As the title says, we at FoOlRulez have been bought out. Our old “competitors” at Yen Press finally realized how much quality we offered our readers and offered us money to do their work for them.

What does that mean for releases?

• We will now require a subscription to access our FoOlSlide. We’re currently working on the access system, so the Slide will remain free until development is complete.
• We can now pick up any Yen Press-licensed series we like. Yes, this means we’re doing Spice and Wolf again.
• Releases will be delayed even further. There is a good reason why Yen Press requires six months to release a new volume, but I’m not allowed to tell you why. Just trust me on this one, okay?
• Our releases can no longer be hosted by aggregators. At all. Period. No questions. We’re official, you’re not. Deal with it, MangaFox and such ilk. (We are currently negotiating with Batoto about a “special exemption,” but no promises.)
• All releases done after the Yen Press buyout will be watermarked. We will not be retroactively watermarking our old releases. We and Yen Press are all lazy. (If this bothers you, I recommend using FoOlUnwatermark)

Finally, all of our backlogged releases will be dumped over the course of the next 24 hours. This includes things we started but never released for REASONS. Since they were produced before this buyout, the watermarking will not apply to these releases, either. I will list them below as they are made available.

• Seitokai Yakuindomo
  • Volume 7, chapters 170-178
  • Volume 7, chapters 179-180, and Volume 8, chapters 181-189
  • Volume 8, chapters 190-199 (delayed 24 hours for Hayate on Batoto)
• Spice and Wolf
  • Exclusive YenRulez Announcement Special
• Iincho
  • Chapter 1
  • Chapter 2

We are known as the most pro-reader scanlation group. We brought you FoOlSlide, we brought you FoOlReader, and we even brought you FoOlFuuka, the best imageboard.

But as time passes, scanlation keeps changing. Some people watermark pages like it’s their own material and claim rights to the manga and I really feel they should stop. However, we know how people on the Internet are…

But we saw it coming.

We know how greedy scanlators can get and that’s why we have prepared a function that resides in every FoOlReader and FoOlSlide. This function allows our comic readers to view the original input file presented to the software PRIOR TO WATERMARKING. Yes, you can now see the unwatermarked versions of the scans. This was a dev-trick that allowed us to read any manga anywhere without having to see watermarks. But, we saw how the situation was worsening and decided to reveal the trick to the world.

Ok, just tell me how!

It’s easy: you just need to install an userscript in your browser. The script is able to detect when you are using FoOlSlide or a FoOlReader and it will enable image source detection, procuring the original, unwatermarked image for you.

Here’s the file: [download id="6"]

On Opera:

If you haven’t set your userscripts folder, go to Preferences (Ctrl + F12) → Advanced → Content → JavaScript Options → User JavaScript Folder. Choose what you want your userscripts folder to be. Save the FoOlUnwatermark file into your userscripts folder.

On Firefox:

You need either GreaseMonkey or Scriptish. If you have either extension installed, clicking on the link should work.

On Chrome:

Just click on the link.

So yeah…

We hope this will ruin the plans of those dastardly scanlators, and that it will take them quite some time to catch up and find the code that splits the watermark layers. As we are clearly the most tech-savvy team in scanlation (and seeing as how everyone else is bad at computers) I don’t see that happening this year.

So, will they just stop using FoOlReader/FoOlSlide? If they do, you will know THEIR TRUE COLORS.

El. Psy. Congroo.

One thing that always owns scanlators is not having backups of their server data.

Each year I hear of about half-a-dozen groups losing all their data over faulty disks, bans or simple mistakes, and I’m sure even more groups I don’t know of are affected as well. Here are some suggestions to make your backups (almost) automatic.

Rule 0: Keep your data in a place where backup is possible

It might sound silly, but it’s the number one cause for scanlation group death. Picture this: a group’s site is a free forum. They can’t back up their data because the provider doesn’t allow that. Their site is suddenly closed for linking to (supposedly) copyrighted material, and the group slowly dissolved. It happens more than you’d think.

When choosing a site for your team’s forums and updates, first check if you can export data and import it to other systems. You should have access to the databases and the server hard disk. You must be able to extract at least the singular databases and all the FTP data.

Backup everything in your WWW folder (to your own hard drive)

A scanlation group usually has less than 8gb of data saved on-server. That’s a quite a large group already, as not even FoOlRulez has that much data, even though we have double copies of our 400 releases in addition to all our raw and worked material in PSD or hi-res.

The data in the WWW folder on-server doesn’t change often. It’s mainly reinstallable software – WordPress, your forum, FoOlSlide. What you have there are the images uploaded for blogposts or chapters uploaded for your online readers. You therefore don’t need to back this data up frequently. Monthly or twice a month is enough to cover you, but make sure it happens.

Lame choice: download via FTP each time

A choice for those who don’t have command line support.

Just select everything via FTP and start downloading. You can leave out less important things. 8Gb isn’t really that large: the problem is more that there are many small files to download, which can slow down the process.

If you can, first compress the folders into zip files before downloading. You can probably do this through your control panel. Compressed files are faster: not because they are smaller, but because downloading one large file is faster than downloading many small ones.

Once you have a copy of the data, you can selectively back up folders you know have changed.

Awesome choice: rsync

A choice for those who do have command line support.

Rsync is an application that synchronizes folders through computers without having to download files twice. It’s installed by default in your Linux server, as well as on Mac OSX. It uses the SSH “command line protocol” to sync files, which means it’s extremely secure, even when used in unprotected networks.

Here are installation instructions for Windows: http://rsync.net/resources/howto/windows_rsync.html

To sync, we use this command from time to time (on our own PC, not on the server’s command line):

rsync -avz --delete -e ssh root@foolrulez.org:/var/www/ /Users/woxxy/foolrulezwww/

This tells rsync to use SSH to connect to our foolrulez.org server as root. It tells it to compress the data before downloading it, and to put it in a “foolrulezwww” folder on my laptop. If it finds that some files have disappeared from the server, it also deletes them from my hard disk.

You can watch the magic happening or simply leave it alone. Do this every few days. You might even keep two versions of your site on your computer: a weekly version and a monthly version. If possible, back up your computer’s hard disk (with the site backup on it).

Save your MySQL database… six times.

You can lose your installation, your files, all your scans… big deal. These are things you can get back from the Internet. For once aggregators provide something useful for us: remote, automatic backing up of files! In the end, losing the files on a site basically means you waste time retrieving and reuploading.

The real core of your backups is the MySQL database. MySQL contains all your hard work: your blogposts, your forum and working data of everything in your server. It’s also extremely delicate. Made a bad update? Had an installation go wrong? Did your server crash? Bam, everything in your database is gone.

Seriously, don’t fuck with databases. Back. Them. Up. Now.

Lame choice: backup manually via browser

A choice for those who don’t have command line.

There’s not much to say: go to your admin panel, and use whatever export systems you have available. Have a monthly and weekly backup. Also keep the previous month’s data, as well as the previous week’s. Redundancy is better than total loss.

Less lame choice: manual backup via command line

You can just save a dump of the database via SSH. The command line to use is:

mysqldump --user=root --password=rootpassword --all-databases > ~/all-databases.sql

This will save all the databases in your server user’s home folder (like /home/woxxy/). You can then connect with your SFTP/FTP software and download it to your computer. Remember to delete the database backup from the server.

Keep a “monthly” backup that you make on the first of the month. Keep a “weekly” backup that you make on Sundays. Again, keep a copy of the previous month’s/week’s backup.

Awesome choice: automatic backups to S3

A choice for those who have command line and like to be awesome.

FoOlRulez has its own script that just does everything automatically. It keeps two monthly backups, two weekly backups, and two daily backups, automatically stored on the extremely secure Amazon S3 service. 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability. Enough said.

I have put the script and a short how-to guide in my latest Github repository, so you might as well just read it from there: https://github.com/woxxy/MySQL-backup-to-Amazon-S3

The cons: they ask you for credit card info (bet you already use Amazon anyway). The first year is free as long as you have less than 5Gb stored, and, after that, you’d pay around $0.42 a month if you have 3gb of databases stored (that’s a lot of database, believe me). If you have a normal-sized database, you’re likely to spend just $0.05/month. That’s crazy cheap, considering how secure is the S3 backup. I think it’s 100% worth it.

Why not Dropbox? Because Dropbox is not the right kind of service for critical data. Its name explains its purpose. Amazon S3 is an enterprise service, and won’t look into what you host. MySQL databases are extremely precious, as they contain hashes of passwords, so you want them to be stored in as safe a place as possible.

More

If you have questions about the code or about ways to back up your server, you can just use http://ask.foolrulez.com to send questions our well. We’re happy to answer.

Additionally, if you want anything added to this article, feel free to ask in the comments section.

1. new FoOlSlide theme
2. FoOlSlide Desktop
3. FoOlSlide extension for Opera
4. FoOlSlide plugin for Firefox
5. FoOlSlide extension for Chrome
6. FoOlSlide plugin for Safari
7. FoOlSlide for iPhone/iPod
8. FoOlSlide for iPad
9. FoOlSlide for Android
10. FoOlSlide for BlackBerry
11. FoOlSlide for WebOS
12. FoOlSlide for my washing machine

This didn’t really seem reasonable. Maybe each developer could code one browser extension, but then the code would’ve been different between each versions and impossible to maintain. Not feeling suicidal, we went for the drastic, painful route, which ensures us consistency through all the setups.

foolslide.js + foolslideUI.js

It took two weeks of consistent coding to generate a complete replica of the FoOlSlide data system in JavaScript (you know, that language that makes move things in your browser). It will take at least two more weeks to make it awesome enough to roll out in the official release of FoOlSlide.

The result is pretty much the following, in the FoOlSlide extensions (don’t mind the uncentered plus):

This has been created with industrial amounts of code! Here’s all the code I’ve used:

$('body').foolslideui({
slideUrls:["http://foolrulez.org/slide", "http://reader.kireicake.com/"],
sidebarElement: "#sidebar"
});
$.foolslideui.displaySidebarLatest();

Another example: the new FoOlSlide theme.

Which was created with the following:

$('#container').foolslideui{
slideUrls:[slideUrl],
sidebarElement: "#sidebar",
contentElement: "#main",
history: true,
fromUrl: true
});


Styling is handled by foolslideUI.js, and interaction with the FoOlSlide server is handled by foolslide.js. The two files interact to create a whole interface on any device that supports JavaScript.

Thus, we made a 2000 line (and growing) library that will let us put our reader on any device.

WebOS too.

That’s how we thought about browser extensions, which can do just as much work, allow you to bookmark the manga you need and have a nice dropdown menu which links you to the releases.
Words aside, I can just show you what I mean:

I don’t think this is the future per say, but I believe it will make it extremely easy to bookmark your series and keep track of the latest releases. A bit like MangaUpdates, but conveniently published right there for you, right from the second they are released.

We will release this plugin for Opera first, then Chrome, then Firefox, and later Safari. At least, we’ll try. I am at a good point with the Opera one, as you can see.
This focus on scanlation team tools is very important to speed up scanlation.

A REST API is a way to connect to Internet applications. It’s way beyond giving direct downloads, or a reader. An API is when sharing is complete, because you can use the raw data however you want. That’s how the widget in the home page of this blog works: I have used the API in order to create a little list, coming straight from our FoOlSlide.

Through the API, you’re not only going to be able to get the images of a release, but you’ll get data on when it was released, when it was last edited, the title, the description, which teams worked on it and their references, which user released it. You can get the list of the latest releases, the list of chapters released for a comic, the list of releases from a single team, or even from a joint.

If you are not a programmer, you can stop reading here. Technical stuff ahead.

In other words, there’s an API in every FoOlSlide, that can be used to create applications around it, with simple GET calls. Currently it’s an open API, but later in time it will need a login via oAuth2 to our servers (that is already coded inside of FoOlSlide, just not easy enough to use it yet), to prevent abuse through request limitation. Right now I wouldn’t really worry about it.

My suggestion is that if you’re interested, join the FoOlRulez programmers team. It’s easier to work in synergy, and I can add eventual missing API hooks, that you might need.

You can find the hooks directly from the files. Each function is fairly documented right before it starts, with the filters it supports.
https://github.com/woxxy/FoOlSlide/tree/master/application/controllers/api

Before giving some examples, there are currently two “formats” you can get from the API:

• JSON (default if not set, /format/json)
• XML (/format/xml)

More might come, though I don’t think it’s necessary. The examples are all with xml appended because it’s easier for the browser to display. I suggest always using JSON.

The suggested workflow is: grab all the comics available, and use their IDs to grab the single comics’ chapters. Then grab the single chapter by ID, that will contain all data of the pages. Each chapter comes packed with team data.

Reader

All the functions that can be achieved via the manga reader. One can build a desktop reader out of this, or a whole FoOlSlide theme… working outside of FoOlSlide, inside of your blog, in example.

reader/comics (plural)

Returns a simple list of the comics with their data (no related chapters)

ID order:

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/comics/format/xml

Orderby:

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/comics/orderby/desc_created/format/xml

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/comics/orderby/desc_edited/format/xml

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/comics/orderby/asc_name/format/xml

etc.

Page and per_page (default: 30 per_page, max:100)

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/comics/per_page/6/page/2/orderby/desc_created/format/xml

reader/comic (singular)

Returns one single comic, and all the related chapters. Each chapter has the teams (can be multiple due to joints) listed with them.

You have to pass an ID:

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/comic/id/8/format/xml

reader/chapters (plural)

Returns a list of the chapters, with their teams, and their comic. Ideal for getting “latest releases” via /orderby/desc_created.

ID order:

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/chapters/format/xml

Orderby:

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/chapters/orderby/desc_created/format/xml

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/chapters/orderby/asc_edited/format/xml

etc.

Page and per_page (default: 30 per_page, max:100)

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/chapters/per_page/6/page/2/orderby/desc_created/format/xml

reader/chapter (singular)

Returns one single chapter, relative comic, teams, and all its pages.

You have to pass an ID:

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/chapter/id/8/format/xml

reader/team and reader/joint

Allow grabbing chapters by team, and work the same way as reader/chapters.

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/team/id/2/format/xml

(FoOlRulez)

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/joint/id/2/format/xml

(FoOlRulez + Suimasen scans)

Orderby:

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/chapters/orderby/desc_created/format/xml

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/chapters/orderby/asc_edited/format/xml

etc.

Page and per_page (default: 30 per_page, max:100)

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/reader/team/per_page/6/page/2/orderby/desc_created/id/2/format/xml

Members

members/teams (plural)

Get the teams on this FoOlSlide

Available filters: page, per_page (default:30, max:100), orderby

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/members/teams/per_page/3/page/1/orderby/asc_name/format/xml

members/team (singular)

Use the ID to get the members and leaders of a team, with their public profiles

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/members/team/id/2/format/xml

members/joint (singular) 

Returns the teams that are in a joint. You grab this by joint ID.

http://foolrulez.org/slide/api/members/joint/id/2/format/xml

(FoOlRulez + Suimasen scans)

Most large groups own $60-$80/month servers. That’s a reasonable price, if you need around 1 Terabyte of bandwidth. We were able to use only 0.5TB, for under $40-50 a month, on what is probably the most performing virtual host in the world.

Yet, In the last two months we doubled the number of readers coming to our site, and we keep getting exponentially larger. So we came to a crossroad: spend more to keep a high quality server, or quit our good server, to buy a bandwidth server. Of course, we didn’t like either, so we thought a bit about it.

We actually have a little, $5 server to use as proxy where there’s limits set by firewalls. It’s quite bad for sites large as FoOlRulez, because it’s unstable, so we never really used it, but… 3.6 Terabyte of bandwidth for $5. A bargain! In 2011, you can get some decent bandwidth for real cheap, don’t you agree?

We just needed to code something to use it.

FoOlSlide Balancer

FoOlSlide balancer is a new piece of software, but I decided to integrate it directly into FoOlSlide, so it’s easier to deal with, since scanlation leaders already know how to install it.

It’s so easy to use, you aren’t going to believe it. Just stop thinking about how it works for a second.

1. Install FoOlSlide on the bandwidth server
2. In the admin panel of this “client” FoOlSlide, give it the URL to the “master” FoOlSlide
3. Give the “master” FoOlSlide the URL to the “client” FoOlSlide

That’s it. Seriously, that is all. If you want, you can even use it with CDN sites like MaxCDN, but I think that would cost quite a bit more.

Now FoOlRulez not only will keep working on an incredibly fast server, but it will cost me even less, while providing up to 4Tb of pooled bandwidth. That’s… something that went better, much better than expected.

This feature is already out. Just upgrade your FoOlSlide from the admin panel!

I’m overworked, to the point I don’t really edit anything anymore. It’s very important to help other groups with their server and FoOlSlide, and I want to keep doing this.

Since FoOlSlide became really popular really soon, I have to put limits to whom I give support, and put a stop to giving help to people who don’t contribute actively to the community.

I will give free support, given the time, to:

• active scanlators
• mangakas and publishers
• web comic artists

I will give paid support, to

• people who make lots of legal bucks out of FoOlSlide who would also like to contribute to the cause in an open source way

I won’t give support of any kind, to:

• people trying to create manga aggregators
• people trying to use FoOlSlide in unconventional ways
• people trying to illegally make money out of it

It’s not rules I have to formally abide to, and it’s still up to me to decide if giving support or not.

Notice that our software doesn’t come with support included. It’s just in my interest to support scanlation and whoever wants to share their work. I will also help mangakas and publishers if possible, because we owe them.

Being a developer, anything that goes out of this scope, and is legal, will be naturally dealt with like a freelance job. The features requested will possibly become open source too, like themes included, plugins, and so on (this especially allows easier updating).

I don’t need to say why I am not going to support people making illegal money with FoOlSlide. Even less I have to explain why I really hate aggregators.

FoOlSlide is a really massive and innovative project. There are many parties interested in its evolution, and, this could be your chance to help us out, FoOls, and the community.

First general rule: you’d be working at FoOlRulez only. I don’t mean you can’t play WoW with your friends, or that you can’t frequent some forums. Just don’t be in another major group similar to ours.

We need programmers that know one or more of these languages:

• PHP
• jQuery/Javascript
• Java (for future android and universal desktop client)
• Objective-C (for future iPhone application)
• English

For knowing, I mean having programmed in them before, being able to bring at least proof about it. I can certainly help, but I need you to be able to deal with objective PHP, know about using jQuery plugins and creating them, and of course all the HTML5 and CSS stuff. You can get updated while coding, if you didn’t code for a while.

Current priorities? Coding a new proper theme, fixing the error lines to a nicer English, dealing with the translation files from other groups, fixing visualization bugs in the admin panel, improving the forms’ error messages.

I moved the project on GitHub to have an easier time – it’d be annoying to deal with server permissions or paying a dedicated server. Here’s the branch: https://github.com/woxxy/FoOlSlide

This is the official branch of FoOlSlide, so we’ll be keeping the FoOlRulez ideal behind it, and you’d have to follow the groups’ priorities when coding it. Anything that is changed into FoOlSlide will belong to FoOlRulez as a group. Donations will be kept by me, who will invest in what the group needs, just as it happened for the past years. This pretty much means I will deal with the loss.

The FoOlSlide project is completely legal. It’s a generic reader, it can be used legally, be it for webcomics, comics, manga, pages of a book, PDFs, slides from power-point and so on. We’re aware of the illegal uses, we are part of scanlation too, yet we like to make sure everyone uses it without hurting at least the moral rights of the companies whose work is derived. In other words, we’re working towards legality.

Sorry for making such points clear: I am aware most programmers care about this, though not every single of them. I have never dealt with software with such a large-scale success, even less I’ve dealt with a team of programmers. You can probably tell I can deal with a large and complex team already, so programming would be just an extension of the team.

If you like reading properly, want to contribute to the community, or just love us, don’t want to spend a dime to contribute and like programming, we’d be happy to have you aboard. You can just mail me at recruiting@{thisdomain.org(you know which domain I mean)}, show me what you coded in past. You don’t need to tell me your life situation, but of course you can tell me what you’d like to – nothing is fine.

But then, there’s also the readers, that are going to be losing the reading quality I provided. I will therefore stop being such a fool.

So, from now on, I am not going to go against my ideals when people ask me personal corrections for my open-source software. I code for the love of proper reading, not for giving individuals a tool for world domination. There are some things that are objectively right to do, and I did them, or will implement them. And there’s things one shouldn’t do, objectively.

I am never going to add anymore or suggest you code about:

• Right click block
• Any kind of code to make saving the page harder
• disable preloading…
• Adding registration/login locks
• Ways to add too much advertising
• Obliging people to click buttons to read
• Automatically add watermarks
• Encryption (yes, there is a certain way to do this)
• Any kind of horribly thought interfaces
• Limiting sharing freedom in general

Such requests come mostly from shoujo teams. I respect your rules, and I am not going to change them. I just won’t assist you anymore in your world dominations plans. Find a coder and get him to edit it for you.

Let me say this: I probably have much, much more experience than you, in web development. If you ask me this kind of code, you probably aren’t knowledgeable enough, therefore you should listen to my suggestion. Giving limitations to readers is not only morally wrong, but it’s also annoying them, and making them go to other sites. You’re losing three times.

I am not open-sourcing my software to give scanlators a nice toy, but so I can go to their site and enjoy reading. I am not going to rape my own software from the reason I have created and released it for.

To everyone who is using it to share freely, instead: THANK YOU. You’re contributing in making this community a better place.