November

Profile Pictures have launched + Profile work is going full steam ahead. Various minor improvements have also been added as usual

The work on profiles has been going full steam ahead, starting off with the rollout of profile pictures as well as other behind-the-scenes work. I am still quite far away from finishing the profile, but it's starting to take shape.

Check out the Changelog for the full list of changes ->

Profile Pictures

To make Profiles happen, there are a lot of adjacent features that need to be implemented - and the first of them I decided to work on was the ability to set your profile picture, something many of you have requested for a long time!

So with that in mind, I am happy to say this first step has been completed and everyone can now set their own picture from Settings.

I hope you will find the functionality very intuitive - you will be able to crop any image to your liking, both on desktop and mobile, including the ability to zoom in and out.

The default avatar has also been changed - the previous default picture has been with us for the past 4 years, but it's time for something a bit more relevant to Kenmei.

There is not too much I can share currently on the Profile feature, as I am still in the process of designing - to make sure Kenmei has the most unique, useful and cool profile pages out of the tracking services out there.

First of all, apart from your profile picture, you will eventually be able to set up a banner as well. Here you can see the default banner with a profile picture that I set for myself

Of course, no profile is complete without statistics. While the design is still very much in progress, here is a preview of what it might look like -> expect to see the breakdown of your reading status, the types of series you read and eventually the breakdown of Genres / Tags.

Finally, you can expect your personal Activity Feed, which would eventually allow you to follow your friend's reading progress. And don't worry - you will be able to customise the privacy of your entire profile as well as individual entries.

As part of other improvements this month, I'd like to mention one important change - password requirements have been updated and are now following the most recent best practices. Moreover, it's no longer allowed to use passwords that have been previously breached, according to have i been pwned?.

It implements a k-Anonymity model that allows a password to be searched for by partial hash to ensure your password is safely tested for breaches, without exposing it. You can read more about it here.

These changes currently only apply to new users as well as when you try to reset/update the password. But soon I will require everyone who doesn't meet the criteria to update their passwords.

This month has been fairly successful -> I am happy with the initial work on social features and I am hopeful that December will see at least the Basic Profile launch in Early Access. There is a lot to build and design, but the progress is going smoothly so far.

While I might have other minor improvements planned for December, as per usual, I will try to mostly focus on Social Features, as I'd like to get something out of the door before the end of the year.

Here's the updated list of priorities: