- Joined
- Jan 24, 2018
- Messages
- 3,231
Hallo hallo,
Another year has passed and MangaDex turns three years old. The site continues to grow at a rate that is completely unexpected to us. We couldn't have made it this far without the generosity of our donors, the untiring efforts of scanlators that give the site purpose, or your participation as a reader. Though this is a message we've said before, we really are thankful. This past year has been characterized by the constant back and forth between us upgrading our site and events happening that increase our traffic past the limits of those upgrades. The most recent upgrade that split the API off onto its own server has given us a bit of breathing room, but it was a flawed implementation that we plan to continue to improve on in the near future.
During the last week of December of 2019 into January of the following year, we experienced legal issues which resulted in us taking down the site for a few days and discontinuing our use of Cloudflare in exchange for DDoS-Guard. I'm sure barely anyone remembers it at this point, it feels like a decade has passed since the start of COVID, but it was uncertain how the site would fare. To say we've made a recovery since then would be an understatement. As shown in the following graph, our traffic has grown 306% from the previous year according to Google Analytics (users with adblock are untracked). It's easy to see why the servers would struggle with the increased demand.
We've only been able to survive this increase in traffic because of the creation of MangaDex@Home, the P2P network solution made by site volunteers 7 months ago that allows people to donate their storage space and bandwidth to serve images to readers in place of our own image servers. Our serving capacity was limited to just 2 Gbps (250 MB/s) with Path Network (considering their service to us is free, it's insanely generous) before the creation of MD@H and we were maxing out that connection nonstop. With MD@H, we're hitting total network speeds of around 8-12 Gbps (1000-1500 MB/s), a significant improvement over where we were before (completely needed for Solo Leveling releases).
Advertisement Follow-up
Following up on our previous announcement where we said we would run an ad from December 21st to the 28th, we've finally received payment for said ad after some unexpected transfer delays. Our total upkeep cost at the moment is $920. Running the ad for a week covered two months of our current server costs. Admittedly, we were expecting a larger amount given the size of our audience, but it's still an amazing amount for something we only did for a week. We have no further plans to run ads.
Android Stats
Apple Stats
Going with Affiliates
In the previous thread someone mentioned why we "don't have a banner for donations instead". While it was a good idea, people don't really know how to donate via cryptocurrency or it's too convoluted for their liking. So instead of donation banners, we plan on exploring the idea of having banners that lead to our affiliates page. Kind of similar to a banner asking people to donate in the way that both involve people wanting to support MD in some way. Not quite ad banners because it doesn't advertise for any service specifically, just asking people if they're interested in supporting the website and giving them options to do so if they click on it. We'll make another announcement when we implement it, so look forward to it.
Example banner, banners should be humorous like the april fool banners we run, not outright begging. Wikipedia ad parody by Teasday
Mega Anniversary Contest Winner
Congratulations to IReadTooMuch for winning our anniversary Contest with their entry, Love is War. They'll receive a $50 Amazon or Steam gift card, a steam game from @Lymus, and an indie game from @Kafka. Thank you as well to all the other participants, your submissions were enjoyable to watch.
v5 When?
The full site rework that is MangaDex v5 is still in progress. We may look into recruiting additional devs familiar with Symfony or Vue to speed up progress, but availability is always the most important factor since this is a hobby and not a job. Hopefully the site condition stabilizes long enough for us to complete it this year. We want it to arrive just as much as everyone else...
Just like the two years before, we'll end this off with quotes from all of our staff (WE MISS YOU HOLO!)
Holo - Former Overlord/Owner
Reddit AMA
We will be answering question on Reddit too, see you there!
Another year has passed and MangaDex turns three years old. The site continues to grow at a rate that is completely unexpected to us. We couldn't have made it this far without the generosity of our donors, the untiring efforts of scanlators that give the site purpose, or your participation as a reader. Though this is a message we've said before, we really are thankful. This past year has been characterized by the constant back and forth between us upgrading our site and events happening that increase our traffic past the limits of those upgrades. The most recent upgrade that split the API off onto its own server has given us a bit of breathing room, but it was a flawed implementation that we plan to continue to improve on in the near future.
During the last week of December of 2019 into January of the following year, we experienced legal issues which resulted in us taking down the site for a few days and discontinuing our use of Cloudflare in exchange for DDoS-Guard. I'm sure barely anyone remembers it at this point, it feels like a decade has passed since the start of COVID, but it was uncertain how the site would fare. To say we've made a recovery since then would be an understatement. As shown in the following graph, our traffic has grown 306% from the previous year according to Google Analytics (users with adblock are untracked). It's easy to see why the servers would struggle with the increased demand.
We've only been able to survive this increase in traffic because of the creation of MangaDex@Home, the P2P network solution made by site volunteers 7 months ago that allows people to donate their storage space and bandwidth to serve images to readers in place of our own image servers. Our serving capacity was limited to just 2 Gbps (250 MB/s) with Path Network (considering their service to us is free, it's insanely generous) before the creation of MD@H and we were maxing out that connection nonstop. With MD@H, we're hitting total network speeds of around 8-12 Gbps (1000-1500 MB/s), a significant improvement over where we were before (completely needed for Solo Leveling releases).
Advertisement Follow-up
Following up on our previous announcement where we said we would run an ad from December 21st to the 28th, we've finally received payment for said ad after some unexpected transfer delays. Our total upkeep cost at the moment is $920. Running the ad for a week covered two months of our current server costs. Admittedly, we were expecting a larger amount given the size of our audience, but it's still an amazing amount for something we only did for a week. We have no further plans to run ads.
Android Stats
Apple Stats
Going with Affiliates
In the previous thread someone mentioned why we "don't have a banner for donations instead". While it was a good idea, people don't really know how to donate via cryptocurrency or it's too convoluted for their liking. So instead of donation banners, we plan on exploring the idea of having banners that lead to our affiliates page. Kind of similar to a banner asking people to donate in the way that both involve people wanting to support MD in some way. Not quite ad banners because it doesn't advertise for any service specifically, just asking people if they're interested in supporting the website and giving them options to do so if they click on it. We'll make another announcement when we implement it, so look forward to it.
Example banner, banners should be humorous like the april fool banners we run, not outright begging. Wikipedia ad parody by Teasday
Mega Anniversary Contest Winner
Congratulations to IReadTooMuch for winning our anniversary Contest with their entry, Love is War. They'll receive a $50 Amazon or Steam gift card, a steam game from @Lymus, and an indie game from @Kafka. Thank you as well to all the other participants, your submissions were enjoyable to watch.
v5 When?
The full site rework that is MangaDex v5 is still in progress. We may look into recruiting additional devs familiar with Symfony or Vue to speed up progress, but availability is always the most important factor since this is a hobby and not a job. Hopefully the site condition stabilizes long enough for us to complete it this year. We want it to arrive just as much as everyone else...
Just like the two years before, we'll end this off with quotes from all of our staff (WE MISS YOU HOLO!)
Holo - Former Overlord/Owner
ixlone - Admin
bocchi - Developer
carbotaniuman - DeveloperI haven't done anything yet as a dev but
fugiman - Developer
Plykiya - Developer/Public Relations
rdn - Developer
Teasday - DeveloperThis year has seen too many technical problems and firefighting because of the user growth. This corona meme cant end fast enough so you goddamn weebs stop reading so much manga all the time. jk ily
Bonus meme
Xnot - Developer
BraveDude8 - Moderator
Electromaster - Moderator
Lymus - Moderator
Daviot - Forum Moderator
Kafka - Forum Moderator/Public Relations
woulez - Forum Moderator
Zephyrus - Forum Moderator
Henny - Public Relations
Arvid - Designer
Well, ever since I discovered that Manga exist, MangaDex has been a considerable time-sink. That has been going on for 2 or more year or so ... honestly I have lost the feel for time ...
Anyway, here is hoping for many more years
And maybe, just maybe, I might also start being productive this year lol
Reddit AMA
We will be answering question on Reddit too, see you there!
