June

Adding Tapas, a new official source, as well as making big strides on the Discovery functionality. And not to forget about new Suggested Series Approval / Rejection Emails

📚Tapas Support & Locked Chapters

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally added another official source to Kenmei. As many of you know, Tapas is probably the biggest English publisher of manhwa and continues to pick the most popular series. I've went and added 500+ series, both for series heavily tracked on Kenmei, as well as many new ones.

Tapas is a paid per chapter source though, so while all chapter links are provided, just like with any source - visiting those links will show you a locked chapter, unless you paid for them. I soon will be adding lock icons, to make it clear which chapters are potentially behind a paywall.

🔍Discovery page progress

I've also spent a lot of time on Discovery, the biggest feature planned for this year, making some great progress. I am hoping to release it into Early Access by the end of July or at the latest - August. I will then release it publicly by the end of the year, as per the original plan.

While Discovery touches on almost everything Kenmei has to offer, there are a couple of specific features that are going to be introduced - with one being what I call Advanced Search. The one you get in your Dashboard, will become Quick Search and become accessible on every page of Kenmei, letting you quickly find a series by title. Advanced Search on the other hand will provide various sort and filtering options, as well as all the available results, not just a couple of top ones Quick Search returns.

Here's a sneak peek of the new Advanced Search, currently only with sorting options present:

📬New Series Suggestions Emails

Another Quality of Life improvement added this month is extra visibility into the review process of the series suggested by everyone.

Now after suggesting a series, you will get an email, letting you know if it has been approved or rejected. If available, it'll also provide a specific reason as to why it has been rejected. So do keep an eye on your mailbox, if you've suggested a series to be added to Kenmei.

I implore you not to try and resubmit a rejected report. I will start blacklisting series in the future, to help stop duplicate reports, but meanwhile, I'd just hope you'll spare me from extra time reviewing the same series over and over again.

📈Progress Overview

Just as planned, I had the chance to put some serious work into Discovery mode, which I've been meaning to get to at the start of Summer. I am happy with the progress so far and will continue adding other bits for the month of July, hopefully making it ready for Early Access.

Moreover, I am happy to have finished another official source - Tapas, which has been a long time coming. Tapas proved to be quite difficult to add, but also provided various insights on how the overall process can be improved. I still need to improve some edge cases, but it is mostly done at this point.

I plan to continue with the same plan as last month. outlined below:

  1. Kenmei Discovery

  2. Data Pipeline Improvements

  3. Populating missing and/or invalid data

  4. Adding new sources (primarily official sites)

  5. Bug fixing & across the board improvements

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