MangaDex v5 Dev Suggestions: The Real Thread

[Plykiya]

Hallo hallo, MangaDex staff here

It's a month away from our anniversary and we'd like to get feedback and suggestions on what things we can change or add to the site. We're currently committing all development to MangaDex v5 so the live website will be sparse with updates or bugfixes. To anyone following our development, yes we did skip v4.

MangaDex v5 will be a full rewrite of the website from scratch. It will be a SPA using Vue.js (JS framework) for the frontend. The backend will be done using Symfony (PHP Framework). The forums will be sped along using Xenforo (forum package). Search will be done with Elasticsearch (search engine) and reopened to guests.

Here's a list of some of the planned features we have for v5.
[ul]Full site API (SPA)
Search results appearing dynamically (Elasticsearch)
Support for full site translation (Symfony)
Author pages
Additional and customizeable follow lists
Saving other user's follow lists
Reviews
Setting preferred covers for manga
Selecting preferred titles for manga
Following manga from inside the reader
Mass marking chapters as read
Sorting follows by unread chapters
Additional stats and graphs for uploaders and groups
Reworked sexual content rating system (for the shoujo ai/yuri merge)[/ul]
...and more. It would take too long to go through the entire list of what's being changed since the entire site is being reworked from nothing. If you have anything you would like to see added to the site, any feedback about features you don't like about the site, now's your time to suggest it for our consideration as we dive deeper into the development of v5

There's an ongoing Reddit thread for those who prefer it, but feel free to respond here as well

 

[Ceiye]

You can't just skip numbers, this isn't Apple or Windows! Even if this were, you have to skip the ninth version! Way to break convention, MD.

But damn, rewriting the entire site sounds rough. May it go smoothly

Oh yeah, suggestions. Uh... I vaguely remember there being a suggestion months back for character lists on manga, and I kind of get it now. I just read a chapter today where the characters did not look like how they normally do and realized I literally did not know any of their names. I get the fear of spoilers, so maybe just a page of names and an image of the character from their first appearance, or the clearest, most unspoiled image of them?

 

[pockettrash]

reviews

Feel like this will be mostly used by holier-than-thou folks, hope I'm wrong

All in all, looking forward to the results!

 

[Plykiya]

And to the people who responded in the dumb test thread I made....

_{@ZipFile posted:}

Would be nice to have (incremental) synchronization API also. Both for offline-reader convenience and for backup purposes.

If we go down the PWA route, offline reader with downloads could be a possibility. Going full SPA makes it easier to develop

_{@williamx posted:}

A little interested to see what material design would look like. Maybe have it as a beta in case people don't like it.
also maybe a like system (like youtube, w. no dislikes)

We're still going to be using bootstrap, although we did consider material

_{@feha posted:}

On the topic of short chapters, I would love a way to make recent-chapters list not show entries for split chapters. I only want to read when the chapter is complete, so the best would be if I only got notified when it was [complete], and if it presented it as if it is [a single complete chapter] (lots of "if, it, and is" here ).

There's no way to determine if the chapter is a split chapter, bonus chapter, etc without making a special marker for it, and in general we don't allow people to be uploading chapters in parts. It's probably just released that way by the publisher.

_{@Ada posted:}

If it is possible to implement blocking or "not showing up on feed" function on certain generes/ tags such as ntr, loli/ words like violence etc.
Basically something like the hidden hentai button, which people can customize what they don't want to show up when browsing or searching for mangas etc.
Not sure if it is possible.

In the merge shoujo ai/yuri merge thread I mention that one of our solutions will likely end up being having filter presets people can make and choose from, but you likely won't be able to set it up outside of the settings page.

_{@Bastadon posted:}

i'd like to have a function to hide manga not currently translated in the preferred language

Will be handled by the "Latest updates to respect language filter" in the planned megathread

_{@lexy posted:}

I don't fully understand the "Additional and customizeable follow lists": does this mean I can search genre's/content/themes and whatnot with my own following list? Because sometimes I want to reread something I just know I've followed, but can't remember the title. and rather than shifting thru every follow page, or trying to advance search between all of mangadex's archive, I would like it if I could simplify my own follows

You can already search for genre/content/theme/etc in your follow lists right now on MDList, the custom lists mean that you can set up different named lists and whether or not they're public or private or whether they show in your follows page or not

_{@Misiakk posted:}

I would like to have the ability to subscribe to an author or an artist. So whenever his new work gets translated i can see it without serching for it with clicking on his name.

Coming with author pages

_{@Wolvenworks posted:}

I know someone has prolly whined about this before but just a reminder, mobile app version.

Going full SPA is a step towards making a mobile app

_{@Riggs posted:}

I don't really like when some pages of a chapter don't charge and i have to refresh over and over until the chapter is completely charge

Change your image server

_{@Aelisya posted:}

Restrict punitive suppression for a group (notify an admin for approuvement).
Notify the User if a group delete their upload (sometime i discover a manga not updated anymore and full deleted (so i have to search on web but if i don't see it..))
Follow obligation from GDPR Europe (for instance modify email, or export data (for passing it to a friend)).
And last but not least let us see (with filter) only series we don't read on the mdlist of a friend.

Elaborate on the first one, probably not gonna happen on the second one, we're not going to follow GDPR but we'll let you change your email and delete your account, and that last one is planned.

_{@Pauan posted:}

Suggestion: an option to hide chapters which have already been read

In my post as "Sorting follows by unread chapters"

 

[Pika]

Thank you for your hard work!

Wow, did that yuri/yaoi debate really become this big?

 

[Plykiya]

@Ceiye Character list is interesting, although I wonder how we would make guidelines on when a character should actually have an entry made for them. MAL for example doesn't list every single one of the characters in a series

@AbyssalMonkey Yeah we'll support chapter downloads in one way or another.

@Pika It affects most of the content on the site, not necessarily the yuri/yaoi thing that's of significance

 

[L_A_S_E_R_shark]

Some ideas:
For the reader:
A stretch to width option would be good for some of the older, lower res stuff.
An option to load in preview thumbnails for the pages before full images would be cool.
Infinite scroll, that would load in chapters on the same page, this would be really good for all those manga with 1 page per chapter.

 

[Bumblebeepee]

I'd like to see a feature to be able to ignore / not show manga releases.
e.g. - you can ignore a release group so they don't show on your follows, useful if multiple groups are translating the same manga.
- or to ignore Manga titles so they don't show in the latest updates, if there's specific titles you don't want to see at all.

it could be added to the actions drop down menu where you would set a manga as "reading", "dropped", etc. An option to "ignore".

Another suggestion following on from above, it would be nice to add the ability to group the manga you read with custom categorys in the action status, so you could bundle all your favourite mangas under one custom name

Thanks for all the hard work developing this site!

 

[Xunder]

@Bumblebeepee There's already a feature like that. Go onto the group and block them, you won't see their updates

 

[Alakazan]

Is there an issue happening currently? Im reading stone ocean and the pages take significantly longer than usual to load. Is this because of traffic?

 

[Ksetrar]

Need some post slider button
Like the hentai2read website

 

[Plykiya]

@Alakazan No issues, try changing image servers (enable advanced reader settings

@Ksetrar Can you elaborate on the slider thing, not gonna open the site to find out lol

 

[ununseti]

This is looking cool! I'm seeing lots of long-requested features in the list there, so that's great! Thanks to the devs and the staff for all their hard work!

@Plykiya MAL character coverage varies a lot depending on the popularity of the parent series Some series have entries like "Nekokoneko is a cute toy in the form of a cat", and meanwhile other series have no character entries at all :/

Possible starting reference point might be MAL's Character & People Database Guidelines.

 

[feha]

@plykiya

There's no way to determine if the chapter is a split chapter, bonus chapter, etc without making a special marker for it, and in general we don't allow people to be uploading chapters in parts. It's probably just released that way by the publisher.

While ideally the uploaders would tag entries with the actual chapter they belong to (as you say, adding complexity), there is an easy (albeit inherently... "bugged"?) way to automatically see if the chapter had all parts uploaded, which is how I envisioned it to work: As it currently is, the name of the chapter always has the chapter-number in it (sometimes also volume and ".part", where part is a number). As such, it would just have to check for when the chapter-indicator increases (so rather than update on finished chapter, it would update on the first part of every chapter).
This would have issues with when volume-number is in the chapters name, except I have noticed that the chapters seems to get sorted properly without issue despite having both volume and chapter given. Even when a tl adds a chapter for their re-tl on a manga which already has several entries. Which means there already is support somewhere one can tap into to make sure they dont mistake the volume as the chapter, and the chapter as the part (although I wouldnt be too sad if volumes were merged as well). Another issue would be ".5" chapters being merged as well, but again, I wouldn't actually find that too annoying. What *would* be annoying is the lacking update for the final entry, but that can be solved with the blue "end" tag.

If rather than a fully automatic (and flawed) system only dealing in filtering out updates and displaying "merged" entries, one wanted a more involved/manual system (that still avoids added complexity of an extra marker), it could be possible to go by page-count on entries with "x._" in their name (ie. 3.1-3.9001), and judge it as a part-post (for that user) if the count is below the users set threshold. Volumes (where in "x.y" x is volume and y is chapter) aren't an issue as the count would be high enough, and non-split entries are avoided because the name lacks the (already well-established) pattern (which is why I call it "manual"). Doesn't merge parts as much as it instead merges parts smaller than user wants, which solves the underlying "issue", instead of the described one.

As for some mangas being split by publisher and not tl, that doesn't change my annoyance with parts. I am not annoyed at the tl. If I am annoyed with anyone, it would be myself for being to impatient to wait. And that it feels spammy in the updates page ofc..

ps: And sorry, didn't notice the prior thread was a test-thread.

 

[artikandri]

Im a developer myself, and Im not too thrilled by this announcement. By using Vue, there is a possibility of the site becomes bloated and too heavy to load on mobile browser. Hope it wont happen.

Otherwise, good luck with the development!

 

[HDMI1]

Not really a big deal, but are there plans to add "Publication Start/End" dates to the series info on it's page?

 

[Neapolitan]

You should expand "Award Winning" tag to metapage of each award. Make it easier to search for what award a certain manga win and see the competition of certain awards.

This should reflected to manga page itself, which is inconsistent on this end. For example:

Dungeon Meshi is underlined bullet points
Doraemon is a paragraph
5toubun has none at all.

 

[Sheogorath85]

A minor thing that has been bothering me, is that some series (pretty much only Chinese manhua) the published format is individual pages, but at some point along the way, it changes to being in Long Strip format. It would be nice to change the default/native view for a series only for the chapters that have that specific format. Currently, it seems the default format setting is set for an entire series, not taking possible format changes during publishing into account.


tl;dr: Add a default format option for series that start as Standard/Paged & switch to Long Strip part-way through publication.

 

[Holo]

@AbyssalMonkey

The current concern regarding downloading is that if we officially supported it, it may lead to people abusing this feature and the site already pumps probably 2PBs of data every month.

We have previously considered making it a supporter feature - maybe we'll go through with the idea at some point, who knows.

 

[firelight]

Export follows

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The forums are being replaced with disqus?
Thank you Abyssal, I didn't see that.

A stretch to width option would be good for some of the older, lower res stuff.

This please.