`recordedAt` date for when a chapter was earliest recorded

[curiousCheck]

Thanks to the efforts of everyone involved, mangadex is well on its way to become a database for all CJK graphic novels and related (and the scanlated chapters whenever possible)

Since a lot of data and chapters are backfilled sometimes its not easy to know when an actual chapter was originally available
This is a useful information that something like MangaUpdates can have owing to its presence since the 2000s
It'd be nice to have a way to also store this info in MangaDex itself instead of having to rely on MangaUpdates, other trackers, official publisher pages, and retail links (all of these can do down at any point like doujinshi.org including mangadex.org of course but then we'd have to start from scratch again were it not for backups)

So apart from "publishAt", "readableAt", "createdAt", "updatedAt", a new "recordedAt" might be useful for some cases (eg: backfilling missing chapters, ex-lic uploads, old groups coming back to mangadex and not spamming the latest updates page, mangaplus exturl links etc)

The disadvantages are of course that it is had to track down an original source/timestamp for most things. Yet I see myself in cases where I see CXC Scans or Yuri-ism with recorded dates that could be useful info except there's that can be done with that on MD

This is a rough idea I had for a while so its very rough and not super developed but hopefully I was able to convince some sort of need to store this data

 

[BraveDude8]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
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for this to be any use at all we'd have to give out chapter edit permissions very widely, and that's a recipe for disaster, or set up more granular chapter attirbute editing, which is a pain and probably still a disaster

 

[Remocracy]

How would this work when multiple groups upload different chapters to the same language? There would need to be some metadata stored per combination of language and chapter number, and this would once again be difficult for oneshots.

 

[BraveDude8]

How would this work when multiple groups upload different chapters to the same language? There would need to be some metadata stored per combination of language and chapter number, and this would once again be difficult for oneshots.

irrelevant, these are per-chapter attributes

 

[Remocracy]

irrelevant, these are per-chapter attributes

Oh, I see that this is for scanlated chapters but for the first instance. I thought the proposal was for stuff like chapter serialization times/etc. (like Chapter #69420 of One Piece was published in English at June 9, 42069).

 

[curiousCheck]

for this to be any use at all we'd have to give out chapter edit permissions very widely

why cant it just be reported to mods like everything else

or set up more granular chapter attribute editing, which is a pain and probably still a disaster

recordedAt probably will need to editable, unlike the other dates which are all determined on chapter upload
which is indeed its own can of worms
don't think it has to be more granular than current one tho
just the same as how chapter/volume numbers can be edited, this new timestamp can also be edited

 

[BraveDude8]

why cant it just be reported to mods like everything else

because we don't want to manually backdate hundreds of thousands of chapters

 

[TestAddress]

because we don't want to manually backdate hundreds of thousands of chapters

me. too. even if the manga is that interesting.