February
January and February has seen a large infrastructure upgrade / migration, the most new sources added as well as first Smart Suggestions improvements → ability to ignore specific source suggestions and addition of covers for better UX.
Check out the Changelog for the full list of changes →
📋Changelog🌐 New Supported Sites
While I am still deciding on a new aggregator to replace Comick with, first time in awhile I focused on adding as many of the scanlator groups as possible this month. As a result, I had the most added in a single month - 6 new sources.
You can find all of them in the changelog, but we unfortunately, also lost some sources:
Pocket Comics has shut down some time ago. There are still no alternatives for some series, so I will continue adding new sources and when we matched the remaining 150+ series, I will remove it completely
Zero Scans has shut down as well. All sources had alternatives, so it has been now completely removed
Rizz Scans have disbanded back in August, but their site finally went MIA in February.
As mentioned, I continue to slowly migrate remaining Comick series. While I've identified 2 decent alternatives, due to ongoing situation with DMCAs, I am still not comfortable enough doing substantial work of adding a new aggregator, considering the high risk of either or even both of them shutting down.
🛠️ Infrastructure Migration
This has been the biggest chunk of work this cycle - and while it might not sound exciting on the surface, it's something I've been planning for over a year. Doing a full migration with 100,000+ users and millions of records carries significant risk, so it's not the kind of thing you rush into.
There were plenty of reasons to do it — improved performance, lower costs, the ability to build certain features (e.g. push notifications) and more. So while I've wanted to pull the trigger for a long time, I kept delaying. But with Heroku, the provider I was using, announcing that it would likely cease to exist in the coming year or so, that was the final push I needed to actually carry this out.
I'm happy to report that the migration was successful. It took only 4 hours out of the 8-hour maintenance window I'd planned, and there have been no issues (aside from one minor one) since it was completed.
Since then, you may have noticed the massive performance boost this has brought - especially if you're in more distant regions like Australia or South America, as I am seeing up to 2x speed improvements across every single page.
With lower costs, I can now acquire more storage for caching, which should bring even further performance gains in the coming months. This also means potentially increasing the cadence of chapter updates — currently we check every 15 minutes, but I think we could bring that down to every 5 with the additional resources.
Smart Suggestions v4.5
I have a number of new features planned for Smart Suggestions, as I'd like to make it a much more useful feature for both Lite and Pro users. Once everything is released I'll be marking this as v5, but in the meantime we're working under the name v4.5.
The first improvement is a much-requested ability to permanently ignore a specific combination of smart suggestions (Site A → Site B). I'll be adding the ability to block suggestions from specific sites entirely as well, but this first improvement lets you do it on a per-series basis — for example, "I want Asura Scans suggestions for all series except Series A."
I've also added covers to the suggestions, so it's a bit easier to figure out what series a suggestion is for, as not everyone remembers every single title.
You can also always restore any permanent ignores you've made, in case you change your mind down the line.
Next up, I'll be adding the ability to block a source from ever being suggested, as well as two new suggestion types.
Progress Overview
The start of the new year has been slower than I'd have liked when it comes to features. I'm very happy with the infrastructure migration finally being completed, but I haven't made as many Smart Suggestions improvements as I'd planned, nor have I released Statistics in early access.
I'm still planning on a faster cadence as mentioned in the last update, but I'm still in a bit of a transitionary period in my personal life. That said, I'm expecting this to change in Q2, so I hope to make up for the slower updates then. In the meantime, I'll be continuing to work on the same priorities I mentioned last month.
Hence the priorities remain unchanged:
Smart Suggestions improvements
Statistics
New Supported Sites
Chapters v3 (List View)
Mobile UX improvements
Adding other highly requested features
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