Measures for avoiding translations being stolen

I do appreciate all the effort that is put into it, and I can totally understand how hard it is to redraw things on LQ images, did that before, was a nightmare and I gave up halfway after spending some 5 hours on a single image and getting barely any progress.

Of course having the good raws is necessary, but that's why you'd usually scanlate a manga you can actually get your hands on... Sure, some groups are lucky enough to find a raw provider that lives in Japan, but... Well, I can imagine how ridiculously rare those are.

I'm just saying lack of money is no excuse to not make a fantranslation with no profit in mind. There are way better reasons to stop scanlating than that.

 

This is exactly the issue we ran into for scanlations, but we had additional required expenses you can avoid with novels. And novel authors generally support fan translations, unlike manga publishers.

I'm just pointing out that yes, you can inconvenience pirates, but in the end, if they are determined enough, nothing you can do can stop them. Believe me, we tried, but in the end, we all just stopped caring and threw in the towel. I'm not advocating you doing the same thing, as I'm sure a lot of people appreciate what you're doing.

 

Ah, I certainly understand that... It's why I never bothered with trying to stop the aggregators from copying my content...

It was funny when I saw a footnote on an aggregator linking to my site, but that was just a big coincidence, I didn't really try to make anything with it.

And I can definitely understand throwing in the towel when all attempts to sabotage fails! >.<

I was just arguing that money in itself shouldn't be one of the more relevant factors to give up... Though yeah, it does increase costs when you need to pay the raw from your own pocket... Though I think that people that started scanlating already had the raw at their hands before they even considered it? I mean... I wouldn't scanlate something I didn't have access to in the first place. Feels a bit weird to suddenly need to take the price of the raw into account when I would buy them for my own enjoyment in the first place... At least it's how I'd do it.

The fact that manga publishers don't support scanlating at all is also a huge trouble... T.T

 

Several people who provided raws were raided by the police in the past, which scared our raw provider at the time who refused to continue. Basically, we paid for the manga, but they would debind and scan everything, but in the end got to keep the manga. We solved it by shipping everything to the group admins and have them scan everything themselves.

But that's why we scanlated in the first place, we like the series so we wanted to do it justice by making sure that our product were as high quality as possible. I took immense pleasure when some of our work turned out better than the released work that came years later. We would never use our time to work on low quality raws that would look like shit both before and after (aggregators only hosted in low quality at the time, so we would never use them). And yes, a lot of times (especially as we got less donations), we would only pick up series they already have access to raws to, but for the series we really liked, we would often buy the manga we wanted to scanlate. It was also very common for the first volume to be available (because someone bought it, liked it and shared it hoping people would pick it up), but other volumes would need to be bought and scanned.

It wasn't even that our sabotaging aggregators failed, it was more like we could only hurt our readers (and lower the quality of work) by hurting them, so we wanted to avoid that.

 

Hi all,

I have conducted my experiment and I am pleased to report the following:

You CAN stop these bots from other websites from grabbing your contents. It is possible.

And NO, it will NOT stop your readers from accessing your site through Novelupdates.

How? For the excerpt of your RSS feed, just change it to show only a few words like (20 characters) or no words at all. This will prevent the other websites from stealing your content. They stole it by reading your RSS feeds and link to your pdf / images.

The excerpt of your RSS feed is where they stole the content from. The good news is that NovelUpdates does not care about this content, and they still update when you update your site, so your listing on novelupdates are not affect.

For your information, please.

 

Nope, already tried this before and it won't work. Their scappers are scripted to update whenever there's a release in NU itself, and tve bot will creep through the link on NU until it finds a page where the text count is equal or more to the variable set on the script. To fool the bot you onky need to make dummy pages with dummy text in them that I already had proven effective and working until they manually copy it by themselves.

 

What about if you report them to the google DMCA thing? Will that be a permanent solution...?

 

No. Most pirate sites have web hosting in countries with no laws

 

rip....

 

See my post on https://forum.novelupdates.com/threads/suggestions-for-dealing-with-content-thieves.61269/#post-3861991 This will teach them a lesson!

 

Yes, if you report the DMCA violation to Google, they will disappear from Google search results. However, you can only report your story's DMCA violations, not the entire website. Google won't remove the entire website. You also have to report each page that has your story. So if you have 2000 chapters on their website, you have to send those 2000 urls to Google.

But yes, if you take the trouble to do it, this does work in removing the website from Google (not from the internet).

I also noticed that some website that I reported voluntarily removed the content.

I believe that is because of SEO - if Google identifies the website as one that hosts plagiarized content, it should rank lower in search results because that lowers their "trust rank" in the Google algorithm.

OP was asking about Google DMCA. That goes to Google, not the webhost.

 

What if we made one fake and one real chapter, with the fake one being longer than the real chapter, and placing the fake chapter on the first page of the chapter page and the real one on the second page? Would that work? I noticed that a certain aggregator did not include the text in the 2nd page.... Or maybe they didn't because they knew it was a rant about them? =_=
e.g. :

Pages: 1 2

(pagination is at the bottom.)

Or, using publishing the chapter on google docs, turning off the permission to copy and posting the link on the chapter page? e.g.:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10WrbxHBqotqqEZJ0LSsJZbJbPDgkibJvjVuqI14Y7zY/edit?usp=sharing

Conclusion:

Need to find out how the bots select which text to copy

a) do they copy the longest text
b) copy ALL text on the same page
c) enter pagination links and copy from them
d) enter all links on the page
e) if they do enter all links on the page how do they select which link's text to copy?
d) do they copy embedded pdfs / google docs
e) do they copy

If (a) is true it would be easy to prevent the bots.
If (b) is true at least it would annoy readers on aggregate sites if garbage text surrounds the real translation?
e.g. (garbage)
(real text)
(garbage)

 

I already saw someone using the google docs method, not only it made the reading experience horrible (I don't know what was wrong with that document though, but it felt like it was a LQ image pasted on the docs, so it was incredibly terrible to read), but the aggregators still copied it anyway.

Pagination might work though. I have a feeling the aggregator readers will just tell the aggregator owner about it and fix it though.

 

What about password protecting the wordpress page? And making the password a captcha image?

 

Password protecting may work, though you need to somehow provide the password to your readers too I guess.

It honestly depends on how many people read your novel, if there are few readers, it might go unnoticed, if there are many, someone will definitely poke the adms of the aggregator about it.

It doesn't look like it will inconvenience your readers too much though, so I think you could give it a shot~

 

Awesome

 

FRom my experiments
a) their bots are set to copy the first long text page it could find. I am already doing a dummy text hidden in my post and have a link there to the real chapter, the bots copied the dummy text in the post and erasing the url link in the process thus making them have the unedited GT ver in their site instead.

b,c) I havent tried pagination so I can't say anything.

d,e) nope, the bot tries the links one by one. If it finds a page where there's a text equivalent to the value in the script then it will copy it and erase anything that has a link or is invisible.

f) if it's in pdf, they'll put the pdf itself in their site.

 

Hmmm so if I made a page with the right title but filled it with bible text, then linked it to the post and made another link to the page with real text, which one would it copy? [e.g. Chapter 1 (Bible text) Chapter 1 (real text) - which link's content would it copy?]

Also, what would happen if the fake text was coloured solid black and the real text was coloured semi-transparent grey? (when both are on the same chapter page)

And, what if you made the entire real text hyperlinked?

 

If the post has the bible text then it is linked to the real chapter, the bot will copy the first long text it could find and that is the post with the bible text, it will copy everything in yhe post and remove the transparent text and hyperlinked text and any html tags used like colors or font size.

For me I tried putting in my post a normal post message with the chaptwr link at normal font size then put my GT ver in zero font size so readers won't see it. And the bot copies everything, removes the htmls tags and links then post it on their site.
Just look at what's on my site
And what they had copied

 

Lmfao. Guess I'll do that then.