July
This month's update is relatively short - as I was mostly on holiday, I focused on non-development work, such as planning future work, marketing, improving data and more. Nevertheless, I found some time to work on a few features and improvements, so read on to find out more.
Check out the Changelog for the full list of changes ->
📋Changelogℹ️ Series Descriptions
Following the launch of Series Details v2 last month and the implementation of descriptions, I embarked on the challenging task of backfilling over 27,000 descriptions for all series featured on the platform. My vision is to make Kenmei the most comprehensive directory for manga, manhwa, and manhua, hence this wasn't as straightforward as merely fetching descriptions from all the supported sites.
Given that most descriptions are user-generated content (predominantly because a majority of the series are fan-translated), they often contain elements like advertisements, poor translations, and other erroneous text. So I had to figure out how to backfill this substantial amount of data, ensuring the inclusion of only high-quality descriptions.
I am happy to say, that I successfully managed to backfill 77% of all descriptions - 20,991 to be exact. While I cannot assure you that each one is of excellent quality, my backfilling script (with a touch of Machine Learning power), should have successfully filtered out most low-quality descriptions.
Moving forward, I, along with future data moderators, will fill in the remaining descriptions manually. As far as existing descriptions that might have issues, I will be relying on all of you to report them so I can fix said descriptions (Series Details page will have a report button in the near future).
🔍 New Advanced Search Filters
As mentioned in the last update on Series Details v2, Kenmei now has information on genres and themes (with more being added in the future).
Of course, this meant I had to provide the ability to filter by said genres -> which is something a lot of you have requested previously. With that in mind, Advanced Search (currently in Early Access, which you can check out with a Premium subscription) now allows you to filter by both genres and themes, giving you even more tools to find exactly what you need.
As part of this addition, I also finally updated the currently rudimentary filtering UI on mobile, so that it can support many more filters in the future (and there are many more planned).
🔍 New Dashboard Sort Options
The final updates to mention are two new sort options on the Dashboard - Last Read and Last Added, which were requested on the Suggestion Board some time ago.
Last Read will sort series by when you marked them as read (that includes setting the chapter manually). Depending on whatever you sort ascending or descending, you'll see those you marked as read recently or a long time ago.
Last Added is similar - it will look at when you've added a particular series to your list. A great way to quickly find series you've recently added to your list (or those you added a long time ago).
Both of these options have been highly requested, so I hope it'll make it easier for you to manage your lists even better going forward.
📈Progress Overview
As mentioned last month, I expected July to be a non-eventful month as I was mostly on vacation. While I lowered the amount of work I was planning to do, I still didn't manage to do it all. But I did the most important ones, so I am happy with the outcome.
I am now back to the usual schedule, so you can expect August to be a more packed month for features and improvements. I am still on track to release Discovery and Advanced Search from Early Access by the end of the summer, hence why I plan to focus on finishing the remaining v1 features for Discovery itself (e.g. Featured Collections).
After that I plan to work on the next evolution of Smart Suggestions, which will see a completely new UI for managing suggestions, taking into account everyone's feedback. But that's something I am likely to start in September, so I'll share more details then.
Here's the updated list of priorities:
Discovery Improvements
Smart Suggestions v2
Importing from MAL, Anilist and more
Social Features v1
Last updated
