Thread: Continuous series reader & other ideas

Continuous series reader: Visitors select a manga series, and the online viewer would continue to display pages until the end of the series instead of until the end of the chapter.

Other features:

• Bookmarking pages (Continuing from where a visitor left off)
• Tracking series progress (Showing how many pages are remaining in the series)
• Favorite pages (Collecting ecchi moments?)
• Sharing a page
• Report a problem (Image does not load, incorrect page, etc...)
• Back button (Using the browser back button does not load the previous page; rather, it goes back to chapter listing)
• Achievements (e.g. A user finishes reading series "X", achievement unlocked on user's profile; A user finishes reading 10 manga series, achievement unlocked on user's profile)

These are all good ideas, except the report a problem. From experience I can say that does not work out well. We used to have a report a problem link, and I received thousands of reports. Only a few of those were legit issues that I fixed.

In order to make these changes, I am going to have to get a new image gallery script, our current one is about 2+ years old of no improvements. I spent a good amount of time this summer recoding things so that things were decent and no longer consumed so many server resources (too many bad queries, bad db design, etc), the only thing I have left to not redo is our image gallery script. I hope to complete that by the end of summer and I will be keeping this in mind for sure.

Perhaps "Reporting a problem" could be achieved through another route.

Glad to know that some of these ideas are already in your roadmap.

More ideas:

• Expand the manga series/chapter meta data
  • Series
    • Description
    • Total number of chapters
    • Creator
    • Total online views
    • Comments
    • Total favorites
    • Available Achievements (Building on above mentioned feature)
    • Related websites
    • Where to purchase the series/apparel/etc...
  • Chapter
    • Total views
    • Comments
    • Released by (Scanlation group)
      • Name
      • Link to
      • Other series released by Scanlation group
    • Total favorites
    • Chapter Poll (e.g. "Who do you think will rescue Soul Society?")
• Scanlation Group Listing
• Scanlation Group: Help Wanted
• Anime - Fansub Collection (Torrent listing?)

Series:
What you described for the series section are things our current script mostly supports. The real issue is with over 3k manga series that would take me a very long time to do, but is something I plan to do once I get a lot of coding done for other projects out of the way (at least for the more popular series to improve SEO) as I would have to manually add so much information.

Chapters:
As for the chapters, the released by is not something I keep track of as right now I just download everything to a folder, rename them and upload. I do intend to allow users to mark chapters as favorites or give a ranking.

Chapters & Series:
Anything to do with comments/polls I've found is a bad idea. People either post random things, messages to the admins, spam and would require dedicated monitors to read each comment, which I tried doing myself but there were so many comments each day I just removed the feature as I was spending an hour or two each day reading comments.

Scanlation Group & Anime:
I am not sure something like this would work for this site. I think for now downloads should be offered only. I'd like though for manga Scanlation groups to be able to upload chapters to our server (code is already done) and give them a link to show their visitors but not sure how popular that would be so I might stick with the current feature of allowing users to upload files direct to our server for now (code is done, not sure when it will be released as I need to rewrite our admin area to support that).

All good ideas, many of which I just need to implement.

Maybe he meant comments as in directly being able to discuss the series or posting "that was great" or something (like you can do on mangahere and mangafox for example...). I don´t know though if that´s so good when we´d like the people to discuss the chapters here...

Originally Posted by BlueDemon

Maybe he meant comments as in directly being able to discuss the series or posting "that was great" or something (like you can do on mangahere and mangafox for example...). I don´t know though if that´s so good when we´d like the people to discuss the chapters here...

I never visit mangahere/mangafox, or any other manga sites really. I'd like to keep all the commenting on the forums and try to build around that though. We will see how things go though.

Great responses to the comment idea -- BlueDemon you are right that "comments" was meant as a "that was great" or a series review similar to Amazon's product reviews. If "increasing the forum activity" is a goal then it may be worthwhile to create a "review" section within each series' forum that we can syndicate on a series homepage; furthermore, each chapter could syndicate the posts in a chapter discussion thread at the end of the chapter.

Example: End of Bleach Chapter 500 could show the 5 first posts from the current chapter's discussion thread.

Originally Posted by dotuser

Example: End of Bleach Chapter 500 could show the 5 first posts from the current chapter's discussion thread.

This is a good idea, but I would not have the time to add links to each chapter. I'd have to contact people on the forum posting the threads to see if they would be interested + I would have to build that into the admin area. I could build this into our DL script easy, but where would the first 5 posts from the chapter discussion forum be posted? Perhaps on the manga reader, where there would be two different tabs, one called "Image Viewer" and the other "Latest Forum Discussion" or am I off base here?

Originally Posted by Kevin Shiel

This is a good idea, but I would not have the time to add links to each chapter. I'd have to contact people on the forum posting the threads to see if they would be interested + I would have to build that into the admin area. I could build this into our DL script easy, but where would the first 5 posts from the chapter discussion forum be posted? Perhaps on the manga reader, where there would be two different tabs, one called "Image Viewer" and the other "Latest Forum Discussion" or am I off base here?

I think the people posting the newest chapters wouldn´t have a problem with that, if we could incorporate that easily enough! Though dotuser means those posts would be always shown at the end of a given chapter, not as a separate tab (although that could work too, but then it wouldn´t really be for every series...).

BlueDemon has the right idea about showing the posts at the end of the chapter instead of a separate tab. The objective would be to catch the reader's attention before they're off to another activity, and the chapter's content is fresh on their mind.