Show how many chapters a series has when searching

[tirakai]

I've noticed when searching through the manga list they don't say how many chapters there are, so sometimes I'll see something interesting and click on it only for it to have 2 chapters and hasn't updated in months.
Or alternatively I'll be looking for something of a decent length to read but don't want to click on every separate series to see how long they are, and end up skipping over stuff that has plenty of chapters as a result.

I know some series are missing chapters in the middle but it'd still be quite helpful to see how many there are without having to click on everything individually.

Unless there's some hidden away option for this I haven't found?

 

[Teasday]

Problems to consider:
- What is meant by "how many chapters"? The total across all groups? The total of unique chapter numbers? Only the latest available chapter number?
- All the different available languages clearly shouldn't be added together, so they would have to presented separately. This will cause problems with displaying the chapter counts for some users and for some manga where multiple languages are available, taking up a lot of space on the lists and making it difficult to design for.
- Doing all this counting for each individual user and every manga means that the performance of the entire site will definitely suffer, and seeing how we're still having server errors during peak times means it's not the time to just add on more computationally complex features yet.

 

[ununseti]

For comparison, when I browse through fanfiction on AO3 and FF.net, I look at chapter count, word count, date published, and date last updated, among other things, when deciding what to read.

For this site though, I think just grabbing the largest chapter number is fine. When browsing the front page of this site, the most recently updated chapters are usually enough to give me a sense of how large the work is and how recently it was updated, and that's good enough for me. Sure, it's not perfect, since there may be missing chapters, and it may be in a language that I can't read, but it's close enough for jazz.

For performance, I'd think that it should be fine if the chapter count is cached somewhere, since the count would only change when a chapter is edited or when a new chapter is uploaded.

Anyway, I do most of my browsing on the front page where the latest chapter is already shown anyway, so it's no big deal to me if this doesn't get implemented.