Feature Request: "Rising", "Trending", or "Top This Week" for Series Discovery

[J4mag]

Theres currently no good way to discover series on Mangadex.

Your options are essentially:

• staff picks
• live feed of chapter releases
• advanced search with a sufficiently narrow set of search terms

None of these options are great. Staff picks are maybe obviously the tastes of a few people, and oftentimes series with one or two chapters. The live feed of chapter releases is frankly useless, and it heavily skews towards weekly releases rather than monthlies. And advanced search skews towards old series, and just lacks the entropy to discover things.

I'd like a system where activity on a series (follows, views, reviews) is stored with some recency information, allowing a "popular" list which only includes activity in the last X days. A more sophisticated view of the activity could filter for "rising" series whose activity has increased disproportionately recently.

This could be implemented by keeping a rolling queue of daily activity, which upon getting pushed out of the queue is added to a longer-term queue of weekly or monthly activity.

See royalroad as a platform with some great approaches at series discovery.

Alternative options:

• public lists by curators
• a search option to filter by "new" series below a certain upload date, to pair with "popular" or "best rated". Ideally faster than that, though.
• open to other thoughts.

 

[J4mag]

I should add that the scrolling bar of 10 "Popular New Titles" is much too short a list for discovery purposes, and thus lacks genre variety.

And also that filtering publication year in advanced search is both too coarse a time window, too indirect a metric on recency, and takes something like 10 clicks to get to from the home page, which makes it have too much friction to be useful for browsing.

 

[BzzBzz]

Your options are essentially:
* staff picks

Alternative options:
* public lists by curators

What's the differnce? I see none.
You criticize the first one but then suggest literally the same option?

 

[Trodsen]

You know, your public lists by curators suggestion is already implemented isn't it? MDLists can be publicly shared afaik.

As for popularity metrics/sorting I assume it's probably really costly database wise to provide this info due to a few technical details on how MD is implemented, and how MD's team try to keep server loads as low as possible.
Like we don't even have the views counter per chapter for a long while now. Along with other features from MD v3 that still do not have a single prospect of ever returning, like filtering the homepage with tags for example

 

[J4mag]

What's the differnce? I see none.
You criticize the first one but then suggest literally the same option?

The main issue is the staff recommendations are a small set of series. It's basically a single list, which rotates occasionally, but that's it.

Community lists can be much longer, can be focused on certain genres or ideas, etc. They exist right now, as Trodsen helpfully points out:

You know, your public lists by curators suggestion is already implemented isn't it? MDLists can be publicly shared afaik.

... But they can't be shared or discovered except externally. MVP would be a public "list of Lists" somewhere on the site, but preferably it would be sorted by follows on that list.

Lists are pretty much half-implemented. At some point, they might as well not exist because if you need an external tool to find them, you might as well put the list on that external tool, too. Why share a List when you could share a list of links, unless the List can be found from within the website?

 

[Trodsen]

The main issue is the staff recommendations are a small set of series. It's basically a single list, which rotates occasionally, but that's it.

Community lists can be much longer, can be focused on certain genres or ideas, etc. They exist right now, as Trodsen helpfully points out:

... But they can't be shared or discovered except externally. MVP would be a public "list of Lists" somewhere on the site, but preferably it would be sorted by follows on that list.

Lists are pretty much half-implemented. At some point, they might as well not exist because if you need an external tool to find them, you might as well put the list on that external tool, too. Why share a List when you could share a list of links, unless the List can be found from within the website?

it can be found within the website, it's just really clunky atm, since the only place they're available is on a user's profile. However once you've actually found the list you can follow it, which eliminates any kind of external tool need