This is a little awkward timing given the current events but we already showed off the shop to power uploaders and group leaders yesterday with long term plans to announce it today. If an opportunity arises that MangaDex would be able to go legit without drastically affecting the total content of the site, while also benefiting scanlators, we would gladly take it. That said, as far as we can see, a scenario like that is a near impossibility.

We've been playing around with the idea of merchandise ever since our Mega Shirt Contest back in January. Donations may not always be enough to keep up with our constantly increasing server costs and merchandise is one of the alternate methods of funding the servers that we've considered exploring instead of the use of ads. Reception to the idea of selling merchandise was positive and so we've decided to test run the idea of merchandise by starting with mouse mats! We have more experience selling mouse mats than shirts so this is what we're doing first. While this event is just a test run, if reception is well we may consider turning it into an ongoing thing.

The mouse mats are 24 cm x 20 cm. We're offering seven different designs. Four of them use art directly from our Mega Content entrants NobunagaOda and IrrelevantGirl's entries with their permission ("My Neighbor Totoro", "Anniversary", "Stylized White", "Stylized Black"), one uses art from our mascot designer Caprisun ("Vaporwave"), and one uses art from our own site dev Teasday ("Banana"). There will be vertical variants of every design except the Totoro one, for people who prefer portrait layout instead of landscape.

None of this would have been possible without our talented community. A majority of the merchandise comes as a result of our contests and our mascot and logo both originated from our very first contest. We appreciate the generosity we've received and it's shaped the image of the site greatly. We would love to feature our mascot in greater detail but fan art is sparse and current financial contributions from our supporters are set aside only for maintaining and expanding the site's infrastructure. Funding from other sources such as merchandise gives us the potential to commission official art for the website, explore the possibility of selling other things like T-shirts and cover the cost of the expanding infrastructure at the same time. If you draw fan art, we'd love to retweet it or feature it on our social medias!

Order Information:
You'll be able to submit orders for mouse mats until Sunday 23rd June. To change your order, you cancel your existing order and resubmit a new one. Orders will be finalized and invoices sent out via email on Monday 24th June. The email used will be the email attached to your MangaDex account. Payment and postage information will need to be confirmed by Thursday 27th June by replying to the invoice that we send. Orders will officially be posted by airmail on Friday 28th June. Depending on where you live, you should receive your order within 1-2 weeks.

Each mouse mat is $10 USD (or equivalent) per mouse mat. Payments in USD, GBP, EUR, and AUD are accepted. Payments can either be done by direct bank transfer or through paypal. Postage will be around $2 to $3 USD per mouse mat but is generally more economical on larger orders. There will be a 5%, 10%, 15%, and up to 20% discount the more mouse mats you order. We will be able to deliver worldwide.

I just read only this part in the Discord notification popup: "Well, this isn't exactly how we" and thought MD is going to shutdown...
Way to go for some heart attack.

International delivery is possible right?

Also nice timing. Great day.

Yes, we will ship anywhere.

it’s not patreon

BRUH

@m3ch_mania PayPal is available if we don't mind the "fee" of course.

Are you guys going to make mouse mats for some Webtoons with the authors permission?

If you don't mind Holo has to pay the fee, that is. The price is the same for the buyer regardless.

NSFW option when?

Ply option when?

disappointed the merch is using the old, outdated name instead of glorious mangacat

Since I see payments are via bank transfer, would Zelle Quick Pay be a possible option? I'm pretty sure there's no fee involved .

Oh man, I really love the design but it's hard for me to change Mouse Mat and feel comfortable mmm...

I hope there's a shirt version sometime soon mmm...

@VawX buy some as gifts

@VawX Which design tho 👀

I'm gonna get banned for this but...

Scanlators : we're sick of bad staff and ambiguous rules that are enforced only when the admins feel like it. We're sick of users complaining that we need donations to pay for our site and scanlators, and don't realize we are constantly under threat of lawsuit for our work. We're leaving unless things are changed completely

Mangadex admin: we should work things out with them because our site doesn't use ads or demand donations, and these large scan teams are a massive source of our funding and clicks.
Mangadex owner: hmmmm. Anime mouse pad. Let's sell anime mouse pad. Low effort waifu cut out with our logo. Titty mouse pad

@FrostBlood
>I'm gonna get banned for this but...
You won't. Feel free to speak freely.

>we're sick of bad staff and ambiguous rules
Which rule is ambiguous? We'll clarify the wording if needed.

> We're sick of users complaining that we need donations to pay for our site
Users don't complain about donations for site hosting costs or raws, but they do commonly mention disliking donations for profit.

>don't realize we are constantly under threat of lawsuit for our work
DMCA applies just as much to us as an individual scanlator. Publishers don't actually pursue DMCAs to court because they would lose money if they did. Many staff are scanlators themselves so we know exactly what legal threat scanlation entails.

@Plykiya Totoro, Stylized and Vaporwave seems very nice, but I doubt the totoro will fit in shirt form as good as mouse mat version mmm...

Pls Mr admin don't hurt me. Not gonna @ you cuz mobile

But... You do remember there was a shit storm literally a week ago because snipers were trash talking scanlators in the credits, scanlators replied 'yeah this is bullshit mockery for someone hiding behind an alt account' and got punished for it? Or are you telling me you didn't have to clarify rules because the wording was too light

Making money??? You think scanlators make any notable money??? Anons patreon donations alone from solo leveling were 2k a month, but all of that went right back into hiring a shit ton of staff to pick up more projects. Dru made away with profits but that's because he siphoned a shit ton from everyone. His stuff was entirely paid releases. Also what's wrong with wanting to make money? People pay for marvel movies and comic books that Stan Lee wrote even though he stopped writing them. Hell people have even paid money for a 13 year old girls holocaust diary to be translated. The people who scanlate this use up a shit ton of time, translating can take a few minutes for a dozen sentences or a few hours for complex and specific text, cleaners can spend hours redrawing boxes and characters so the quality is decent enough to not get complaints. Typesetter to put text into the boxes that have been whited out (a pain in the ass cuz font size and boldness for emphasis, or fitting words in that were much smaller in Kanji or whatever other language). Let's not forget the proofreaders and quality checkers. Even with all this, they upload chapters as long as American comic volumes, stuff you pay money for (often a premium if you buy it from a comic store and not the DC or marvel website)
How is it chill with you to read this for free, these guys spent dozens of hours on certain projects, to make sure you don't have machine translated low effort stuff like metropolitan system. They could use the time to do actual work, play video games, have fun with friends, but they sit down and crank out chapters so you can jump on your laptop or phone and scroll through it in 30 seconds then bitch about patreon requests before you ping them asking for solo leveling.

Uhhh lawsuits? No shit. Stuffs illegal. Meraki had to strip all its stuff. You're not ever at risk you know? You have a wall of technicality and server host counties that take weeks to get info from because international lawsuits take forever. Even if someone threatens a lawsuit, you always immediately take down the chapters if the scan team hasn't, so there is no need in the companies eyes to waste money suing a third party site with an owner in a different country then the host website. It's why kiss Manga can use so much licensed content and not get shut down, because they host in dozens of counties with domains for users from other counties , and it's a paperwork nightmare to sue because each separate domain is registered to a different person in a different country. The teams are way more at risk then you, because they don't have the money for a legal team in most cases, and lose massive amounts of followers and donations if they lose a good series.
When meraki was 'abusing the system for profit' he also inexplicably managed to pick up as shit ton of new series and teams who somehow vanished when the popular series were gone. Huh, doesn't make sense because they weren't getting paid with the 'profit' according to you.

Also edited comments are scary because
1. Youre staff
2. It puts me at risk for you changing a shit ton of wording for your posts so it makes me look like a dumb ass