The scale of this takedown is pretty staggering:
- What happened?
MangaDex received a takedown request that affected approximately 7,000 titles.
Alright, reading between the lines, it looks like Mangadex is pretty much dead as a platform for scanlations. They seem to be now owned by NamiComi, a platform that allows creators to self-publish comics. Then, in this FAQ, the Mangadex staff write:
We will continue working on the features that make MangaDex great, to make it an even better platform for content creators.
Combine this with the recent updates to their uploading policies which require an uploader to be the legal rights holder, and it looks like the end of Mangadex scanlation uploads except in very particular circumstances (some twitter series have explicit author permission for example).
As for this community, in the short term there are no changes other than that I slightly relaxed the rules in the sidebar. Previously I had a rule about preferring mangadex or scanlators’ home sites if possible. However, in light of these events, I suspect there are going to be a wider array of sources for reading.
So basically they became tapas.io.
This is why I self host. nas+komga+mihon beats mangadex/bato/etc every day
I hope scanlators get back into the habit of releasing rips onto their sites, torrents, or some other direct platform instead of these sites that inevitably turn to shit
gee, I miss republishing on onion & eepsites.
Is that a thing? I’m not part of any groups, just a weirdo that occasionally does a one shot or short series for practice (with horrific typesetting and redrawing because I am garbage at that and I have no e friends haha)
I tend to just post them on a random wordpress site I made and they still usually find their way to mangadex and co with no promotion whatsoever which is weird
It is. I just had to destroy my service because someone betrayed my trust. But I do miss mirroring バトト and other romcoms in dark sites.
I used to also publish ウクホルデル on NNTPChan.
This is interesting, thanks
I guess I’ll have to look into self hosting my library again on my server. Any tips for which software/stack to run?
Support for downloading from most major sources going forwards like Mangaplus and various aggregators (and I guess scraping out the last data from Mangadex before it’s gone) is important. Or some other kind of automation for updating and downloading new chapters on release and other metadata.
Preferably something headless running in Docker (web GUI optional), and the ability to sync to Mihon is crucial. I’ve been looking at Kavita, Komga, and Suwayomi but haven’t decided yet.
Suwayomi is probably your best bet, since it can auto download new chapters as soon as it finds them. Not sure how it is now, though. Last time I checked was at least two years ago.
TIL about suwayomi. I just set it up now and it is interesting. Basically, it is like a hosted version of mihon that lives on a server (it uses the same extensions and can even import a backup from mihon). It works exactly like mihon and many of the menus/settings are exactly the same. Chapters are downloaded and the library is periodically updated exactly like in mihon. You could basically put this on something like a NAS at home and use it like a web version of mihon. Optionally, you can figure out the hosting side of things and have it live at a domain you own, like manga.yourdomain.com behind basic auth.
The most interesting part of hosting it on the web is that you can install a suwayomi extension in mihon on your mobile device. Then, your mobile device can browse your suwayomi library just like it does any other extension. Reading chapters on either your mobile device or on the suwayomi web ui will mark them as read. Additionally, it means that you can exclusively use the suwayomi extension on your mobile device and leave all the other extension management to the suwayomi install, migrating as needed when sources appear/disappear. All of that would be completely transparent to mihon because it is still just pointing to the same title on suwayomi.
I am going to be messing around with this. There are some rough edges I have run into. The main issue I am having is that chapter downloads are really slow and the web ui isn’t the most responsive at updating things like download percentages or library updates. I also couldn’t get flaresolverr to work. Disabling that part of the docker compose file got downloads working again (just slow).
Alright, updates to my experience with Suwayomi for those that might stumble upon this in the future. Turns out a lot of my problems were solvable.
The biggest fix I made was running it from SSD rather than straight from my HDD array. This fixed a lot of the slowness. My SSD cache drive on my NAS isn’t the biggest, so I was able to use docker volume mappings to stick the downloads folder onto the array while leaving the rest of the app files on the cache SSD. This has dramatically helped speed things up.
The other main thing that helped was enabling websockets in my reverse proxy. It turns out that the main reason the web ui was so unresponsive is that it heavily uses websockets to do things like update progress bars and the like. I have to deal with CGNAT, so it is a bit involved to set up (some extra lines in a couple nginx config files), so it isn’t something I do by default for each of my services. It helps dramatically with Suwayomi.
Since making these improvements, it has been much nicer to use.
Kotatsu has a cli-only downloader, and it’s used to download manga directly from sites in Kotatsu
@[email protected] I pinned the post since it’s quite important.
That post was a post from a scanlator noticing a policy change when uploading a chapter. This page is a newly created FAQ by the Mangadex Staff attempting to clarify things about that policy change and answer questions about recent events. They are related, but not exactly duplicates.
