Character list

[dube]

Some mangas, like Watamote, have a lot of characters and it can be hard to remember them all and what they did in previous chapters (and all the nuances of their relationships), especially when the updates are rare and you also read other stuff.

My sugestion is to add a character list (a cheat sheet) a bit similar to what myanimelist has but more dynamic.

A truly awesome implementaion would allow to:
- dynamic list - swipe / click at any moment to see which characters are in the page you are currently reading - names and profile pics
- dynamic bio - click at the character on that list and see a laconic list of major events/things related to this character that happened in the story up to this moment (but obviously not after, to not spoil anything)

This would require effort from community to write all of this, but i’m sure the bigger series have enough fans here, who would love to do this.

Obviously googling and reading wikis is a solution that already works, but this would be the next level in convenience and would make the experience of reading many different series simultaneously much more enjoyable.

 

[Oeconomist]

@dube—

That would involve a considerable amount of coding and a noticeable increase to the burden on the server even for series in which the information was never loaded.

 

[AviKav]

@Oeconomist
Dynamic Bios should be a lot easier in dealing with group specific versions (I.e. by only showing info that happened before the floor of the chapter number of the current chapter), but still need some UI improvements. Server burden could be reduced by having bios be append-only as you progress in the story and by caching bios locally.

Dynamic List would need to be specific for each chapter version, but that would be doable with a sophisticated enough editing UI. Otherwise, it seems less useful than Dynamic Bios and would require more DB storage.

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

Can't you just open up another tab and put that on MAL at the characters section?

 

[Teasday]

Defining which characters appear in a given page or even so much as a chapter is not realistic or in my opinion necessary. The only way I could see this being reasonably implemented would be a basic non-spoilery bio for each character that includes the chapter number of their first appearance. That way we could check for which characters to display from inside the reader (and possibly also in the manga title page based on the latest read chapter). Making this thing more "dynamic" in the sense that more information gets added as the story progresses (even if the info is also similarly chapter-marked) sounds to me like it would eventually lead to full-on wiki articles, whereas I'd rather just see a short summary.

I don't know. While I could see the utility in something like this and don't want to just dismiss it out of hand, we already have enough stuff high up on the priority queue that I wouldn't hold my breath to see this implemented.