Introducing Project Necro & Various Reflections

If you've been following us on Discord, you’ve probably already heard me pitch the idea of launching a new group focused solely on reviving long-abandoned series, dubbed Project Necro. Many of you expressed strong support for the idea, and that encouragement gave me the confidence to push forward with it.

As for who’s leading the charge... Mab, our resident gremlin translator, is constantly whining about being bored and needing more work, so I’ve given him the perfect outlet: heading this new project. This should keep him plenty busy and, more importantly, productive.

To ensure Mab is fairly compensated, I plan to repurpose one of our older Patreon pages and transfer ownership to him. That way, he won’t be starting from zero. While I’m still using donations from that page to help fund Project GB, this shift is a bit like cutting off my own limbs to grow a new tree, but I believe it’s worth it. After all, I’d still be paying Mab the same amount to translate 4–5 chapters a month either way.

This decision also made me reflect on Re:Library’s current payment model. In my opinion, our fixed-pay-per-chapter system is outdated and no longer in tune with the times. Because we operate on limited funding, our monthly output is strictly limited, which has led to many readers complaining about slow updates, and that’s one of the reasons Re:Library has faded into obscurity.

I’ve been openly spying on another translation group this past week (heh), and I discovered that they compensate translators based on sales performance while the group owner takes a small cut. As a result, they don’t have the same funding bottleneck we do, and their translators are highly motivated to release daily updates to maximize their income.

Honestly, I believe that’s the direction we should be heading. While fixed pay offers stability for translators, it also caps their growth potential and sometimes causes complacency. After all, if the pay is guaranteed regardless of performance or quality, there’s little incentive to go above and beyond, or even to ensure proper quality checks. And when things go wrong, I’m the one who ends up taking the heat since I’m the main face of Project GB. Most of our translators, with only a few exceptions, rarely interact directly with the readers. That disconnect doesn’t help build a strong or healthy community.

It may be too late to change the payment system for our current team, but I believe that for any new hires or future projects, we should consider implementing a performance-based system that not only rewards effort but also encourages more engagement with the community.

And honestly, it’s not just our payment system that’s showing its age. Our website design, server setup, database structure, and even the PHP version are outdated. I’ve spoken with Fana and discovered that our current OS doesn’t even support the latest PHP, so I’ll need to sit down with our server provider (our Queen) and find a good time to coordinate an upgrade to the operating system. At the same time, we’ll update the database, PHP version, and maybe even install Redis Object Cache and increase the memory limit.

In short, there’s a lot of work ahead. Luckily, I've already finished my share of translation work for the month, so I’ll be dedicating some time this week to sorting things out, figuring out the next steps for Project Necro, discussing potential payment systems for the project managers to adopt, exploring more efficient ways to publish early-release chapters instead of relying on Google Docs, and... oh yes, I also need to migrate the artwork to the General Purpose Patreon.