In case you didn't know, mangastream is a group that releases high-quality scanlations pretty quickly for very popular series, so everyone usually reads their work. I want you to imagine for a moment that you can't view any of they release without first going to a specific page, searching for the password, then downloading a zip, and using that password to look at the files. And you have to reuse that password for each jpg. That's pretty fucking terrible. Surprisingly lots of groups do this, but I've noticed it's only those that are geared toward women, like shoujo or BL. Shounen or seinen groups never give a fuck about this.

And this isn't anything new; in the late 90s to early 2000s, many websites dedicated to these genres would have an opening page saying, "This is my shrine to blah blah blah" or even warnings like, "Inside contains materials some may find offensive, like gay sex." At the bottom there'd be an "enter" button, you'd just be linked to a page that said, "It seems like SOMEONE didn't read the directions." So you'd be forced to go back the first page and read it carefully until you saw a note in the middle of paragraph three that said, "Press here to enter" or "The link to the main page is the F in 'contains materials some may find offensive'."

I'm trying to figure out the reason behind this, and I think it's related to groups wanting to limit distribution to online readers, but there's has to to be more to it than that because this doesn't stop really stop anything and is just a general annoyance to everyone involved. Considering it's usually limited to the female demographic and this "being a hindrance to your audience" bullshit has been happening for years, I'm wondering what's in these communities that perpetuates this nonsense.