Comix's claim about hammering Kagane servers back in the day.

Looking back at the email chain, they initially proposed donating $300/month as a gesture of appreciation and to share some of the costs, while asking us to whitelist their bot and essentially accept that they wouldn't display our credit banners on every chapter. We said that amount wasn't enough to offset the costs of scraping at scale, and that we weren't interested in effectively granting those concessions in exchange for a monthly donation.

They later sent $1,000 anyway, explicitly saying it wasn't conditional on us whitelisting their bot. We thanked them, but made it clear that we didn't want there to be any monetary obligation either way.

So yes, they did donate, and I appreciate the gesture. But no, I wouldn't say they covered a month's running costs based on the emails. Our server costs were in the thousands per month, and neither the $1,000 donation nor the $300 in the other email thread from February were presented or accepted as payment for a month's expenses or as an agreement to allow scraping.

I typically don't like sharing private email chains, but given the situation, I think it's better to let people judge the context for themselves rather than rely on anyone's recollection or biases. The original email chain is the best source for that.

thanks for being transparent. This does make things much more clear.