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

I have been informed we are recruiting for other positions as well.
Editors and Proofreaders and idk, whatever else makes the ship float (are we still a ship?)

If you’re interested in one of those then send an email to recruiting AT foolrulez DOT org
or go to the IRC
or post in the forums
or whatever.

So, what’s editing? Editing is cleaning and typesetting. At FoOlRulez every editor knows how to do both. I can accept it if you have a preference for one or the other, but you won’t often have much choice.

Requirements:

• English
  You need to be able to understand English well
  
• Open minded
  You know we do a lot of open source work and that we like to stress we don’t own the manga
• Be narcissistic
  Every editor in Foolz claims to be the best editor (btw, I am the worst editor in Foolz)
• Don’t be in another group
  You won’t have time for other groups. If you quit a group for us, you are disqualified
• Be a bit of a workaholic and like the manga we work on
  Editors spend more time with the manga than anyone else, so you should be able to enjoy it, or at least stand it
  

I don’t mind if you moan while editing. I don’t mind if you ask a lot of questions. However, I loathe editors who give an OK about a chapter and still haven’t started two weeks later. ESPECIALLY if you don’t notify me about the delay. We aren’t a group who demand fast editing. You’re not required to edit a chapter in less than a week, nor will you be expected to edit more than one chapter a month. We’re very laid back and have no release schedules, but we must get things done eventually.

Bonus points if you’re some 4channer, especially if you edited chapters as Anonymous. We don’t have any scanlation drama and we are an independent team (another reason why we don’t allow our team members to join other groups). The majority of our members are regulars on 4chan. If you wish to join a group, we’re the right one.

There’s a short test to take, composed of a couple pages. It comes with an extensive list of instructions and suggestions that I wrote myself. You’ll be forgiven for little details I didn’t list, or for miniscule, pedantic things, but there are suggestions that I listed three times, which I absolutely require.

If you care to join us, send me a mail at recruiting ATTO foolrulez DOTTO org, and just ask for the editor test.

Consider this from our point of view: we have a relatively large group of 20 active members, of which at least 15 have been with us for over one year, ten for over two years and at least five having been with us for six years. We don’t only scanlate: we also code and maintain the 4chan archives – ergo, there’s a lot of trust involved.
We take the team extremely seriously.

Point zero: all members joined acknowledging this rule

We’ve had this rule for six years and it was in all our recruitment posts. We wouldn’t allow people to join multiple guilds, and we wouldn’t allow them to leave and rejoin. This rule works for many reasons, some unknown even to me, and keeps the team solid.

Members have plenty of work to do

There’s no point in sharing team members with other teams when our own group’s work is enough to fill everyone’s plate. We have a huge backlog of chapters, since we work on several series that we started after several volumes had been released.

Our members are too nice

Some of them will not look at what they have on their FoOls backlog and traipse easily into the matters of other groups – even if they don’t get credited. If they really insist on being exploited, I’d rather exploit them myself with a double dose of chapters.

The word ‘joint’

If a team member must work with another group, it can be a thing called a joint release. We partner with the other group and make the situation a bit more official and controlled. When the chapter reaches us, I assign that part of the chapter to the member. This allows me to fine-tune the member’s workload. I can even tell another member to do the job.

People who join multiple teams act weird

It is really embarrassing to deal with a person who is working for more than one team when you are the leader. Being told that another group has priority is the worst offence I can receive.

Different teams, different cultures, different ideals

When we work in joints, there’s always a lot of disagreement on the standard we use. The reason why we held a joint with Suimasen-scans is because our teams are pretty close in ideals and editing standards, and maybe even in culture.

If a member joins two teams, he will create a lot of friction inside your own team. He will throw the other teams’ standards into your projects, criticize your methods using another team’s examples, and cut straight into your IRC culture.

Most of them are useless and join for the name alone

People join multiple teams just to be in the ‘cool’ teams. Not to boast, but we can seem pretty cool to some. I’d say more than half the people who work for multiple teams join and never work.

Productivity is not the point

The point is to be laid back and get work done without being stressed out.

Our team’s tranquility would be shattered if we let people in without this rule in place. We’d lose a lot of our identity and start requiring rule discussion all day, instead of being able to do what we like with our team, the only group which our members should care for.

In my opinion, our rule is a luxury, not a limit.

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.

Giving better tools to allow the readers to read,
or giving better tools to allow the scanlators to work faster?

Most people think only about the former, not even realizing the latter, because it’s more fun to be popular among the readers, than being respected in scanlation.

I always get mail from people who’d like to start a manga aggregator with me, because I am the most popular coder around here I guess, and because I own the code of the best reader. They want to create a new, flashy site that will host all manga for free, without profit. I kindly answer with a “no”, while many thoughts pile in my head. Nothing negative: I just realize how people aren’t familiar with the scanlation community, neither know where to address their efforts.

I agree that delivering is really important, but that’s like, 5% of the work, and it’s already dealt with through missile launchers and transoceanic cruisers. There’s literally petabytes of traffic due to scanlation.

Everyone just focuses on a 5%, and nobody really notices how there’s another 95% that can be improved, and that relies on “upgrading” scanlation itself.

People should stop thinking about how to deliver content, and start thinking about the scanlation process. There’s absolutely no piece of software for scanlators (and translation in general) that can deal with priorities, attaching extra files to a release, do messaging in a team, poking people, and much more that could make scanlation extremely faster and cleaner. We still use email, FTP, dropbox, forums, Wiki, all separated, and extremely clunky.

I imagine software that can typeset via browser by the translator, fixed on the image by the proofreaders, then be sent to GIMP/Photoshop to be refined by the editor, and an interface via HTML to point out more mistakes. A live wiki system for translations, and a priorities page updated in real time, with comments and blockers.

This is not sci-fi. It’s all doable, and it’s not difficult to do.

I wish we had the time to do this. I hope I can find more skilled programmers like prinny and Yarn, who helped me lately with the PHP code. I really want to implement the above, I am sure everyone would love it, and could cut down scanlation time by at least 30%.

Anyway, what I had to say is: stop thinking of the readers, start thinking about the scanlators. The former have plenty of options, while the latter is trying to cut rice with chopsticks.