Too many doujinshi!

The number of scanned doujinshi uploaded has increased dramatically in the last few months.
From what I see, every single Touhou doujinshi uploaded in the last 8 months has been approved. Copying and pasting touhou doujinshi from exhentai over to danbooru (presumable also in the hopes of getting a free translation) is a surefire way to get lots of approvals. We have a growing userbase of people who do nothing but upload doujinshi of varying quality from exhentai here. The users are even beginning to believe that this is OK and this starts a chain reaction of other people uploading their favourite doujinshi.

Janitors and Moderators need to stop encouraging this sort of behavior. Danbooru is not a repository for touhou doujinshi. And I'm not talking about a few 10 page comics here and there. I'm talking about 50-100 page books, or the latest chapter of "Cirno and Reimu's 1-2-3" or "Omoito" (compare with latest chapter of Bleach or Naruto). God, the former has 9 (NINE) chapters and the 10th one is already out and will be scanned soon enough. I'm talking about the fact that EVERY SINGLE doujinshi of certain artists, such as Imizu and Morino Hon, is uploaded here and future ones will be as well.

Just an example of 1 of the many users who upload only scanned doujinshi and nothing else.
Pools by that user
user #352574 :
pool #5946 - Touhou - Colorless Sapphire (Doujin) (yukataro)
pool #5941 - Touhou - An Afternoon Nap... (yukataro)
pool #5899 - Touhou - Flower Painting Of Vortex (mizumoto tadashi)
pool #5866 - Touhou - Magical Heart (nazuki nazu)
pool #5775 - Touhou - Cat's House (Doujin) (nakatani)
pool #5519 - Touhou - Short Kazami Yuuka Comic (Doujin) (mokku)
pool #5505 - Touhou - It's Possible! (Doujin) (mikagami hiyori)
pool #5429 - Touhou - Fortune Days (Doujin) (pigeonblood)
pool #5412 - Touhou - Unfair Randomizer (Doujin) (Nakatani)
pool #5355 - Touhou - Kill Geppu [Imizu (Nitro Unknown)]
pool #5211 - Touhou - Story Of Certain Winter (Doujin) (mokku)
pool #5191 - Touhou - A Flower For The Heart (Doujin) (mokku)
pool #5168 - Touhou - Come Come! Rigid Paradise (Doujin) (Kannazuki Hato)
pool #5160 - Touhou - Sleepy Princess (yukataro, leex) (Doujin)
pool #5146 - Touhou - Reverse (uro) (Doujin)
pool #4896 - Touhou - Lunar Rabbit On Earth... What Do You See When You Jump? (Doujin) (fuantei)
pool #4807 - Touhou - Scarlet LoverS (Doujin) (mamedenkyuu (berun))
pool #4709 - Touhou - Faith For The Transient Goddess (Doujin) (hitsujin)
pool #4699 - Touhou - Onee-chan Has Died! (Doujin) (kumadano)
pool #4632 - Touhou - ReiMari Shringara (Doujin) (yonu (yonurime))
pool #4595 - Touhou - Flan-chan Theatre! (Doujin) (mamedenkyuu (berun))
pool #4553 - Touhou - Hunted Hunter (Doujin) (nekotoufu)
pool #4550 - Touhou - The Sparrow's Midnight Dining EX (Doujin) (nekotoufu)
pool #4373 - Touhou - Tsukinaki (Doujin) (Nakatani)
pool #4366 - Touhou - Spectral Feelings (Doujin) (Nakatani)

617 images uploaded, 617 are doujinshi scans. And all of this within 1.6 years.
Other users with similar record: user #109291, user #163385, user #383801, user #321535, user #382717, user #320289, user #374673, user #382058, user #337059, user #110385, user #367766, user #379928, user #382558, user #407177, user #374767 and many more

And then there's pool #6778 - Touhou - Fujiwara Mokou x Mystia Lorelei Compilation (MokoMys) (mitsumoto jouji) with 87 pages.
Mitsumoto has already requested the removal of all of his scanned doujinshi in topic #5920

I got to read works by Morino Hon & Imizu so IDC

I don't see doujinshi being a problem as long as they are decently drawn and interesting. It's just that "EVERY SINGLE" doujin by Morino Hon and Imizu happens to be decent. Also, danbooru note system is doing a great job in protecting scans from awful amateur editing and typesetting, as well as giving a chance for good translator to come by.

And yes, I find it fun being in your user list after partially uploading 2 doujins. If upload limit is your concern, we can just change the formula to exclude doujinshi and scans.

But I'd also like to see the outcome of this topic, mostly because there are 2 more doujinshi by Morino Hon (snowfight from ashiato and continuation of yakumo-ke) that I wanted to upload here sometime soon.

Type-kun said:
I don't see doujinshi being a problem as long as they are decently drawn and interesting. It's just that "EVERY SINGLE" doujin by Morino Hon and Imizu happens to be decent.

I agree (especially about Imizu) but I think a lot of Touhou doujinshi don't really qualify. It's basically the old approvers' Touhou bias debate all over again, i.e. "Would mods approve scanned doujinshi like these in such great quantities if they were about some other copyright?", etc.

S1eth said:
Janitors and Moderators need to stop encouraging this sort of behavior. Danbooru is not a repository for touhou doujinshi.

My rule for approving these kind of uploads (whether for Touhou or any other copyright) is that every single image of the set must be worthwhile when viewed on its own. If there are a few images below my "borderline" then I won't approve anything.

I do have alternative idea that is highly related to this.

Can we please disallow uploading full non-freeware doujinshi?
Uploading them is no different from commercial manga from both ethical and (I think) legal points of view. The only practical difference is that there are no large publisher behind them.

This will reduce number of doujin uploads noticeably. And, what's much more important, it should make danbooru look less evil in the eyes of many artists. I think this is a huge factor contributing to danbooru's reputation of "artwork stealing site" among Japanese artists.

Obviously, I'm talking about full chapters, uploading cover or few separate pages is probably fine.

Danbooru is not the place for these, it says so on the uploading and flagging pages. There's other places to find these, if you really wanted. Delete the commercial ones.

Personally I'd rather have the doujin manga allowed. Though I would like some means of having them not count at the same level as a standalone upload in regards to things like upload limits. When I go to see if someone should be promoted, I try and weed out doujin manga uploads from their upload count and do not consider those kinds of uploads as counting when promoting people.

As for being an "artwork stealing site" and not allowing commercial works, this also means that we should also be banning every megami magazine scans and commercial artbook scans (things like post #193067 and probably pool #6003), correct?

As for my own personal policies with approving doujin manga, in general I try to follow only approving those around a year or older since release, have been parented and/or pooled, and seem to have good art (as a comic). If the material is standalone (4koma type, etc) then I judge and approve the content individually, if the material is sequential pages then I look over as many pages as I have access to (ideally if it is sourced I can see the whole thing, not common though) and approve it or reject it as a whole. Given that quality usually doesn't seem to deviate too much for something released as a single package, I'm less hesitant on approving it if it isn't fully uploaded (not usually possible to upload it all at once). I find it easier to end up in the sequential trap with page by page or portion by portion releases on like pixiv with approving the earlier part only to find a later part going past your own threshold of considering approval-able.

Slightly offtopic, but as an alternative - maybe we should make it mandatory to link to the place where the doujin can be legally downloaded/purchased (DLsite|toranoana|whereever else) at pool description, along with "please support the author"? Any decent scanlation site already does this.

And artists will always be angry about their pixiv art uploaded elsewhere. Less angry than about doujin, probably, but still angry.

Type-kun said:
Slightly offtopic, but as an alternative - maybe we should make it mandatory to link to the place where the doujin can be legally downloaded/purchased (DLsite|toranoana|whereever else) at pool description, along with "please support the author"? Any decent scanlation site already does this.

This was also suggested in topic #5920 by Hazuki, and it's not a bad idea. Should Danbooru move towards that direction and become a scanlation alternative though? Because it seems that's kinda where this leads to.

Not that I'm against it necessarily, but it seems like it's going to be much trickier business than usual.

I agree, but without a firm doujin policy what can really be done about it? Karma whoring, or approval whoring in this case, I guess, isn't exactly against the rules.

I remember a while ago we were talking about this and I or someone else proposed only free or web doujin, no convention releases, etc., but that obviously didn't go through. Of course I know that not everyone would be willing to do the work to look for the source, even with doujinshi.mugimugi.org at their disposal.

I also believe in the artists wishes in that if they put it out there for sale, we should respect that, and that by not doing so we're not helping our case that we're not just lowly art thieves. I simply don't think that just because e-hentai is a forum for piracy that we should be, as well, and allowing it just so we can get our grubby, entitled little hands on a quick translation shouldn't be an excuse. It's absolutely not the same as just grabbing whatever off an artist's public page.

Anyway, do we still use this page? That contradiction there still has to be updated to match the current loose doujin regulation.

Type-kun said:

Also, danbooru note system is doing a great job in protecting scans from awful amateur editing and typesetting, as well as giving a chance for good translator to come by.

The system itself is ultimately beneficial and I think more scanlation hives could adopt such a way to get things done with better efficiency, but I tend to believe Danbooru does more harm than good to the art of scanlation and scanlation efforts, both good and bad. Basically the best thing Danbooru does is bring attention to lesser known artists.

If these good translators want to help they could join voile.gensokyo.org or any number of other scanlation sites and drop scripts there.

In regards to translations, we recently decided that uncertain translations had to go, and translators should only bother if they're certain of the translation. The advantage of danbooru's progressively updated overlay translations is now gone, and in asking translators to translate the whole page or not touch it, we're basically asking them to put as much effort in as they would do in a hard translation community. Plus hard translations can look nicer than having to mouse over each bubble as you read, so I think that's another reason to leave these doujins to other sites.

Edit: What about stuff like karaagetarou's pool #1407 & pool #4318, which are one big doujin, but were updated a few pages every month?

Serlo said:

In regards to translations, we recently decided that uncertain translations had to go, and translators should only bother if they're certain of the translation.

This has been in howto:translate since it was created 3.4 years ago.

Make sure you completely understand what they're saying. It's worse to have an image translated badly, than to not have it translated at all. This is because poorly translated images tagged as translated will no longer show up in searches for translation_request, and the readers won't know it's bad. If you're unsure, don't translate; leave a comment on the image with your interpretation and a request for confirmation instead.

Serlo said:

Edit: What about stuff like karaagetarou's pool #1407 & pool #4318, which are one big doujin, but were updated a few pages every month?

I don't think anybody has ever complained about publically available webcomics.
However, some of these webcomics DO have portions that are only available printed.

Oh, I never read the wiki before (since I don't translate), I only saw the thread a few months ago about getting rid of check_translation.

This is one of those annoying cases where we don't really benefit from a draconian ban, and yet have to just trust that the loophole won't be "abused".

Worse yet, have to define what abuse is, and when it happens, how to respond - by going with draconian rules after all? I'd rather not.

On the legal/danbooru reputation front, that's really a question for Albert since he has the most stake in it.

For you janitors, know that that Sakuya doujinshi you're so happily approving will have 2 more chapters (50 pages) coming our way in the next days.
I may be the only one here thinking that's an issue, but I think we're already at the 7th doujinshi upload in the last 10 days (all approved of course).

Kinda makes me wish we had a Doujinbooru so we could dump every scanned doujin manga there and keep both Danbooru clutter-free (lots of pages filling my subscriptions and searches lately) and readers and translators happy.

Personally, I'd be very, very happy if a checkbox could be added to the subscription settings for each subscription group that would essentially add "-comic" to the search it performs to populate the subscription. This way one could have an artists subscription where you can find new comics if you really want to, and character subscriptions for finding "regular" artwork of those characters. Or any other combination, of course.

Fred1515 said:

Kinda makes me wish we had a Doujinbooru so we could dump every scanned doujin manga there and keep both Danbooru clutter-free (lots of pages filling my subscriptions and searches lately) and readers and translators happy.

I approve of this product and/or service.

Touhoubooru while at it.

Fred1515 said:

Kinda makes me wish we had a Doujinbooru so we could dump every scanned doujin manga there and keep both Danbooru clutter-free (lots of pages filling my subscriptions and searches lately) and readers and translators happy.

Isn't exhentai more or less already this, if you remove non-doujinshi from your searches?