This week's poll was suggested by Afiaki, but I removed a lot of the nuance of the original proposed options.

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

Previous Poll Results:
Question: When applying for a job, does the reputation of the company matter to you?
Choices:
Yes - votes: 1728 (56.2%)
Just a little - votes: 932 (30.3%)
Not really - votes: 284 (9.2%)
Nope - votes: 132 (4.3%)
There were 3076 total votes.
The poll ended: July 23rd, 2022 11:28am PDT

But if you really need the job to make a living...

A just ruler amongst tyrants

Wait and see where the licensing deal does is the unlisted way to go. Partially finished US translations help no one.

I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb

I couldn't give a damn about US licensing, the vast majority of these will never be available in my country anyway. Unless publishers make their releases available online internationally, it doesn't change anything for fans outside of the US.

Now, MANGAPlus is actually available globally, so if the title becomes available there, it's another story. I'd say keep scanlating until official releases catch up and stop when/if they do. Oshi no Ko is in this situation right now. Japanese raws are out up to chapter 88 and Ai's fanclub is doing a fantastic job with the scanlations, but MANGAPlus has been hard at work trying to catch up, releasing 3-4 chapters per week. I think the scanlators are planning to stop when they finally do and I believe that's the right choice.

The point of scanlations (at least for fan scanlators, I'm sure some of them are in it for profit) is to bring the work you love to as many people as possible. If official releases already reach global audience, that goal has been achieved. But the reality of things is that very few manga titles get released trully globally.

Just continue. I do understand not bothering when official releases are caught up to the raw though.

The legality of creating fan translations doesn't change whether it's licensed or not.

One should ask ADV Manga this.
PS: I'd wish someone will finish Rune Soldier, Those Who Hunt Elves and it's other titles...

It would be better to add the condition to the poll.
I agree that the scanlationgroup should stop with the scanlation after a series gets licensed, but on several conditions:
The licensor is not to far behind the latest chapter.
The licensor gives easy acces and proper availability.
The licensor doesn't make it to expensive. (No crazy prices please.)
The licensor needs to have proper speed. (I don't want to wait ages for a new volume.)
The licensor needs to give proper quality (proper translation and a good final product.)

It also depends on the releases of the license holder. I really like to read my favorites on paper. For example the paper version of Solo Leveling looks great, while Viz media is lately the worst in quality, but yeah they are the cheapest (the outlining and cutting is not well done by Viz. Sometimes the text inside is cut off.)

Their is also a major difference from the stuff from South Korea and Japan. Japan gives more priority to the profit, while SK gives more priority to amount of readers. (Webtoons is some good proof.)

Another thing is the speed of the releases, with manga it's not that much difference. But with light novels it's like a different world. If a 'scan' lationgroup releases a chapter we're happy ones a week. But license holders like Wuxiaworld going at full speed with a daily release of a chapter every day for most series. (Then off course it's better for the group to drop it, except if they don't to sleep at night.)

Even after dead, we raise from the ashes for the sake of manga.

Unless they're at imminent risk of being DMCA'd I would prefer the group to continue. I haven't experienced this with manga but light novels become a huge issue. Reading 15 volumes of an ongoing series only to have it licensed is annoying. The licensing company starts over from volume 1 and often has many concurrent projects and this leads to me waiting years for them to catch up to unofficial translations.

The nuance was actually quite important with this one... but still, the results are pretty interesting.
Thanks for polling this suggestion lambchopsil.

For anyone wondering about the nuanced options:

Straight yes
Straight no
Only if the licensed release is slow and/or too far behind
Only if the licensed release is not easily available to read or accessible to everyone
Only if the scanlator posts lower quality images (so there is reason to buy the official release)

I personally use fan translations to not only read leisurely but also to see what to buy. It's extremely helpful to my wallet to not just "blind buy" a manga - I need to know if it's good enough to read again and again. Blind buying is utterly foolish. I've both saved and spent a lot money doing this because a lot of English publishers' entire catalogue (I read BL) existed as fan translations first, so I could read completely beforehand. So I'd say keep scanlating until the official version comes out, or at least don't stop after only one chapter. I need to know if the story is worth my money.

But it depends on the type of comic, though, i.e., webtoon vs manga. Many good webtoons are very quickly licensed in English and the official translations are just superior to fan translations, from my experience (except Netcomics, their quality is baseline mediocre and sometimes complete crap). It takes forever for a manga to get licensed in English, and it's only a tiny fraction of what's out there that do get licensed.

Also, manhwa are very rarely made into print, so the primary income of the creator is based on the use of official online platforms. At least manga creators can rely on print sales as well as digital. So having a dual fan translation of a manhwa is kind of wrong, unless the official English version is (1) many months behind the raws, or (2) a censored "all ages" version while the ongoing scanlation is the uncensored mature version (this is common practice on Manta; they will edit an R19 webtoon just so it can be on their platform, much to no one's amusement🙄). All bets are off if any official release -- webtoon or manga or LN -- is censoring/altering content, sorry not sorry.

(Quite frankly, the biggest issue with a licensed webtoon isn't a continuing fan scanlation, it's the aggregators having the official version on there for free.)

Digital-only licensed manga gives me mixed feelings. Idk if it's the Japanese publishers' decision or not, but only doing a digital-only English release when most people want print books is going to make me want the fan translation to continue. I want to support official releases, but why pay for what is essentially a scanlation marked up 1000% and sometimes it's not even better quality than the fan one? I'd rather just read a DRM-free quality fan translation and just buy the Japanese book if I love it.

tl;dr: it depends.

떡대수 supremacy

They can stop. If I already have the option to read officially, so be it. Some people have concerns but it doesn't affect me that much. I only take advantage of the free chapters when curiosity kills me but that also doesn't happen often. I distract myself by watching more accessible contents like K-drama and others. Do that and time flies, I have a lot of material to binge.

Most mangas will not be available in my country even if they're licensed in English speaking countries. And some mangas are licensed in my country but not in english speaking countries. That's why also the license tag on Baka Updates doesn't mean much to me.
If I have the possibility to go to a bookshop and buy the manga, then I don't need a scanlation. But as I said, that's often not the case. Sometimes a manga is available in my country several YEARS after I read the scanlation. But if I liked it, I'm willing to buy a copy of it.

I say stop because it doesn't matter anymore and I don't believe for one second people don't know how to pirate here.

I will come at this from my point of view, the moment that a translation group stops a manga because its licensed, its effectively dead to me, i'm not waiting years being pissed off every time I check the manga if it caught up or if a new place decided to pick it up passed the first month, i'm just at a point where I consider it 100% dead.

I honestly hate the western industry, and I will never pay the grossly inflated prices per volume for their work, given even large projects have translation errors that scanlators don't have, or if a scanlator does, they go back and fix it.

if you gave me a good netflix like service that gave me access to everything and it paid out according to my attention span and gave me 0 limits, I would think of it, but at the same time, if that service existed I would have 0 issue with piracy as its likely more convenient.

I mean ill give an example, back when I actually bought manga, I saw the scan version and it had 320 yen for the book price, and what I had to pay was 20$, I don't remember the exact manga, but it was that kind of price difference that made me stop even looking at it. i'm going to end up buying all the berserk manga due to the hardcover version of it, I got a copy for 30$ and that's WELL worth it but for nearly everything else, you ain't getting me on it.

I hope you at least buy the raws (print or digital) if you like something, even if the official English is not good (enough). It's true some licensed stuff isn't any better than a fan translation (or worse) and it can be expensive, but I mean, these artists aren't working for free. Scanlation tends to make people forget that blood, sweat and tears go into making comics, so in a way it's good they drop a series. I've seen a lot of people who seem to think they can be animanga fans, constantly consuming a lot of content, but never paying for anything.

떡대수 supremacy

For something like this ^, it would be nice to have centralized service for all mangaka's, like patreon.
Or maybe, someday, on mangaupdates basis...