- Joined
- Jan 24, 2018
- Messages
- 3,231
Note: this announcement was made on the website before the forums were reopened. We backported and backdated it here after the forums launch.
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Hallo hallo and a happy four year anniversary to MangaDex,
While we've faced various forms of threats and troubles in several levels of severity over the years, we've always managed to overcome most, if not all of them, with the love and support of the community and the countless hours of dedication from our volunteer staff. So thank you to everyone who made this possible, the users for their kind words, the scanlators for their tireless effort, and to the gracious donors and affiliates who let us stay ad-free.
This year we had the hack back in early March that left us with the difficult decision to either try and alter the old and undoubtedly insecure code, or intentionally take the site down for a full rewrite. We decided that the best decision was to rewrite the website from the ground up. MangaDex was originally built in a weekend by a single developer, bodged together from the shell of an anime torrent tracking site and slowly built up into the aggregator that people remember. Keeping it running was becoming difficult due to the extreme growth of the site, and we couldn't be confident that we'd be able to address all of the possible security issues that had been introduced over the past three years. So we moved on.
The foundation upon which the new site has been built puts security and reliability as the very top priorities so we can ensure the website is working securely even in the face of extreme growth (we could easily handle 10 million more users). Long-time MangaDex users for example might have noticed that we went from the site dying multiple times a week (RIP Solo Leveling) to essentially no downtime for months. You can read a more technical breakdown of our new infrastructure on our dev blog, which will be getting new posts soon. Developers should be happy to hear that our API is fully documented and updated regularly.
While we are still missing some very important features while rebuilding MangaDex from scratch (aka v5), we've implemented or improved on many features already. You can filter for series by the original language it was made in – by far the most requested feature in the history of the site, primarily by people complaining a site with Manga in its name allowed non-Japanese content. Searching was previously limited to logged-in users only, as the search function was so inefficient it could be used to DDoS the website. Thanks to a complete revamp in how searching is handled site-wide, this is no longer an issue. Search auto-completes results in real time rather than having to take 10-or-so seconds to load a page of results. Group blocks and ratings are making their return in the next update as well as the brand new addition of user upload blocks, allowing you to filter out uploaders who don't upload under a specific group. There's not much left to implement to meet v3 feature parity, and then we can start looking forward to the future of the site and adding more brand-new features.
We know that you desperately want the forums – or more specifically, the comments – back. Believe us, so do we. But before we're able to re-implement the forums, we need to set up OAuth, which is a secure way of authorizing account access between services, so that our forum software can be integrated with the website. After that, all that's left to meet v3 parity is adding back in views and global tag filtering. We're so close to the end, thank you all for sticking with us through this journey!
We hope you enjoy the site, and as always, here are some quotes from all of the staff members who made this possible.
P.S: We have an AMA occurring on /r/manga on January 23rd, come ask us questions then!
P.P.S: We're looking for another API developer, experience with PHP and Symfony required. Join our Discord and send a message in #dev-talk-api if you're interested.
P.P.P.S: We have a cute new shirt on loot.moe!
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Hallo hallo and a happy four year anniversary to MangaDex,
While we've faced various forms of threats and troubles in several levels of severity over the years, we've always managed to overcome most, if not all of them, with the love and support of the community and the countless hours of dedication from our volunteer staff. So thank you to everyone who made this possible, the users for their kind words, the scanlators for their tireless effort, and to the gracious donors and affiliates who let us stay ad-free.
This year we had the hack back in early March that left us with the difficult decision to either try and alter the old and undoubtedly insecure code, or intentionally take the site down for a full rewrite. We decided that the best decision was to rewrite the website from the ground up. MangaDex was originally built in a weekend by a single developer, bodged together from the shell of an anime torrent tracking site and slowly built up into the aggregator that people remember. Keeping it running was becoming difficult due to the extreme growth of the site, and we couldn't be confident that we'd be able to address all of the possible security issues that had been introduced over the past three years. So we moved on.
The foundation upon which the new site has been built puts security and reliability as the very top priorities so we can ensure the website is working securely even in the face of extreme growth (we could easily handle 10 million more users). Long-time MangaDex users for example might have noticed that we went from the site dying multiple times a week (RIP Solo Leveling) to essentially no downtime for months. You can read a more technical breakdown of our new infrastructure on our dev blog, which will be getting new posts soon. Developers should be happy to hear that our API is fully documented and updated regularly.
While we are still missing some very important features while rebuilding MangaDex from scratch (aka v5), we've implemented or improved on many features already. You can filter for series by the original language it was made in – by far the most requested feature in the history of the site, primarily by people complaining a site with Manga in its name allowed non-Japanese content. Searching was previously limited to logged-in users only, as the search function was so inefficient it could be used to DDoS the website. Thanks to a complete revamp in how searching is handled site-wide, this is no longer an issue. Search auto-completes results in real time rather than having to take 10-or-so seconds to load a page of results. Group blocks and ratings are making their return in the next update as well as the brand new addition of user upload blocks, allowing you to filter out uploaders who don't upload under a specific group. There's not much left to implement to meet v3 feature parity, and then we can start looking forward to the future of the site and adding more brand-new features.
We know that you desperately want the forums – or more specifically, the comments – back. Believe us, so do we. But before we're able to re-implement the forums, we need to set up OAuth, which is a secure way of authorizing account access between services, so that our forum software can be integrated with the website. After that, all that's left to meet v3 parity is adding back in views and global tag filtering. We're so close to the end, thank you all for sticking with us through this journey!
We hope you enjoy the site, and as always, here are some quotes from all of the staff members who made this possible.
P.S: We have an AMA occurring on /r/manga on January 23rd, come ask us questions then!
P.P.S: We're looking for another API developer, experience with PHP and Symfony required. Join our Discord and send a message in #dev-talk-api if you're interested.
P.P.P.S: We have a cute new shirt on loot.moe!
Quotes:
Holo - Papaixlone - Administrator
Lymus - Administrator
antiunredoify - Developer
Bottersnike - Developer
carbotaniuman - Developer
flare - Developer
panda________ - Developer
Plykiya - Developer, Public Relations
Teasday - Developer
Tristan #9 - Developer
rdn - Developer
Xnot - Developer
Arvid - Designer
BraveDude8 - Moderator
Daviot - Moderator
Electromaster - Moderator
Kafka - Moderator, Public Relations
woulez - Moderator
Zephyrus - Moderator
Henny - Public Relations
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