Some nicer way of pre-loading more pages for those of us with sluggish internet connections.

[Pokari]

One thing I've noticed with the new reader is that strip-format now only loads a few pages ahead of where you're currently reading.

I understand completely why this would be desirable from a bandwidth-usage standpoint.

However—some of us with crappy internet connections really do want to preload everything, for quality of life reasons. At least/especially for color webtoons with their massive image sizes. As it is, for a decent reading experience, I currently have to keep scrolling down to force it to load more pages, then go back and read things once everything's loaded. It's maddening—like trying watch those streaming videos that won't buffer more than two minutes ahead no matter what your connection is like.

Additionally, consider that the problem can be further exacerbated in webtoon strips where different authors/groups chop up the pages into different sizes (because it normally doesn't matter much). This means for webtoons the buffer length, as measured in pages, is highly variable. For an extreme example try reading anything from Futaku Scanlations now (they cut their releases up into tiny shreds to spite mangafox et. al. Example: https://mangadex.org/chapter/407710/1 )

I don't know—could we just get something like an explicit button in the side bar to click to say, "Yes, I really do want to pre-load all of these pages for this particular chapter?" I would think that would be enough to prevent people wastefully loading full chapters just to see what the beginning looks like, and most people would never pay such a button any attention, because they'd be fine just with the regular chapter buffering.

 

[Pokari]

Oh, another annoyance along these lines that I ran into today. When a webtoon starts with a flashback (there's no page limit to a webtoon, so naturally some just open with the last scene copy-pasted from the previous chapter)—then I have to actively wait while scrolling through a bunch of pages to even get the reader to the beginning of new content (since it won't load it if I just sit and wait at the top), even if I'm otherwise reading slowly enough.

This seriously isn't working out for me. I'm coming to dread trying to read webtoons with this reader.

_{Aside: It's possible that Redice's simpler suggestion would be more appropriate than the obscure compromise I propose above.}

 

[Plykiya]

@Pokari
Images preload in the back without pre-displaying, scrolling down doesn't force it to load. It just displays when you do. How fast the images load hasn't changed between the old and new reader. I guess the new reader is a problem with that group specifically with 244 page chapters ...

 

[Pokari]

@Plykiya

In the case of scrolling webtoons, the old reader loaded everything in a chapter at once because it was all on the same page.

If you're saying that the new reader still does this, that isn't borne out by my experience—the webtoon readers will only give me a few more pages loaded in the background (that is to say, 3 or 5 depending on my preload settings) even if I leave it there sitting for an hour.

(TL;DR: Essentially, the new policy of applying preload-limits within a single scrolling webtoon chapter is the problem. For the reasons outlined above.)

Please do note that I'm having trouble with more or less all webtoon chapters. The several-hundred-page strips are literally unreadable (I would have to baby the chapter literally constantly, until the entire thing had loaded several minutes later), but the rest are still atrocious.

 

[Deoxyribo9]

Definitely makes it troublesome to deal with stuff like re-reading Gangnam Beauty
https://mangadex.org/chapter/203107

 

[Plykiya]

@Deoxyribo9
Gangnam beauty is less of an issue if you're actively reading the chapter :x
Preload of 20, each page is about 100 kb, entire chapters should only be about 8 - 12 mb total, should be fine on any bad internet

Unparalleled makes preloading terrible on any setting for the new reader ...

 

[Teasday]

_{@Pokari posted:}

I understand completely why this would be desirable from a bandwidth-usage standpoint.

Great. You probably understand all this already, but just to be thorough and to clarify this to anyone who may not already realize this:

The preload setting does indeed preload in the background the next 0-20 images depending on the page you're currently on. If you're on page 3 and your preload setting is 20, it'll begin preloading the pages 4-24 in sequential order. If you're on long strip, the images don't get immediately displayed (I may change this) but they have nevertheless been downloaded and thus will display upon scrolling even if you go offline. Of course, if you do and the manga has, say, 40 pages then naturally the pages 25-40 will not have been downloaded.

So, on one hand people with spotty internet connections would prefer to download entire chapters at a time so that they may read them fully later, but on the other hand the problem with auto-preloading everything is that it's wasteful and stressful on the servers, especially if full preloading was available as a saveable setting, in which case there would be people firing and forgetting it and thus causing problems along the line.

_{@Pokari posted:}

I don't know—could we just get something like an explicit button in the side bar to click to say, "Yes, I really do want to pre-load all of these pages for this particular chapter?" I would think that would be enough to prevent people wastefully loading full chapters just to see what the beginning looks like, and most people would never pay such a button any attention, because they'd be fine just with the regular chapter buffering.

Something like this could possibly be a decent workaround. Like you say, I could add a "Start full chapter preload" button for example next to the preload option in the settings modal, possibly available to only logged in users. Forcing the user to go through a hoop would prevent frivolous usage. Well, at least until someone decides to write a userscript to press it automatically. On the other hand, people could write a script to trigger a full preload by other means anyway, so I'm not sure if it's worth worrying about.

I'll talk to Holo about it later.

 

[Plykiya]

@Pokari Well, now there's a preload entire chapter button hidden in the new reader setttings (advanced)

 

[Pokari]

@Teasday @Plykiya (and anyone else who might have been involved):

Many thanks for this.

I could stay stuff about UX and such, but personally, I'm very happy right now ~w~