October
Large Cloudflare outage that had to be resolved + new official source added.
Last updated
Large Cloudflare outage that had to be resolved + new official source added.
Last updated
This month, I couldn't release any new features due to a Cloudflare issue that impacted six of our supported sources, which required significant time and effort to resolve. However, I did manage to add a new official source: Pocket Comics.
Check out the Changelog for the full list of changes ->
Many of you may have noticed some source sites experiencing issues in October, which have now been resolved. However, I wanted to provide more context, as most of the information has only been shared on Discord. If you'd like to stay up-to-date on the latest Kenmei news, please join us here.
So, what happened? While only 6 out of 23 sites were affected, it impacted some of the most frequently tracked sources on Kenmei, leading to missed chapter updates. This issue arose due to Cloudflare, the hosting provider used by many websites, implementing more aggressive anti-scraping measures in an effort to combat the growing presence of AI training data scraping.
Even though Kenmei is designed to have the least possible impact on the sites it scrapes, Cloudflare still ended up blocking Kenmei's requests, which caused the recent problems. As a result, I had to substantially restructure how Kenmei fetches data for these specific sites. While this has fixed the underlying issue, it means some sites will now update slightly more slowly, and it also makes running Kenmei more expensive.
Despite these challenges, I will continue working to improve the new system, making it faster and hopefully less costly to operate. This is not my highest priority at the moment, now that the main issue has been resolved. On a positive note, we are also now better prepared for any sites that may increase their protection levels in the future, which was previously not possible to bypass.
In other unfortunate news, a number of sites that were previously supported on Kenmei had to be removed due to groups disbanding. This has resulted in a declining number of sources available on the platform, which is not an ideal situation. We've gone from 30 supported sites down to 20, even with the addition of new ones, over the past year.
As mentioned previously, I am currently focused on adding all available official sites to Kenmei. With that goal in mind, I made an effort to add another site this month to offset the loss of the two groups that shut down - Pocket Comics.
Pocket Comics is another manhwa-dominant site, but it does have a sizable content library, especially in the shoujo genre. The addition of Pocket Comics brought approximately 380 new series to Kenmei (though many were already present on the platform). Our Data Moderation team is still in the process of reviewing and approving these new series, and they are about halfway through the process at this point.
While the reduction in supported sites is unfortunate, I remain committed to expanding Kenmei's coverage by onboarding more sources, official and not. This will help to ensure that users have access to a diverse and comprehensive selection of content, even as some sites inevitably shut down over time.
As you could have guessed, majority of the month ended up having to figure out how to fix Cloudflare issues. I was really hoping to focus more on features, but this had to take priority. As a result, I could only work on minor improvements.
But I am more or less settled in Japan now and I am starting to build back up my habits and get more Kenmei work out. I have 1-3 new social features in the works and I am also looking to finally added Publication Status to Kenmei, which has been requested for some time now. So I hope to have something more exciting to look forward to in November!
Here's the updated list of priorities:
New Supported Sites
Expanding Data (e.g. new tags and classifications)
Ongoing bug fixes and improvements
New Social Features
