Hallo hallo,
Another year has passed and MangaDex is turning a whole five years old. When MangaDex first began, we didn't have any idea how big it would become or how long it would last. The generous estimates for how long we'd last were in the two year range, but here we are reaching five. We wouldn't have been able to do it without the support from our users who sent us plenty of kind and encouraging words or the scanlators that tirelessly dedicate themselves to translating content for all of us to mutually enjoy.
Infrastructure Improvements
It's been nearly two years since we made the decision to rewrite the site from scratch, and we can happily say that it was the right one. As we continue to focus on both security, stability, and long term viability of each feature (we try to share some insights on that work every now and then in
our DevBlog, for those interested), things do take a bit more time to build at each step of the way, but it has been paying dividends.
From fighting downtimes every week (and sometimes every day) in the v3 days, we can
look back at 2022 (i.e.: 8760 hours) and see that we had a grand total of 6 hours of complete outage, and 33 hours of partial outage. The vast majority of which was planned migrations, or hiccups before we had fully tuned things after these. And that is while seeing steady growth, slowly but surely inching back towards the heydays of v3, with traffic spikes above 700'000 unique daily users, 5500 requests per second, and breaking 17Gb/s of traffic recently.
Quite a lot of reading indeed.
Forums and Comments Return, Rules Rewritten
In our
last anniversary announcement, we said we would focus on bringing forums and comments back this year. After we implemented
what we needed to make it work with the manga side of things, the forums and comments have made their glorious return. We're using the
Xenforo forum software rather than the completely homebrew solution we had before, which means much more features to play with such as a more developed text editor, media embeds, group DMs, push notifications, better moderation tools, and other things you'd expect. We'll continue to work on the appearance to make it a bit more MangaDex-y, as well as focus on the creation of a light theme for those that prefer it.
The forums coming back represents the return of our ability to properly communicate with users and scanlators without having to resort to third-party platforms such as Discord or Twitter. Because we have a new
Community Contribution forum section, we've taken the opportunity to completely
rewrite our rules (
old rules for comparison) to make the wording more consistent and easier to understand. Users can post threads in the Community Contribution section about MangaDex metadata situations that need a bit more discussion than just reports to properly sort out. Take a look at it if you're interested in improving the data quality of MangaDex. Just make sure to read the new rules page first!
Looking to the Future
There are just a few things left before we hit feature parity with v3 such as view counts, RSS feeds, site-wide tag filters, server-side user settings, and a few other quality of life things like having genre filters on your follows page. We're at the point where it's less about hitting feature parity and more about implementing things as they ideally should be. The main new thing that you can look forward to is the custom follows rework, which should aim to give you full control over how you manage your follows.
We know things aren't perfect right now, but with time we can work towards it. Thank you for being patient with us and we hope you enjoy the site.
Just like the past four years, here's a word from our staff members.
P.S: We're hosting a
Reddit AMA right now!
P.P.S: There's also an anniversary sale going on at
https://loot.moe/ if you want some MangaDex merch.
@Holo - Papa
@ixlone - Admin
@Lymus - Admin
@AlexEliot - Developer
@Asyncantiunredoify - Developer
@Bottersnike - Developer
@carbryvietia - Developer
@eralfl - Developer
@panda__________ - Developer
@rdn - Developer
@Teasday - Developer
@tristan9 - Developer
@Xnot - Developer
@ImightRemember - Designer
@BraveDude8 - Moderator
@Daviot - Forum Moderator
@Electromaster - Moderator
@glad-barfs - Moderator
@Kafka - Moderator/Public Relations
@woulez - Forum Moderator
@Zephyrus - Forum Moderator
@Plykiya - Public Relations
@Henny_ - Public Relations
