So the day is finally here….
Group Links Removed
As some eagle-eyed users have noticed, all website and forum links for all scanlation groups have disappeared. In addition to this, none of the IRC links are clickable anymore; they remain as plain text. We regret to inform all of you that we have received a DMCA takedown notice. Of course, we wish to keep MangaUpdates running, so we had to resort to these measures. The representative of the group that submitted the DMCA has so far said these actions are enough.Despite these changes, our release and group submission policies remain the same. Releases must be from scanlation groups that exist according to MangaUpdates, meaning they must have a group entry. In order to have a group entry, the group still needs to submit one or more of the following: website, forum, Twitter, Facebook, and IRC channel. The website and forum will not be displayed anywhere on MangaUpdates though. These pieces of information will be for our own purposes in order to verify the existence of a release. We continue to strive to display accurate information for all series, groups, and releases, so we will check the validity of every submitted release. If you feel a release is fake, you can submit a Change Request, and we will double check your claim.
Thank you for continuing to use MangaUpdates.
– lambchopsil & Manick
I guess it was a matter of time for this to happen. Most of the traffic to this site comes from mangaupdates, and I’m pretty sure it’s the same for all the other small groups, so this will be a big hit for scanlators, which I’m pretty sure are the real target of that DCMA notice. I wonder how this “little” change is gonna affect the traffic we get or the exposure for our releases. Most of the trafic will move to batoto and other manga reader sites, that’s for sure. Well, it’s not like we need the extra traffic, we don’t even have ads in the site, but it’s gonna feel kinda lonely with no one visiting us. At least they still keep the twitter and facebook links, so you can get every notice from us in those social networks, but it’s gonna be a pain in the neck to get the website address for small groups with no twitter nor facebok page. Well, things are going to be interesting in this new round against scanlations…