MangaDex@ Home Changes and Update
The amount of people volunteering servers to participate in MangaDex@ Home is greater than we could have imagined. We can only accept 50 clients per week due to cert issue limits but we have enough to fill in the next two weeks at the very least. The most recent update to the backend will allow us to assign multiple clients from a single user to a single cert, freeing up certs to give to people who have applied and are waiting.

20% of all clients are currently offline, we'd like to ask people to keep them on as much possible as one of the requirements for registering was that you would be able to run it 24/7. If you turned your client off due to the bandwidth/CPU load being too high there is a new client version to limit CPU usage. You can also PM @ixlone and have the amount of requests sent your way lowered. We have a support channel for those running clients on our Discord server.

Currently all users and all guests are set to receive images from the MangaDex@ Home network and the initiative itself has brought our cache server traffic down to acceptable levels. MangaDex@ Home is still in it's beta testing stage but we may reach a stable version soon. We're currently on Release Candidate Version 15 (RC15) of the client after bug fixing and performance updates. Regional routing was disabled at first as we slowly built up our client count but it has now been re-enabled. Until we're fully confident that the network is stable, the option to switch MangaDex@ Home off will be available here.

The network assignment algorithm is designed to be spread across a lot more clients than we currently have in service. This may well be leading to failed images in your region as certain clients are getting overloaded at times. Bear with us, as we add more and more clients to the network the load will be spread around more fairly. Most clients are already reporting 98-99% success rates with image loading to users.

New Affiliate Links
We have a new affiliate: VeePN - a VPN provider as you may guess by their name. If you are considering getting a VPN, we would recommend you get it through these guys. We will be adding links to selected affiliates on the homepage near the "links" section soon.

Looking for a Symfony developer for MangaDex v5
Spoiler

User research survey for MangaDex v5
Our new UI/UX designers would like to hear your feedback about the current website for their consideration to make MangaDex v5 more user-friendly than the current website. The survey itself shouldn't take longer than 5 minutes to answer, and every response will be read.

Survey Link: https://forms.gle/PiTpdBGTfGEGMWGM9

not to be that guy but shouldn't activity drop with the whole world re-opening thing anyways? sure the load times have been awful but demand likely won't be like this for forever

I can now read old chapters again. Huzzah!
@niggardly Sure, but some of the traffic is from the closing of manga rock, and that's permanent.

RC15 already wew

Always happy to give some feedback :3

@niggardly If traffic dropped off after every huge spike, we wouldn't have had to upgrade so many times in the past. Even if the ridiculous size of this spike is unique to this situation, it's not behavior that we would be able to sustain on just user donations alone. The site was near unusable for at least the past two months. This is essentially a permanent solution to our bandwidth problems now and in the future

I'm well versed in .NET / web services / HTML/CSS/JS , but unfortunately my php and Symfony is lacking. I'll have to study up on them and apply some day if another position opens up!

yeah I still don't know what mangadex@home is

@ajddavid452 People volunteer their servers to cache chapters for MangaDex. You request a chapter from their server. If they don't have the chapter, then you get the chapter from us. The chapter is then saved to their server for the future. When someone else accesses the same chapter, the volunteer server will already have the chapter and serve the user it immediately without our own server needing to give it to them.

@Plykiya thanks

@ajddavid452
https://mangadex.org/thread/262074
Basically users volunteer to act as a cache server for MangaDex (old chapters for now) cuz they keep getting overloaded.

I would love to help (learn) with the dev stuff, but I have almost no experience with php and MD are obviously not taking inexperienced interns.... 😓

Why PHP? You would think that there would be more capable languages for backend development. Since speed is obviously a key component, would something like C++ or Rust not be a better choice?

20% offline? these users have no gumption.

Fellow UXer plopping my survey in, good luck with all that!

Never had any issue with the UI or UX, it has always been good enough for what I needed. One of those why fix what isn't broken feelings.
Glad H@H, I mean MD@H is doing well. I've noticed much quicker load times on old chapters since it has gone into operation.

Took a look. Do you guys have any experience using them?

Their price is reasonable enough, but their site is very spartan wrt finer details. From the little checking I've done so far, VeePN (or their parent company) seem to be owned by AnchorFree, a company that often engages in sniping/trolling battles with other VPN providers. AnchorFree also own some free (ie; data-mining) VPN providers, which I would consider a big conflict of interest. This also probably explains why VeePN's "no-logs" policy is a copy-paste of almost every other AnchorFree owned VPN provider (majority of which are sketchy) out there. Lastly, while there is a Warrant Canary up, it's equally sparse and afaict there aren't any public security audit results specific to VeePN posted anywhere online either. Oh, and any privacy respecting VPN provider whose site has Goolag and Fuckerberg Inc analytic scripts running on the front page doesn't inspire confidence, imho.

On a more personal level, they don't seem to employ my preferred protocol (WireGuard), nor do they provide manual configurations for mobile operating systems, meaning profile generation is only possible via their mobile app which has the potential to break with any potential API or tunneling protocol change in future iOS/Android updates, leaving users exposed until the provider catches up with an app update of their own.

Not saying they're outright bad, but it would be nice to know the reason(s) why MangaDex recommends VeePN, aside from the affiliate commissions of course.

Same thinking as @Moodyz here. I am usually following the advice of That One Privacy Guy and this VPN is not even on their list... Seems quite shady to me, I'd like to hear good reasons for using them and it not being just about making some extra cash

@PokestarFan
Preference. Speed isn't that important, speed of coding it is lol.

This is something I've always wondered, and now that the UI is being discussed it seems like a good time to ask. Is the UI built from some kind of free asset package? It's very similar to something I use for work and I have found myself confusing the tabs at times. On the upside, this also means whoever is looking over my shoulder doesn't think I'm looking at Chinese Cartoons.