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- Jan 18, 2018
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MD has the ability to link out to external websites hosting official releases, and we're looking to add more accepted websites.
Broad guidelines;
The chapters need to be freely available, and accessible from a normal web browser.
Best example to use here is MangaPlus, where we have a community maintained bot that adds and deletes chapter links on MD as they're added/removed from M+.
If you're from an official publishing site and you want us to link to your content, email us at support@mangadex.org.
If you have a suggestion for a site that we should link to, or if you're interested in making a bot that does this for a suggested site, post in this thread.
Bot guidelines;
For services like J-Novel and Alpha Manga where there's only a small number of chapters (every free JNC release is linked on MD, 412 as of me typing this line) exceptions can be made, as it's not too disruptive.
Bot Progress Spreadsheet
Potential Sites
Webtoons - there's defintely some kind of API access here (1, 2) and they have a lot of chapters in multiple languages for thousands of titles. They're also the original source for a lot of popular OEL titles on MD with no English scanlations (obviously) and having some kind of English chapters available for those entries would be nice.
EDIT: More technical details in this post.
Tapas - I don't think there's easy API access for this, or at least I can't find anything more recent than a dead Github repo from 2020. It'd be nice for the same reasons as Webtoons, and it also hosts the #1 most followed OEL title on MD - The Beginning After the End.
Note: I'd really like a Webtoon bot.
Broad guidelines;
The chapters need to be freely available, and accessible from a normal web browser.
Best example to use here is MangaPlus, where we have a community maintained bot that adds and deletes chapter links on MD as they're added/removed from M+.
If you're from an official publishing site and you want us to link to your content, email us at support@mangadex.org.
If you have a suggestion for a site that we should link to, or if you're interested in making a bot that does this for a suggested site, post in this thread.
Bot guidelines;
- The bot will need special site permissions to add externalUrl properties to chapters, and a dummy account for this purpose (we will provide this)
- It needs to detect newly available chapters on the site, obviously, but it also needs to detect when chapters are removed and delete them from MD so we don't have dead links. In the future this will probably be changed to mark them as unavailable so comments/views are kept intact with a placeholder chapter, but the process will remain the same.
- Ideally the site should have a public API, even better if it's somewhat documented. If it doesn't, you'll have to figure out a way to scrape everything you need and it'll be a pain to do.
- The bot should check for available chapters with the same chapter number as the external chapter it's currently creating a link for, and if the MD chapter has a volume number it should copy that. This helps keep chapters organised without requiring manual mod intervention.
- The bot also needs to be able to exclude any given series, to account for cases (generally user-created) where, for example, someone is uploading their series directly to MD + Webtoons Canvas. The Webtoons bot should have this series excluded, as it's an unneeded duplicate.
- Complete chapters are preferred - if the service hosts partial chapters and there's already conflicting MD chapters, it ideally should only link the first partial chapter and match the MD numbering so users don't have to click through multiple copies of the same chapter. Example; Ch1.1, 1.2, 1.3 - link Ch1.1 as Ch1.
For services like J-Novel and Alpha Manga where there's only a small number of chapters (every free JNC release is linked on MD, 412 as of me typing this line) exceptions can be made, as it's not too disruptive.
Bot Progress Spreadsheet
Potential Sites
Webtoons - there's defintely some kind of API access here (1, 2) and they have a lot of chapters in multiple languages for thousands of titles. They're also the original source for a lot of popular OEL titles on MD with no English scanlations (obviously) and having some kind of English chapters available for those entries would be nice.
EDIT: More technical details in this post.
Tapas - I don't think there's easy API access for this, or at least I can't find anything more recent than a dead Github repo from 2020. It'd be nice for the same reasons as Webtoons, and it also hosts the #1 most followed OEL title on MD - The Beginning After the End.
Note: I'd really like a Webtoon bot.
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