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.

There is, of course, the overarching truth, which is that we always knew these services weren’t for permanent storage. Whoever uploaded files there did it with the knowledge the download would expire eventually. Surely they also knew there were better alternatives (or DDL from their servers when possible).

Realization

Yesterday I was, as usual, playing with entertaining myself on 4chan, when someone pointed out that “on the Internet, when something goes down, someone will replace it”. I answered “You must be new to the Internet”, as it hardly ever happens that an equivalent service is born immediately or at all after the old service is killed, leaving us moaning about the old days forever and ever.

Then I realized how there’s no need for alternatives yet, as there are plenty of file uploading services.

Moeney

The upload sites gave money to uploaders. Why would they do that when they can keep everything to themselves?

Fact is, there’s just so much competition, and pleasing the Downloaders gets very difficult. When everyone is driving the same car, the only solution is to steal the fuel of the other websites – the Uploaders.

It doesn’t matter if they put more ads or if they request money for faster and/or consecutive downloads. If they grab all the Uploaders, they will be getting all the Downloaders onboard anyway.

Greed wins over Quality again

I love when people upload to sites like MediaFire. There’s no wait times, there’s no bandwidth limits, no simultaneous download limits, the download button is green and very visible and it starts the download without a hassle. The ads are irritating and everywhere, but we can’t exactly ask them to give us their time and bandwidth for free.
Moreover, the people who have to pay for the accounts are Uploaders, not the Downloaders.

One negative thing about MediaFire – it’s a little harder to keep content online… what have you been uploading again?

The other popular sites on their download pages beside captcha and wait times, will instead give a list of options to get subsequent, simultaneous and wait-time-free downloads. This is how these sites are able to multiply their income: disregarding the Downloader in order to attract the Uploaders.

This is a well-wrought cycle that will kill the more honest upload services.

Uploader’s fault

Choosing a service to get money from pirated content is pretty despicable.

I believe the recession, financial crisis and number of jobless young people is making this a more widespread problem than it should be. The full-time job of many is to upload pirated content on these sites to make money through the downloads. The earnings that can be made through uploading for few hours a day are comparable to the wages of a proper job – minus the taxes of course.

The issue isn’t that pirated content doesn’t give royalties to the copyright holders, the issue is that it is now used to increase downloads and money.

This is making pirated content more widespread thanis requested or required, and the easier it is to reach, the more “normal” it will be considered by the Internet population. My “real life” friends wouldn’t know how to use torrent or p2p services (poor fools), but they know all about the direct download sites like… what MegaUpload was.

Final thoughts

I haven’t uploaded to services like these for 2 odd years. I download off them a lot though, stuff from SaHa and circles like that, doujins basically. Sometimes I happen to download MineCraft stuff, but that’s it.

I believe the ones who don’t distribute money or try too hard at getting Uploaders onboard will be the sites that will stay up… the longest. I seriously hope so.

We were down for one and a half days. Over 50.000 users raged hard. Don’t do SOPA. Or PIPA. They’re bad for your health.

I am a ferret.

Today I read that easymodo is going down, and since we are kinda power-users of the service, I have installed the archiving software on one of our servers.

You can access our /a/ and /jp/ archiver at http://archive.foolz.us. By now it’s stable enough, save the reports function for which I don’t have enough love at 4am, but surely will have when I wake up fixed it.

The Easymodo admin said he’ll publish the dumps of the past years later, and I think we’ll need a bigger server for that, but I guess we got one for that.

There are times programmers offer code because they know there will be fools using it.
The fools are the site administrators that think having a blog and blogging in a forum are the same exact thing.

It’s not the same goddamn thing.
Forums look like crap and modified forums look even worse.

Putting looks aside, there’s the simple fact that a forum isn’t designed to be used like a blog.

• need to register to comment
• tiny font
• too many characters per line
• screen clutter on the periphery
• titles with poor visibility
• lack of well-designed widgets
• full of hackish code, especially for portals
• slow, as it grabs blog posts as forum posts
• bad Search Engine Optimization
• no basic functions like excerpt control
• no automatic spam moderation
• no trackbacks
• no per-post image gallery
• different moderation mindset
• no clear RSS button
• HTML tables everywhere
• incredibly difficult to edit/make themes
• plugins barely exist and aren’t compatible with the portal

Why are you using colors/bold front or centering things in your “forum portal blogposts”? Because it’s a mess. You are subconsciously realizing that the layout doesn’t work at all, and you need to focus your letters in some way so it doesn’t disappear amidst the clutter.
If it was a blog, the most you would do is bold some lines so people can skim your article easily.

Is it really overly difficult to deal with both a forum and a blog? It’s not, because WordPress is much smarter at dealing with posts, and it clearly becomes a more convenient and safe island for you to blog on. Plugins are far more popular in blogs and therefore more refined. They can save you hours of time.

Forums and blogs are also different in the minds of the readers.
In a blog you’re authoritative. You’re a “researcher”, a “journalist”, you’re bringing news. When the people reply to your blogpost, they will be interested in giving opinions rather than prolonging discussion for entertainment, and will be able to get a “threaded” answer. You’re not a “God amongst humans”, like a moderator, but someone whose posts exist in a dimension separate from theirs. They don’t even know how the panel to add a blogpost looks like; they’re detached. And that’s good.
In a forum, you’re the administrator, the moderator. Your post will look just the same as every other post. This makes the users feel on a similar level to you. You’ll be that “God amongst humans” you don’t want to be, and they will feel like you have to live up to your own rules more strictly than they do. They will think they have the power you have. In many cases, they will try abusing this. That’s incredibly bad.

Blogs and forums are two different ‘cultures’ with different associated experiences. It’s rare to have a bad experience writing a blog, but forum-goers will likely recall times they were bullied by administrators, or were trolled and disrespected as moderators themselves.

This said, if you are still on a forum, quit using it as a blog. It takes around 15 minutes of your work to install WordPress and find a theme that suits your site. There are thousands of WordPress themes, and, while it’s not the best blog software available, it’s certainly the best for you.

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.

To the point FoOlRulez.org became kinda a mess to keep using for our projects, as it’s not really a proper place where to share code like a tech team.

FoOlRulez.com: FoOlRulez tech

We’ve bought a new domain to separate the tech section, and the scans/anime/manga section. We’ll use the second site less often, as it will be mainly become a hub for downloading the software, plugins, themes and so on.

Remember FoOlSlide, the new version of the now popular manga reader for scanlators? It’s already open sourced on FoOlRulez.com, though it’s not yet functional (NOT FUNCTIONAL AT ALL, DON’T TRY USING IT).

Go over to FoOlRulez.com to see more.

This also means we’ll be recruiting programmers. Be ready for this.

Well, we did an april fool two years ago, and today it was added to the danish wikipedia page for scanlation.

Også scanlationfolk kender til aprilsnar. I 2009 forsøgte gruppen FoOlRulez sig således med en oversættelse af Hayate the Combat Butler kapitel 130, hvor der skiftedes mellem en række forskellige sprog som tjekkisk, tysk, nederlandsk og fransk. En spøg der dog ikke rigtig vandt gehør hos læserne, der havde forventet et kapitel kun på engelsk. At den velbesøgte side MangaFox først fik kapitlet 2. april gjorde ikke just sagen bedre. Så da FoOlRulez kom med den rigtige oversættelse et par uger efter, måtte man da også meget undskylde.

Which Opera-Translates to:
Also scanlationfolk know about April Fool. In 2009 the group tried FoOlRulez itself with a translation of Hayat the Combat Butler Chapter 130, which turns from a variety of languages ​​such as Czech, German, Dutch and French. A joke is not really met with sympathy from readers who had expected a chapter in English only. To the popular page MangaFox first got second chapter April did not exactly improve matters. So when FoOlRulez came with the correct translation for a few weeks after, it was necessary because too much apologizing.

Yeah, we had published a chapter of Hayate without announcing it, and people ran over to upload it everywhere. It featured every page written in a different correctly written language. I think you can still download it from the download section.

Troll successful, but I would have never guessed this would put us on Wikipedia two years later.

Gave us a good laugh.

Achievements

That’s right: FoOlRulez has now achievements! Click around the site, keep visiting, and you’ll make points.
It’s obvious what these points could be used for, be it prizes, decisional power, veto power on hentai, admin power for a week, control on scanlation for a day, raging flames in blog for a year and so on!

Now GO! When there will be enough players, a table will appear, telling us who’s winning!
And notice: achievements are over 50, and are constantly updated and added. The amount of points you can get is not related to how difficult is to get to the achievement.