November

The past two months have been incredibly hectic following Comick's sudden shutdown. I had to pause work on Chapters v3 to address the immediate impact, given how many of you tracked series from Comick.

So this month's focus has been split between adding new sources, migrating Comick entries to alternatives, and managing the surge of Comick refugees. As a result, I had to re-evaluate priorities, which also led to finally implementing importing functionality for Kenmei.

Check out the Changelog for the full list of changes →

📋Changelog

Comick Removal & Migration

As many of you are likely aware, Comick has transitioned from being an aggregator to a simple tracker, similar to Kenmei, which means we'll no longer be supporting the site. Given the large number of series tracked from Comick, I had to figure out a way to migrate all of the existing entries and series. In the initial phase, here's what we found:

  • Total series with Comick sources: 19518

  • Total series with alternative sources: 18398

  • Total series with better or equal chapters: 10648

  • Percentage matching overall: 94.26%

  • Percentage matching (better or equal chapters): 60.25%

While most series could be safely migrated, the incomplete coverage meant I had to focus on adding new sources. I've since added three new sites—MangaPlus, KManga, and HiveToon—along with backfilling missing sources through multiple migration phases.

After adding new sites and backfilling missing sources through multiple migration phases, we ended up with only around 13% Comick sources left.

  • Total series with Comick sources: 5733

  • Total series with alternative sources: 5039

  • % of remaining Comick sources: 12.46%

Our short-term priorities:

  1. Continue adding new sites to reach 30+ sources

  2. Find alternatives for all remaining Comick sources, regardless of chapter count

  3. Migrate all Comick entries to alternative sources

While no ideal aggregator alternative currently exists, I'll be migrating all remaining entries to other sources, even if chapter counts don't perfectly match, so we can fully remove Comick from Kenmei. I'll add a second aggregator once a suitable candidate emerges, but I cannot provide a timeline for this.

Importing

This brings us to importing—a feature requested for years after MangaDex removed the export function and I temporarily disabled importing. Now it's back and better than ever.

You can import using several methods, with more coming soon. Currently supported options include links to compatible sites, MyAnimeList, Anilist, and Comick exports.

Two main upgrades are planned for the post-release phase. The first is detailed import status tracking, so you can identify which titles failed to import. The second is manual series matching for entries that weren't found or returned multiple matches. (Currently, we only import exact matches to ensure accuracy)

Recommendation Engine Upgrades

With all the Comick stuff, I still found time to work on some exciting improvements to our Recommendation Engine, affecting both Personal Recommendations and Similar Series.

As our Premium Pro user base has grown, recommendation generation was becoming slower and beginning to impact other processes on Kenmei. This also meant new Pro members experienced delays in receiving their personal recommendations.

After extensive optimization work, I'm am super happy with the results: recommendations now generate in under a second on average, down from taking up to a minute.

The second major improvement is accuracy for both Personal Recommendations and Similar Series. We now store semantic data at 4x the density, which delivers significantly more accurate recommendations across the board. As we continue refining descriptions and expanding our tag coverage, the engine will only improve further.

📈 Progress Overview

The workload effectively doubled due to Comick fiasco, but I managed to accomplish most of my goals despite the toll on my sleep schedule... Most of the fallout has been contained and we've moved out of crisis mode.

I'm now returning to working on Chapters v3, which would have been finished by now without the Comick situation. As mentioned, I'll also prioritize adding new sources and fully removing Comick from our database.

Looking ahead, I'm focusing on improving our existing Premium features. Since Pro's launch, I've gathered substantial feedback on Smart Suggestions and Personal Recommendations, so I got quite a few things I plan on making better. I'm also potentially planning on introducing several new premium features, so watch this space!

Here is the updated list of priorities:

  1. New Supported Sites

  2. Importing

  3. Chapters v3

  4. Premium Improvements

  5. Mobile UX improvements

  6. Adding other highly requested features

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