June

This has been quite a beast of a cycle for me, as I managed to finish a ton of really long-running issues, implemented some of the most requested features and even had time to do some huge improvements, both to the performance as well as to the infrastructure.

I can't cover half of what I've done here, so do check out the Changelog for the full list of changes ->

📋Changelog

Onboarding v2

This won't really affect most of you, but as I've mentioned before, my focus over the last couple of months has been improving how we convert new signups into regulars—turning Kenmei into their go-to tool instead of something they try once and forget about.

One of the biggest predictors of long-term engagement is whether someone adds their first entry right after signing up. The problem is, a lot of new users either don't know where to start or think "I'll do this later"—and then never come back. And so Onboarding v2 has been made...

Some of the most popular tags are provided

After picking their username and avatar, new members are now presented with a simple way to select a few tags and genres, then shown a collection of the most popular series so they can quickly add some favorites and jump straight in.

Based on early testing, I am already seeing an uptick in regulars, but the work is far from being done, so I'll continue on improving the onboarding as well as the first days and weeks after signing up.

Negative Filters

One of the most highly requested features has been the ability to exclude genres and tags when browsing. For example, if you want to find Romance series but exclude Yuri/Yaoi.

I'm happy to say that this functionality has been added to your Dashboard, as well as the Advanced Search and even Custom Collections. So now you can cycle between including or excluding a particular filter, making searching for new stuff to read even better.

Combine inclusion and exclusion tags

Also, you can exclude not just tags and genres, but even specific sites, in case you want to avoid picking up a series that can only be read on specific sites you don't like.

You can also do the same for sites you can read on

Performance Improvements

This month had quite a lot happening on the performance side, with one unlocking quite a lot of future improvements.

First of all, I managed to finally optimize Dashboard entry loading for extremely large lists. We have quite a few members that have thousands of entries, which when loading or filtering, would be quite a bit slower than usual—something I've been trying to improve for a while.

Some users with over 5,000 entries went from an average of 2s-1.5s with unread sort to 300-450ms (70% to 85% improvement), and on average I've seen around 40-50% improvements for those with over a thousand entries tracked.

Second, a more fundamental improvement comes to hosting specifically. In the past couple of months, we've finally reached over 1TB of bandwidth monthly, which has started to pile up in terms of costs. With that in mind, I've finally decided to move to Cloudflare, which not only comes with free bandwidth, saving hundreds of dollars a month, but also with a ton of additional performance and safety features.

📈 Progress Overview

This has been a really great month - some unexpected wins on my end as well, which has made me really happy with the progress.

With Onboarding out of the way, I am moving to yet another highly requested feature - adding back Importing. Some might remember it, but you could previously import MangaDex and Trackr.moe lists, but that functionality was disabled after both has removed exporting.

But as previously planned, I do intend to add importing from MyAnimeList, Anilist, Kitsu and even simple lists of links or titles, making it super easy to migrate from other platforms.

Apart from importing, I've already started working on a couple other highest rated feature requests, as per my pledge at the start of the year. If you haven't before, do check out our Suggestions Site and upvote features or improvements you'd like to see me work on.

Here is the updated list of priorities:

  1. Improving Onboarding Experience

  2. Importing

  3. Adding other highly requested features

  4. New Supported Sites

  5. Expanding Data (e.g. new tags)

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