- Joined
- May 29, 2012
- Messages
- 594
Edit #3 Response has being fantastic so far for clients, so much so that we have several days of clients waiting for new certs to be generated! We will get to everyone eventually!
As you will no doubt have noticed, since the start of year, many events have occurred which have negatively impacted on the site. Losing CloudFlare at the start of the year was a blow, but that was largely resolved by switching to DDoS-Guard. Losing PayPal as a direct method of support has been somewhat mitigated by accepting Bitcoin. Of course, then came COVID-19, which put the world in quarantine, and that increased our traffic overnight by 15%. Then a month later, MangaRock finally died, and our traffic increased by another 15% overnight. No amount of upgrades could have forseen these increases in the levels of traffic. And lastly, due to factors beyond Path's control, they are no longer able to cache our image archive traffic (but they still provide DDoS mitigation for the image archives, for which we are very grateful for). All of the above has led to dismal loading times for old chapters.
BTC/ETH update
We have received a fair amount of BTC and ETH, so thanks to everyone who went through the effort of obtaining crypto to support us. Recently, the amounts of crypto donations have fallen slightly compared to the earlier months, but for now, it is not a concern, as we have built up a couple of months' buffer again. Please continue to support us with crypto if you can!
Affiliates
Very soon, we will start linking to a few affiliates to see if that can secure our finances for the long term.
But the big news today is...
MangaDex@Home
Today we are super pleased to announce the launch of MangaDex@Home.
Before I start though, a huge shout out and thank you to the guys who volunteered to help us with the client and backend and managed to get it working in such a short amount of time. Like totally amazing how fast it all came together.
So huge thanks to Fugi, carbotaniuman, serjflint, akiroz, kipukun and charly.
With the launch of this we are hoping to address the bandwidth issues that everyone has being suffering from for a while now. With that said, the project is reliant upon community support via the provision of server bandwidth and hard drive space. So we are looking for volunteers to help host clients and boost the network's infrastructure to be able to cope with the demands that are currently placed upon it.
Here's a quick blurb from the MangaDex@Home page explaining:
We will be slowly ramping up the amount of people on the network as more clients are added and coverage improves. We are especially keen on SEA clients being added as that is currently a region we have very poor service in. Having a wide range of locations is especially important as requests from users on the network will be routed to the nearest clients to speed up load times so hopefully everyone should notice an improvement. You can try it right now by turning it on in your Mangadex@Home options page!
The current status of the network at launch is a combined output of 6650Mbps and over 18TB of cache space from the volunteers who joined us early. Although this sounds impressive we are going to need much more capacity to ensure that we can load chapters reliably for everyone on a global scale. The cache on all clients will need to be built up as they are currently only full of chapters from our internal testing spam, so loading times will improve as more users use the network and start having their chapter requests cached, so worry not if you don't see huge improvements right away.
If you are able and willing to host a client you can find the application form here: client request form. All applications will be replied to eventually, but since we are unsure of how many people will help out it could be minutes to days before we get to all of them! There is also a limit on how many clients we can bring online daily, too, due to cert creation. People hosting a client will be able to display a shiny supporter icon next to their name! You can enable said icon under Supporter settings. People who sign up before the end of this month get a shiny gold badge to display. After the first month, a boring, old, regular, generic one!
edit: Already reached the daily limit for new clients. Will approve more as the limit refreshes!
As you will no doubt have noticed, since the start of year, many events have occurred which have negatively impacted on the site. Losing CloudFlare at the start of the year was a blow, but that was largely resolved by switching to DDoS-Guard. Losing PayPal as a direct method of support has been somewhat mitigated by accepting Bitcoin. Of course, then came COVID-19, which put the world in quarantine, and that increased our traffic overnight by 15%. Then a month later, MangaRock finally died, and our traffic increased by another 15% overnight. No amount of upgrades could have forseen these increases in the levels of traffic. And lastly, due to factors beyond Path's control, they are no longer able to cache our image archive traffic (but they still provide DDoS mitigation for the image archives, for which we are very grateful for). All of the above has led to dismal loading times for old chapters.
BTC/ETH update
We have received a fair amount of BTC and ETH, so thanks to everyone who went through the effort of obtaining crypto to support us. Recently, the amounts of crypto donations have fallen slightly compared to the earlier months, but for now, it is not a concern, as we have built up a couple of months' buffer again. Please continue to support us with crypto if you can!
Affiliates
Very soon, we will start linking to a few affiliates to see if that can secure our finances for the long term.
But the big news today is...
MangaDex@Home
Today we are super pleased to announce the launch of MangaDex@Home.
Before I start though, a huge shout out and thank you to the guys who volunteered to help us with the client and backend and managed to get it working in such a short amount of time. Like totally amazing how fast it all came together.
So huge thanks to Fugi, carbotaniuman, serjflint, akiroz, kipukun and charly.
With the launch of this we are hoping to address the bandwidth issues that everyone has being suffering from for a while now. With that said, the project is reliant upon community support via the provision of server bandwidth and hard drive space. So we are looking for volunteers to help host clients and boost the network's infrastructure to be able to cope with the demands that are currently placed upon it.
Here's a quick blurb from the MangaDex@Home page explaining:
MangaDex@Home is a P2P (peer-to-peer) system where users will be able to volunteer the usage of either their personal computers or servers to act as cache server nodes to alleviate the stress on our own cache servers. Over time, we envisage that the majority, if not all, of the older chapters will be served by MangaDex@Home
You will be hosting a client that acts as a P2P system for older chapters. Basically, your machine will act as a server where a tiny portion of older MangaDex chapters will be stored and when a reader wants to read an older chapter, it will be "fetched" from your machine and served to the reader. If you're familiar with torrenting, it is very similar: torrents work by sharing parts of the whole file to other torrent clients in order to ensure download stability and faster speeds.
Since your machine will basically function as a server for MD, we are asking only people who meet or exceed the following criteria run a MangaDex@Home client for now:
A minimum network speed of 80Mbps up/down.
A minimum of 40GB of dedicated storage space, preferably more.
24/7 availability (This means the machine must be *on* 24/7).
You will be expected to provide an up to date speedtest.net result on request to validate your specs as part of the application process, whether you are in the initial batch or later on.
Note that if you are concerned about the legality of hosting MangaDex's content, consider renting a dedicated server and installing the MangaDex@Home client there. If you still have concerns about legality, we suggest that you do not host the MangaDex@Home client at all.
We will be slowly ramping up the amount of people on the network as more clients are added and coverage improves. We are especially keen on SEA clients being added as that is currently a region we have very poor service in. Having a wide range of locations is especially important as requests from users on the network will be routed to the nearest clients to speed up load times so hopefully everyone should notice an improvement. You can try it right now by turning it on in your Mangadex@Home options page!
The current status of the network at launch is a combined output of 6650Mbps and over 18TB of cache space from the volunteers who joined us early. Although this sounds impressive we are going to need much more capacity to ensure that we can load chapters reliably for everyone on a global scale. The cache on all clients will need to be built up as they are currently only full of chapters from our internal testing spam, so loading times will improve as more users use the network and start having their chapter requests cached, so worry not if you don't see huge improvements right away.
If you are able and willing to host a client you can find the application form here: client request form. All applications will be replied to eventually, but since we are unsure of how many people will help out it could be minutes to days before we get to all of them! There is also a limit on how many clients we can bring online daily, too, due to cert creation. People hosting a client will be able to display a shiny supporter icon next to their name! You can enable said icon under Supporter settings. People who sign up before the end of this month get a shiny gold badge to display. After the first month, a boring, old, regular, generic one!
edit: Already reached the daily limit for new clients. Will approve more as the limit refreshes!