Question Stopping novel aggregators?

Discussion in 'Translator's Corner' started by yamibae, Apr 2, 2019.

  1. Kainord

    Kainord Well-Known Member

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    It had the link function. But they were threaten to remove it.
     
  2. Walter vi Britannia

    Walter vi Britannia Well-Known Member

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    Why!? By who!?
    Is it really something to threaten about while there are hundreds of other sites out there actually fucking stealing the chapters!!?
     
  3. shinzi11

    shinzi11 Well-Known Member

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    Nothing we can do about it, just post some hidden tl notes about your site or something to remind readers where to read.
     
  4. lenyek_penyek

    lenyek_penyek Badass Member

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    The site aggregates all the release info, but not the releases itself.

    NU is an aggregator site, but a good one. Excellent at what it does too.
     
  5. juniorjawz

    juniorjawz Well-Known Member

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    Did someone say eggcellent?
     
  6. grish99

    grish99 [Pelican Hater] [Hater of Face-Slapping]

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    youre totaly right sir if you define aggregator its totaly say that its a site that post and display content or link to them
    you dont have to doubt yourself anymore :blobgift::blobgift::blobgift:
     
  7. MaskMe

    MaskMe Well-Known Member

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    all of those illegal lookin mofos feel like they are giving me the feel that they are trackin my every move I dont like that so i tend to never use them other than for webnovel stuff.
     
  8. Ai chan

    Ai chan Queen of Yuri, Devourer of Traps, Thrusted Witch

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    Posting translation as an image was done and failed. Ask @GM_Rusaku

    The only thing you can do is understand how spiderbots work. Spiderbots aren't AI. They can only do what the programmer programmed it to do and nothing else. They cannot improvise and can only stay within the bounds of their programming.

    So the only thing you can do to stop scraper bots is by making yourself unpredictable. For example, you can make one release as a post. Then one release as a page. Then in the next release, make it a post, that readers need to click on which leads to a page. The next time, make it so that readers need to click on the two pages to get to the real one. It greatly helps if you copy-pasted some random article about dicks or literotica from the net on those dummy pages.

    Simply making the release a post that links to a page every single time will not work. Aggregators can program the bots to scrape the second page it's on only, or scrape only the page with the highest number of text or the page with the highest size, or the page with the only comments. If you say, "This is a dummy page" on every dummy page, it won't work either because the aggregator only needs a couple of lines of codes to make the bot ignore every dummy page. Bots are very customizable, but they cannot improvise. You yourself must be unpredictable and inconsistent (pagewise, not frequent-wise) with how you post your chapters.

    It's a lot of work, sure, but that's the only way.
     
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  9. abewan

    abewan 〘Nishikigoi Dungeon〙

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    Use captcha. They're bots, they can't tick da box. :blob_sunglasses:
     
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  10. Wyrede

    Wyrede Well-Known Member

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    Due to dmca back in 2013 or so

    Here's the news post when they had to remove links to group to satisfy dmca
    https://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?page=1&tid=44023
    I can't remember when they start to remove the releases link, but it is related to this same DMCA

    Edit: back then aggregators and scanlations also have same problem, namely aggregators steal translations, but the one hit by dmca is scanlations, almost never the aggregators
     
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  11. grish99

    grish99 [Pelican Hater] [Hater of Face-Slapping]

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    but that annoying as fork for readers.
    the worst is when you have 3 option link that a correct option lead to another 3 option link and every option lead to text that you must read some to understand that its a fake one....
    edit: and if you click wrong to many time you get a lead poisoning
     
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  12. Kaminomikan

    Kaminomikan 神のみ感

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    audio files? video files? maybe program some applet... the thing is you will have to invest loads of time to maintain whatever solution you choose.
     
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  13. Wujigege

    Wujigege *Christian*SIMP*Comedian

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    Is captcha really that effective?
     
  14. Refan25

    Refan25 [The one on the back ground]

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    May this lord introduce you to mangadex.org? :blobnom:
     
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  15. MrLLama

    MrLLama Just a Fancy Llama.

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    I'd say NU is more of a nexus than aggregator.
     
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  16. Cantelope

    Cantelope Well-Known Member

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    The translation for A Wild Boss Appears recently tried out fully encrypting the entire page using JavaScript, and the symmetric key was just a simple answer to some quiz he came up with e.g. 2+4=?

    The problem is that if every translator does this, if the questions are too simple, then it's easy to brute force the key. If it's too hard, then you're punishing the readers.

    In any case, I'm not sure if it stopped the aggregators or not; I imagine it was at least somewhat effective though
     
  17. Tpst

    Tpst Well-Known Member

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    From what I've seen, when you try to do something against aggregate websites, your readers complain and defeats the whole purpose of translating in the first place.

    When I added "invisible" lines in the website, people say "it shows up in the reader's mode. So... I kinda removed them... What I can't understand is... why people even need to use reader's mode??? o.o? It's not even like the site is cluttered or hard to read.
    Honestly, there are an "invisible-invisible" texts that won't show up in reader's mode, but those only work on some aggregate websites. Some aggregate sites probably copy paste manually, and those are captured by the "invisible" texts that show up in the reader's mode. The "invisible-invisible" ones don't get caught when someone manually copy paste, but people complain when they see "invisible" texts. Now, I just add 1 of each in each of my chapters (1 at the start, 1 at the end) but, just to annoy the aggregate websites (or more like... I just found out at the time and got too excited haha :blobshh:), the first time I added those hidden texts, I added them in a nasty way (allllll over the pages and some of them disguised as part of the chapter lol :sweating_profusely::sweating_profusely::sweating_profusely::sweating_profusely::sweating_profusely: yea sorry about that xD :blobsweat:) and the backlash was insane.

    The translator I work with tried adding a javascript lock (e.g. what's 1+1) type of thing and there was a lot of backlashes too.

    Keep in mind that although these things sound bit dodgy, if you read normally on our website, you WON'T be affected by them.....

    I wouldn't even mind it as much if the aggregate websites just give credit and link it back to us (or at the very least, not delete the link to our own chapter at the start/end of the page), but nope, can't even do that much. .... I mean, I get like AUD 5-10cents per day from ads and the Wordpress don't pay you until you accumulate $100. To top that off, it took me about AUD $100 to set that up for 2 years (yea it's a bad deal, don't remind me XD) So yea, honestly, I'll take the loss, it's not worth worrying about traffic against aggregate websites since I won't be able to recoup the cost of maintaining the website anyways. It's not really a competition for me, I just wanted to annoy some aggregate readers with a minimal amount of effort. I just wanted to try putting ads because even getting 1 cent is better than none when I spend like half a day translating per chapter.

    I've considered not listing the pages on Novelupdates but.. that seems kinda dumb and just spiteful.

    We often get "thanks for the chapter" :blobhighfive: which feels like we actually have readers that actually read/care about the translation but there's also many that take the translated work for granted (sure, one translator quit, another jump in, so... might be true) and some of them are pretty hostile.:blobnobully::blobnobully::blobnobully: :blob_teary:

    Originally (tbh, even now), I wanted to translate a few other series that I find interesting if I had time. but it just doesn't seem worth it. The return sucks (half a day per chapter and lost money maintaining the website) and the comment section is a ghost town. I'm just maintaining that I'm translating to spread the series I like whilst improving my language and writing skills. Having said that, motivation is hard to maintain when you see people say "x series is boring" and there's no tangible result on whether my writing improved or not, so I think I might just finish the current series and then probably focus back on other parts of my life... >.<:blobnobully:

    And as the original poster said, it's even more annoying because if you google search it, those sites rank higher than us. Last time I checked, my site was like page 5 of google search and 1-4 was dominated by them hahahahahaha :blobsweat_2::blobupset:

    :blobwhistle:Sorry it turned into a long rant :blobtired:

    TLDL: I mean, it's a lose-lose situation for the translators. Damn if we try, damn if we don't. :blobsad:
     
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  18. lnv

    lnv ✪ Well-Known Hypocrite

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    It's not a problem for scrappers to get around that once they know what is going on unless you are really unpredictable. The reason is simple, if you stick to a pattern, they can create rules for multiple patterns, they can even look for certain words on a page.

    There is actually a much better method if you exploit the concept of what a scrapper is. And t works without annoying the users too.
     
  19. Tpst

    Tpst Well-Known Member

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    Ninja'd xD ahaha

    Unfortunately, seems like not too much. xD Some bots/aggregate websites are smart :sweating_profusely::blobsweat_2:
     
  20. lnv

    lnv ✪ Well-Known Hypocrite

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    I use reader mode a lot so I can answer that. First of all, reader mode lets me set my favorite reading settings be it font, size or color. But the biggest thing is battery life. My phone has an AMOLED screen, which means black background wastes 0 power, but white background is created out of red + green + blue.

    [​IMG]

    So any website that uses white background is literally using up ~5X more power than black background.

    Of course if a website is mobile friendly and has a nightmode that I can save and not click every time, I don't mind not using night mode
     
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