 2021, Harudaki only allows access to their releases to members of their scanlation team, and new membership is only granted to those who apply to work for them. Even then, applications can still be rejected, as Angelique707 documented earlier in this thread.

The facts on the ground have changed, so I hope that the admin team revisits their decision to grant an exception to MU policy for Harudaki. Jessica_desu29's proposal strikes a great compromise: preserve all Harudaki releases in the MU database before September 2023 to reflect Harudaki's previous accessibility, but do not approve any further ones. Implementing such a proposal does not require much effort on the part of the admin team, and also resolves years of concerns by MU users (after all, this thread has been going since 2021!) Is there any process, lambchopsil, for MU users to encourage the admin team to revisit the grounds for this exception?

There will be no changes at this time

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

Is there a reason why this exception was granted to Harudaki in the first place? An explanation would help resolve this topic which has now spanned three forum threads, as well as end user confusion on this subject.

I agree. There's absolutely no way for the normal public to access them, so they might as well not exist. At least for 99% of the people who's interested in that manga.



I agree with this as well. It seems an arbitrary exception but, above all, a extremely frustrating one since there's no way to access them. It just discourages other groups to work on those mangas.

At this point, further explanation might provide closure (just noticed this thread is about 2 years old), but it doesn't really solve the core issue, which is the fact that people find it frustrating to see Harudaki releases on series they are tracking or want to track in order to read when an open group does scan it. They have an exception to a rule and seemingly, they are the only exception - maybe their releases are set to become public after X number of years or they could just be friends with a site admin or mod (or someone in the group is). This is a private site at the end of the day, so it is what it is.

Added functionality to block groups might help address people's problem with seeing Harudaki updates. Likewise, if the concern is that Harudaki's releases discourage others - could Harudaki's label have a "(private group)" logo in red or something after their name? This will let other scan groups know on a glance they aren't public releases and trigger a reaction to investigate things further, so they don't feel like they're sniping or think someone else is on it, so they shouldn't pursue it.

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what a joke of a response
so harudaki is exempt from following site rules, and nothing is going to change, presumably because site management is either part of harudaki or is given access to their releases as a non-contributing member

good stuff y’all 👍

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if i stop posting here i’ve been banned ^^