February

The ability to add Friends has been finished, bringing us closer to finalising User Profiles and graduating it from Early Access. Additionally, MangaHub has been replaced with Comick, for a better experience overall. Finally, quite a few bugs have been fixed, as well as a minor UI update to the Quick Search button has been released.

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

📋Changelog

📚 Friend System (Early Access)

The final piece of the puzzle for Profiles is finally finished -> it is now possible to add/remove friends. This is just a start in a long series of social features, so expect things like series in common with friends or friend recommendations to come from this in the future!

For now, though, the important parts are being able to quickly find profiles of your friends, as well as being able to show your profile information only to friends (Friends-Only mode in Privacy Settings).

Easily view and jump to your friends' profiles

When you add a new friend, you will also see it reflected in your activity log.

Activity Feed will now show when you become friends with someone

Finally, as you would expect, when adding someone as a friend, they would have to accept your request first. And vice versa, in case you receive a friend request from someone. Where do you see it? Well, that brings us to…

🔔 Notifications

You'll get a notification if someone sends you a friend request

You heard it right -> the first version of Notifications UI is here. But don't get too excited - all this means, for now, is that you will get a notification if someone wants to add you as a friend. So when someone sends you a friend request, you'll be able to accept or ignore it.

This is very early days and I don't plan to expand this much in the near future - but eventually, you will be able to receive other kinds of notifications, from social to those related to your list...

🔁 Comick Replaces MangaHub

After considering this option for a while (a year or more), I've decided to completely remove MangaHub and replace it with Comick, resulting in migrating over 26,000 series, which was quite an undertaking.

Here are some of the reasons for this decision:

1. Requested by a lot of people over the past 2 years

2. MangaHub is an ad-infested site, and it got progressively worse over the years.

3. No data validation - you can find incorrect chapters attached to the series, tons of duplicates, and even novels for what should be regular manga/manhwa/manhua.

4. Site prone to not load for many, quite regularly, regardless of location.

5. Most of the data moderation review time is spent on MH suggestions, partly because of point 2 + MH just not providing any additional data. Comick is similar to MangaDex, in that it has descriptions, tags, etc, making things a lot easier to review.

After looking at the overall series between MH and Comick, only about 2% of the series that we got on MH, are not on Comick. Additionally, some series have fewer or no chapters, but again a small % of the total series and those are usually just extremely bad scanlations or just plain wrong series.

So with that in mind, if you have tracked on MH, you would have had your entries moved automatically. If there were no alternatives (about 300 series), you would have received a deprecation notice and you now have over a month to export those series.

🔍 Quick Search Improvements

While you can simply share your link with anyone directly, it makes sense to still be able to search for users. With that in mind, Quick Search now has a new tab for Users - simply switch to it and you will be able to search other users by their username.

You will also notice a slightly updated design for the Quick Search button - on desktop, it's a lot more prominent now and will display keyboard shortcut information, depending on whether you use MacOS or Windows.

New design for Quick Search Button

📈Progress Overview

This month went very well - I've finished the friendship system and pretty much everything I set out to do, even with having to migrate from MangaHub. I didn't quite finish everything to release Profiles out of Early Access, so it's going to take a bit longer.

With that in mind, I plan to wrap up minor things to make it ready for everyone and I am aiming for mid-March to release it out of Early Access. For the rest of the month, I plan to finally focus on finishing the Data Moderation System as well do some other features that I've wanted to work on for some time!

Here's the updated list of priorities:

1. Friend System

2. Data Moderation System

3. Dashboard Improvements