Anyway, in my country, there wasn't much manga title sold, not to mention English version. Regrettably, I can't read nor understand Japanese. So raw manga are pretty much useless to me. I then began to search sites where I could read manga online. And soon, I began to visit the scanlation group's site and just download from them instead, since my Internet connection could be slow sometimes and it was extremely frustrating just to wait for a page to load finish when I was so absorbed by the story. Now, I hardly visit those manga aggregator sites anymore. The quality of the manga were quite low anyway, and I'm the type of person that goes for quality, as high as possible.
One of the scanlating group sites that I frequently visited was Omari's Sister. I liked most of the mangas that they chose to translate. Some mangas I liked included Akagami no Shirayukihime, Seirei Produce, Orange Chocolate (sadly it had been dropped and as of now, no other groups had taken up this series, I do recommend it though, it's quite interesting) and many more. Do check this site out, they provide direct download links and you don't even have to be a member.
Well, one of their policies (and I'm sure, as well as other scanlating groups) is for people not to upload their scanlated mangas to any manga aggregator sites. Unfortunately, there were a couple of people who were either simply extremely ignorant, blind or just couldn't care less, decided to upload some of the popular mangas to sites like MangaFox. And just recently, MangaFox had released an announcement where they decided to shut down the forum where scanlators could make requests on taking down series they scanlated. Additionally, they also stripped off the moderators power to take down series. All thanks to the lovely owner of MangaFox, NOEZ. Consequently, due to some irresponsible people that decided to ignore Omari's Sister rules, they decided to watermark future releases and not release it in zip or rar format anymore. Instead, they put it as pdf file. Took some time for me to get used to but I managed.
Now, I never really liked MangaFox. Back then, the site that I prefer to read mangas online was OneManga until they decided to shut down. Man, I really miss that site. MangaFox used to be decent, they did heed the scanlators' requests and took down mangas. Unfortunately, now, they just blatantly ignore the scanlators and do whatever the hell they want to do, with the supposedly noble pursuit of ensuring the members to be as satisfied as possible. I can see why the scanlators are angry, especially in the case of Omari's Sister. In their eyes, sites like MangaFox are in fact thieves that stole free resources for the sake of getting profit. The adverts and constant request for donation? Peeps, MangaFox main objective was money yo.
In the rare occasions where I visited manga aggregator sites, I usually went there for the forum (notably MangaFox, though I stopped going there after Omari's Sister posted stuff about them) or to check out mangas then directly go to the scanlators' websites to download the mangas. As long as you supported the scanlators, or even better, the original author of the manga, that would be much much better. If the Japanese manga industries realised just how popular most manga are among the overseas fandom, they should just find reliable translators to translate these mangas into several foreign languages (ESPECIALLY ENGLISH). That way, not only they could stop online piracy, they could also earn much much more.
Lastly, all I have to say is that tt really annoys me how some people completely disregarded the scanlators simple request and pleas. Hell, I would be annoyed if someone took my work and ignored my request no matter how nicely I told them not to. So people, do respect the scanlating groups and scanlators. Without them, you don't even have any mangas to read, well, for those that can't read Japanese that is. These are the people that you should thank to, not the manga aggregator sites, especially MangaFox.
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