April

New sites, fixing duplications and adding full MangaHub support + more

Another month, another update. As mentioned last time, the focus here has been on resolving duplication issues that arose from MangaHub, populating missing sources and doing other cleanup work. As expected, that did take up most of my time this month, but I also managed to do some important other work, so read on to find out more!

Check the full changelog here:

New Sites Galore

It's been awhile, so I wanted to add support for a lot of sites in a single month. I am glad to say I did manage to do that, adding support for 7 sites in total, although a bit short of the planned 10.

I am quite happy with the number of supported sites. And due to the number of sites we have now, there are various edge cases that cause issues, which need addressing. From MangaHub duplicates to Webtoon chapter inconsistencies or Translation Groups changing things on their sites every other week, I plan to only focus on fixing said issues and making existing support even better and more solid.

After those are addressed, I plan on adding only official sites for the foreseeable future. I do still plan to finish LHtranslations, WhimSubs and possibly Genkan.io, but that's about it for non-official sources for awhile.

MangaHub Full Support & Duplication Resolution

The biggest focus of course has been fixing mass duplication introduced by MangaHub. As mentioned in the last update, I had to re-think how individual tracking works, to account for duplications and then being able to fix it. I am happy to say that work has been finished and I am able to handle any and all duplication that might arise in the future.

All in all, by my estimates there were ~400+ duplicated series, that I have to fix mostly by hand. I've addressed about a half of these, but more remain. On top of that, I've held back on fully matching MangaHub with MangaDex (MD had 21k series tracked, while MangaHub only around 2k). I have now done mass population, adding over 12k tracked MangaHub series. You should be able to search, switch and upgrade to a lot more series now!

Of course, this work is not over and won't ever be over, as so much can be automated. I will continue to work on improving the matching algorithm and introduce new ways to address this issue. One such change is the new Pending Series that you might see if you add new series through a URL.

That means, that system identified a potential duplication and requires me to manually check it, before you can add it. I would usually get around to addressing it quite quickly, but it still might take some time. Of course, the plan is to reduce the chance of you ever seeing this warning and that's why I will continue investing time in improving the pipeline of adding and managing series across all the supported sites. This is crucial for adding support for Discovery mode, e.g. being able to explore all the 22k+ series Kenmei supports, as you would on MangaDex or other sites

UI improvements & Dark Mode progress

Another huge milestone has been finally migrating TailwindCSS from v1 to v2. This is a library I use to style everything on the site and it was a requirement for me to be able to start properly working on the dark mode and other UI projects.

As I make sure to continue building Kenmei with the same care, as you'd see multi-billion companies do, to make this happen, I've had to introduce visual regression system. I've mentioned it before, but basically, it helps me spot any issues with the UI, when I change something. It looks like this:

I had to make this system work fully before doing the upgrade I mentioned, which helped me spot dozens of issues, I wouldn't have seen if I did this by hand. Going forward, just like I test code that runs Kenmei, this will help me make sure I don't accidentally change something and break how things look in some part of the site

Anyways, the changes should be mostly invisible, as it's the way I write code that changed slightly. But there are some changes you will spot, for example, the new focus states on inputs or the new loading animations when signing in:

But, the most important part, is that with this out of the way, I can finish up the Dark Mode, as well as make more progress on the cover mode.

Feature Suggestion Board

Not a development update, but an important one regardless. For the longest time, you would have to join Discord to suggest features and sites. But a lot of you haven't joined it and don't plan to. Moreover, using Discord for this is not very easy, as far as managing requests and replying to suggestions.

With that in mind, there is now a new place to suggest features and sites. The only downside is that you do need to make a separate account, but they offer the ability to sign up through Google, Apple and Github. There is no need to use the same email as on Kenmei, feel free to use a temporary email.

I look forward to seeing your suggestion! I've moved everything that has already been suggested on Discord as well, so feel free to vote for what you are most interested in.

As mentioned, I am mostly not going to be adding many new sources, instead working on improving support for the current ones with the help of new tools, working on Kenmei Premium and of course Dark mode and Covers mode.

Current focus: