MangaDex Development Update - April 2026

[shwiftyshfifty]

1. Title and chapter comments on the platform for supporters
   1. Almost done, just waiting for some small changes in the API. Should release before the end of the month, too

Oh, now I see what that means. How shitty. Now I have to pay to be leave dumb horny comments and stupid memes? I wouldn't do that, even if I did have money.

With all due respect, go fuck yourselves.

*Now I understand that the 'paid' comments are on the main site, not the forums. I got really pissed off. I'll leave this up for the terrible way this was communicated and implemented.

 

[T-sama]

Oh, now I see what that means. How shitty. Now I have to pay to be leave dumb horny comments and stupid memes? I wouldn't do that, even if I did have money.

With all due respect, go fuck yourselves.

Regular comment section in the forum will still be a thing and we still can post there, mods are just being REALLY bad at properly explain things and putting any explations in places where most people won't find them anyway

Yet it's our fault for not knowing what is happening :v

Magandex is truly becoming a real business with such attitude, they're even acting like corpos and blaming users for everything now lol

 

[mgRdr]

Now this is for those that complain about comments being visible directly in the reader after clicking the comment button (by default they're hidden):

Thr majority of the complaints from this category is about the existing button, which used to navigate you to the forum page, now does something entierly different, and for one, there's no reasonably-easy way to read chapter discussion, be it the comments or the forum, without having the chapter marked as read.
So the proverbial "button" we press does something entierly different than it used to, and while we do control whether we press it or not, we don't control what it does afterwards. Speaking in terms of your smartass image response, it is as if the "shoot" button would make you jump instead, without us the players having changed anything in the settings or having the option to switch it back.
Good communication btw, that meme image blaming users for not getting the experience you rugpulled out of them.

 

[T-sama]

Thr majority of the complaints from this category is about the existing button, which used to navigate you to the forum page, now does something entierly different, and for one, there's no reasonably-easy way to read chapter discussion, be it the comments or the forum, without having the chapter marked as read.
So the proverbial "button" we press does something entierly different than it used to, and while we do control whether we press it or not, we don't control what it does afterwards. Speaking in the terms of your smartass image response, it is as if the "shoot" button would make you jump instead, without us the players change anything in settings or having the option to switch it back.
Good communication btw, that meme image blaming users for not getting the experience you rugpulled out of them.

The button taking me to this entirely new worse discussion screen is part of the reason I thought forum was dumped lol

Like, seriously, people have used that buttom to go to the chapter discussion for a long time, what brand of nonsensical logic justify changing that at this point?

The backlash is entirely justified and blaming users is 101 out of touch corpo / executive logic

 

[BestBoy]

read chapter discussion, be it the comments or the forum, without having the chapter marked as read

Why are you reading the chapter discussion before reading the chapter? Also, just press the "mark as unread" eyeball icon if having a chapter marked as read bothers you that much.

 

[mgRdr]

Why are you

not minding your own business? That's one of the ways MangaDex allowed us to interact with manga, and that's the behaviours some users adopeted for their own convenience. Perhaps I want to get the lay of the land and read general opinions about the chapter without being spoiled by the actual chapter content, perhaps it is really easy to miss that you've marked the chapter as read and that you need to unmark it, and so the next time you see the manga, you think you've read more of it than you actually did.

 

[Lunkli]

FFS, JUST PICK ONE ALREADY

Well, if you'd look at the reactions here, it sure seems like people have picked one, doesn't it??

And if that's not definitive enough, you can just make a poll to more properly gauge people's opinions on the topic. Just route it through the new notice board and the annoying unread messages dot should draw in enough people to get a decent perspective on things.

For the record, though, I haven't actually ever seen anyone complaining about the current ( / previous?) forum style discussion threads. Maybe I'm just not in the right places to see these complaints; maybe they're all coming through some direct feedback channel; maybe its just kids complaining on Tiktok. Either way, among the people that actually care to discuss the chapters they read, the majority seems to have no issues with the forums.

I think you may be letting the complaints of a loud minority get into your head, and now its getting in the way of you taking the complaints of the actual majority seriously.

 

[EtherealNeko]

I am going to lock the thread because way too many people are just on the bandwagon again. We have chosen to implement features and changes more frequently so we can receive feedback, iterate, and continue. I appreciate that it probably feels unfinished, but we would rather release more frequently and have the community help shape some of the features and help us test further (thanks a lot to the beta testers on Canary, helping iron out a lot of these kinks before they make it out into the more stable environment) than spend months working on it and then it flops, or worse, not be released at all.

As I mentioned in previous development updates, we can see there are upsides to both systems, and we will monitor UX, feedback, and performance to inform our decisions.

Now that the thread is locked, I am going to take some time to address some of these posts, because honestly...

 

[EtherealNeko]

"Commenting is pay-to-play": Gating the new comment system behind Group 1, and now Group 2, allows us to expand the feature while continuing to test its performance across the platform. It will be released to general users too, but, as with anything on MangaDex, this has to be done slowly so our systems can cope. If we released it as is, we'd have a mountain of spam and degraded systems.

"How long will the test period last?": As long as it needs to and we're satisfied with the result, we're actively working on it, as you all know.

"Can we have two buttons?": No, it's confusing, and that will lead to a further split of platform vs forums.

"Can't start the forum thread if I am in Group 3 (regular user)!": Addressed in my previous post. Not, in fact, addressed in my previous post; I gaslit myself into thinking I had, because I replied to a forum regular about this in the community Discord. The gist of it is: It wasn't mentioned by the beta testers, so it slipped by us that, since the button is wired to the comment component, it doesn't appear to users in Group 3 (not a supporter, aka Group 1, or a data contributor (contributor, group leader, power uploader, vip), aka Group 2). It would have been good to fix before release, but now it's likely to be addressed on Monday.

"Turn off the embed comments!": The comments pane isn't (or shouldn't) open by default unless you specifically click on the comments button. Comments won't spoil you and steal your joy should you choose not to open the pane.

"Notice board and the comment on obscurity": It's been noted that very few visitors, alongside our regular and most avid users, ever come to the forums to read news or announcements. And since making a thread doesn't seem to help, we set up a notice section with a counter that forces you to visit the Notice Board page to make it disappear. The comment does not "reflect the attitude of the staff towards the forums"; it's just a remark that we have listened and are forcing ourselves to write changelogs and announcements for most releases in the open world of the main platform. As a nod to BestBoy, forums account for only 8% of MangaDex's overall traffic.

"Blaming users, being corpo, etc.": Everyone is human, people have limits, and it is tiring for contributors and moderators who help with the site, these forums, the community Discord, and even the subreddit to have bandwagon comments every time we make any changes, be they positive or not. We make mistakes, we are not actively trying to blame the community, especially for providing feedback on new changes we are making, just... please try to be kind while we get ourselves in a good rhythm of features releases and better at communicating new features and changes, including the text you see with early access to features for supporters (thank you, tonie, for the feedback there).