Edit: the new rule was vetoed, so the below doesn’t count much anymore.
Edit from M: LOL

Today, though, they really touched my heart.

In a thread commenting on our post about how some scanlators make profit, it was decided that from now on the redditors (is that what you call them?) will always have to link to the scanlators’ sites to talk about freshly released manga, and posting links to manga aggregators will be prohibited.

You can read about the new rule here.

Scanlation, more than getting traffic, needs popularity. This is in order to get more applicants, which was a problem last year due to other leech sites keeping readers uninformed about us. Of course, it’s very illegal for aggregators to make any profit (and such large profits at that) on the backs of mangakas.

Supporting us is the right move to get more quality and speed in our release. And possibly a more honest community of scanlators. Who knows.

Thank you, /r/manga.

Now I’ll introduce you to a new issue with scanlation.

Remember when, two years ago, scanlators asked you so frequently to buy the original copies of the manga? I hardly remember it now, as the panorama’s changed quite a bit.

Scanlation is becoming business. A profitable one.

I used to talk negatively about aggregators – I still do. The reason why aggregators are to be hated is that they make so much money on the shoulders of copyright holders and even on free labour. Scanlators don’t do that. Nor should they.

Back in 2008, we realized we would be able to afford the cost of our server if we provided what the aggregators did (free online reading), so we created the first “fast, high quality” manga reader on a scanlator’s website. Just as we had imagined, the income from advertising (20-40$ a month) allowed us to acquire a much better server, have more bandwidth and buy raws, all without having to ask for donations.

Fast forward to 2012.  We released two comic readers, Batoto was created, Filesonic is all the rage.

In this age, our income is steady. It’s the same that we had in 2008, but the servers have become cheaper over time. Look at our site for a second: can you find any ads? (there’s only one on the bottom of the reader)

Nightmare mode: have you seen the 4chan archives we host? Those get 1.800.000 pageviews a month, five times the pageviews of our team site. That’s over 400gb of content stored, and even there, we have no ads.

Of course, we offer the best online manga reader ever created, and we offer direct downloads off our server without ads or wait times. We can’t get any more open than this.

How is it possible to live without ads?

The answer is Batoto.

Batoto is a godsend for scanlation. Many scanlators can fund their own site thanks to them, and some quit having ads on their site. Batoto basically allows you to put your Google Adsense ads on their site, so the credit goes directly to the scanlator’s Google account. Very simple, very secure.

We had about the same amount of income when our site had ads on every page, and that’s quite decent, considering we release so infrequently.

Wait a second…

If FoOlRulez can afford all this stuff just on Batoto money, what’s going on with other scanlators?

They release several times more frequently than us, and their projects have many, many more followers than ours. By this logic, they should be earning several times the money we earn, right? Of course they do.

There’s more. They have ads all over their website, they ask for donations on their site, they ask for donations on their credit pages, and they use Filesonic (sort of dead now), which pays more based on how big the file is, and how many downloads it gets. Every time they add another scheme to make money, their revenue multiplies.

How much can such groups earn? Somewhere between $500 and $1000, basing myself on what we currently earn. That’s an incredible amount of money when FoOlRulez has probably some of the most powerful servers in scanlation, with the little we earn. If we wanted to have really nice servers, we don’t really need to go over $150 a month.

This is pretty new.

And that was all I had to say.

I  had to vent a bit about this issue. I’m not going to name any specific groups, because there’s lots of them involved.

We can’t go down this road. Scanlation is already in great danger because all the groups are lacking applicants.

If money becomes a part of the equation, we will seriously think about quitting scanlation. We don’t want to be involved in what may as well be an organized plot to earn revenue from someone else’s work. Compared to the mangaka’s work, ours is a shitstain, only worth minor credit and a read. It’s the mangaka’s effort that should be loved, you should make a shrine for him/her (and you should totally buy the official volumes!)

You would expect I’d have done this post a bit earlier, but I was wasted from the long night, so I relaxed for the rest of the day and watched the first season of Tantei Opera Milky Holmes. I must say that the villain is amazing…in many ways, yo.

We’ve had quite a situation down at FoOls’ scanlation department, considering several crucial members in the team weren’t available to finalize the chapters. In the end I kept back an SYD release for a rainy day…like, the first few days of the year. Seito and Alphonse be workin’ fluently as usual. Hopefully, we can clean up our priorities list in the next days, so when the majority of us return to work/school, we’ll have the big stuff comin’ back out, yo.

My New Years’ resolution is to answer all the email I receive. Seriously, I forget to answer a lot of email, and I think I really need to get a grip on it, yo.

For FoOls, I hope we’ll be as stable as we ever were. I think the most stable period was near the end of the last summer. I hope we can get things back together next month, before exams begin. I don’t really play a big role in scanlation anymore, so it’ll be fine if we can just fix some things up and get the queue cleaned up, yo.

Now I’ll get to packaging SYD, yo.

Did you guys have some silly New Year’s resolution? Yo?

There were some people that lived four houses down from me. Our families were kind of close. We sent each other food from time to time. They had two daughters, whose names I will not disclose.

A year before I knew I was going to move to Alberta, they were expecting a baby. I was happy for them. And I was pretty excited, too. I couldn’t wait to go and see the baby, play around with it, and watch it grow up. I had siblings of my own, but our ages were far too close for me to be anything but annoyed with them most of the time. I couldn’t wait.

The baby was born. It had kidney failure. It died within a couple of days.

I was shocked. I was sad, but I didn’t cry. I had never seen the baby. It hadn’t even been alive for 48 hours.

The family held a funeral for the baby. I went to the ceremony, and there it was, in its tiny coffin, looking for all the world as if it were asleep. It still had a red tinge in its ears, and it looked just like any other sleeping baby. I wanted see if it was cold or not, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. Someone gave me a nudge, and I moved along.

At the graveyard, they lowered the tiny coffin into the tiniest grave I had ever seen. They filled up the hole. The baby was buried. Everyone moved on with their lives. I could only stare wide-eyed at the marker, and moved around in a dazed shock for a week.

And I’ve been scared of graveyards ever since.

The End.

It’s Woxxy the richfag FoOl, blogging from his new 800 euro iPad (bought with meal tickets).

Donations are a serious matter, so let’s keep it serious.

FoOlRulez, with its extremely popular projects and blockbuster-level software, makes over 3000 dollars a day of revenue. This might look like a real lot of money, but there’s a lot of expenses involved, like paying for the protection to the Italian mafia, buying the new Nymph figures for all the team, 70 Euros of electricity every 74 hours, the unlimited Internet connection for all the team, Apple computers for the editors…

But we’re not going to ask you to pay $38.234 Euro a month. No, we’re decent(?) people and know that’s all for our own pleasure.

I’ll ask you one thing: the server leaks around 20€ a month, all from my pocket. While it is a huge server, costing us 60€ a month, we need it because our software, our releases, the 4chan archives and the API calls for a lot of power and bandwidth. The point is, we aren’t wasting the money. I’m actually working hard to cut the expenses, often harder than I’m working on the projects.

I wish I could say software success was making us money, but it’s all open source and used by other scanlators, who, like us, don’t have money to lend anyway. Even though nearly 200 sites use FoOlSlide, for us it’s the biggest expense of the year – in manpower and server power.

Therefore, if you like our releases, our software, or are an user of the 4chan archives, consider rescuing my pocket from paying the remaining server costs. We will then, as per usual, be able to keep working, keep our software updated, keep the releases flowing and publish the new software we have planned (which will be simply amazing stuff: the IRC bot for FoOlSlide, FoOlFuuka and more).

Thank you for your support, both now and in the past. The money we gather will be used strictly for our server costs and possible expenses incurred by our projects. We will, of course, remove the button if we start getting too much.

I have activated all the users that couldn’t activate before.

In case you have issues with our site, please, try reporting them in any recent blogpost so we can read them!

Spice and Wolf has become such a wildly popular series that I even found it even translated officially in Italian. At that point I figured we weren’t really needed anymore, and after stalling the releases for a little while, here’s the final decision: we’re completely stopping work on this manga.

I’ll honestly say that we were working on this manga just because we like the character Horo and wanted to have something about her. We don’t mind stopping distribution as much as the fact that we won’t be working on any more delicious Horo. It’ a very sad day.

So, what do you do now?

You should go to your regional Amazon site/equivalent and look for the YenPress translation of Spice and Wolf. Their version is on par with ours, and they’ll likely be releasing a volume we haven’t worked on in the coming days.
If you care to support your local non-english publishers, ask your favorite manga shop guy (if it’s licensed in your language).

Thanks for reading Spice and Wolf with us. It was a relatively long ride, and I hope that we contributed in making this series as popular as it is.

Well, TRIVIA: last binary day of the century.

Anyway, hail the sweet prince in the picture.

Oh, there’s more, it’s also Hayate’s birthday.

Oh, there’s more, it’s also MLLofTUHC’s birthday.

Oh, there’s more, it’s also Necrophantasia’s birthday.

Oh, there’s more, it’s also my mom’s name day.

What a special day, I must say.

Here’s the original picture:

A "skating skeleton".

We’re giving away an extra copy of GTAIII we have. You must have a steam account to get it. It’s an old game, we all have it, but you might not have it so… go on.

Answer this question. It’s two words, and we’ll give suggestions as people get closer to the answer.

Here’s the image of the object:

What’s drawn on the cover of my Discrete Maths notebook?
Suggestions given: “horror”, “sport” “it’s a verb and the kind of monster”, “S…-ing s…”.

You can tweet me the answer @woxxy, or comment here with an email reaching you.
No need to follow me.

You might know that we’re an averagely cool and slightly influential team. Our IRC is one of the chattiest around, we have many projects unrelated to scanlation, we have a pretty site, we’re in-touch with the public, and we have an almost-ideal mindset about what we do.
Oh, and other scanlators love us. A lot.

If you’d like to join our scanlation team, you’re going to have a hard time gaining fame. It shouldn’t be your reason for joining. If you join us, it should be because you want to help ensure our releases can be published faster, making it so you can read them earlier. And if you would like our releases to be published faster, then by all means, read what follows.

Which classes do we need?

The usual three, of course: we need translators, editors and proofreaders. We always ask for them all to keep some balance. You’ll find the the email to send applications to at the bottom of the page.

Just some short class descriptions for you:

• Translators
  You guys are the rarest kind. You probably don’t need to join us to read what you’d work on. If you would like more people to know about what are you reading, want to learn better Japanese (and English) through translating, or want to help us in our eternal struggle, you should apply.
  As rare as you are, we can’t be very strict about the quality of your work. We will accept you if you are still learning, and we’ll do our best with our proofreaders to find your mistakes. Try to be at least “competent” in your Japanese.
• Editors
  If you can use a bit of Photoshop, you can be an editor. You must be able to adhere to our strict standards, which are described in the PDF that comes with the test. If you can do this, you’ll be fine, so long as you follow the guidelines very closely. It’s not about skills, but instead about sticking with the standards and taking lots of time to make sure your end product is consistent with our guidelines.
  It’s really much better if you have a tablet, because we redraw a lot (and we mean a lot). They come fairly cheap, and Wacom has special offers for students. The test for editors says it all: it’s four pages; make them look better than we did. It’s not hard to do this, because we never put 110% into editing our releases like you’ll have to.
• Proofreaders
  Lots of people apply as proofreaders, and that’s fine with us. What you should know is that knowing English is not enough. You’ll waste a lot of your time, because this is a challenging position with a very challenging entrance test. There are many skills that proofreaders will find helpful or even essential: the ability to concentrate, having a broad vocabulary and sense of diction, having a good eye for mistakes, reading comprehension… but for the most part, it’s about being able to rewrite sentences for better flow while not breaking the good ones at the same time.
  The test is quite long, and you are given two weeks to return it. It could be easily done in two days, of course, but we want you to take your time and explore your possibilities.

More general requirements

First of all, if you join FoOlRulez, you can be only part of FoOlRulez. We don’t mind if you have a gaming guild, but don’t work for another team that scanlates or works on similar projects, like fansubbing. We will give you as much work as you want – possibly more – so we need really dedicated members.

If you can, idle in the IRC at all times. Unless you are fine with being detached and still working with us, IRC is where you should be to keep in touch with our team. We aren’t “circlejerkers”, so it’s really easy to fit in. You know we like things like anime and manga, Touhou, visual novels, 4chan related things, posting pictures from pixiv, hardcore programming, and so on. We lounge about in superficial, Japan-related subjects.
If you care about being too exposed to the public, we have a team channel where only FoOls and some of our contributors hang out, called #FoOlDriver.

Knowing English. It’s embarrassing (for us) if we can’t discuss things with you. Even if you’re an editor, you must be able to speak English without us having to dumb down our speech significantly.

You must be 16 years of age or older. We’ve met many cool 14 year-olds, but it’s a good rule to have a 16+ age requirement since most of our manga have adult themes involved – and our chat itself is not really suited for younger people.

Contact

Email: recruiting ATTO foolrulez DOTTO org. The one who receives the emails will be me, Woxxy. Your email will be available for the team, so if I’d like to show it around to the other members, I will.

You don’t need to write an essay about who you are, and we definitely don’t need to know your real name. We’d be more interested in things like…how much free time you have, when you have it, how old you are, if you have a Twitter, etcetera. Then again, you can write whatever you want. Just know that we’ll take you in even if you write a two-liner, because what counts is the result of the test.

Get some courage!

Anyway, we might look like an easygoing team, and sure, we are, but also consider that there’re a lot of scanlation groups looking up to us.

Tests will be looked over promptly after submissions, and we’ll let you know when we’re done.

Remember, if you happen to not pass our test, don’t worry: we are a high-profile team and our standards are stricter than most groups’. There are always other groups more in-need than we are, and they’re probably looking for members. Helping out scanlators in any way is always a good deed. I think.

All the budding scanlators out there have to start somewhere, so if you’re new to the job, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.

Prepare yourselves, and best of luck to you all.