The Third Impact: MangaDex Anniversary Celebration + Reddit AMA

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is a Reindeer
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Hallo hallo,

Another year has passed and MangaDex turns three years old. The site continues to grow at a rate that is completely unexpected to us. We couldn't have made it this far without the generosity of our donors, the untiring efforts of scanlators that give the site purpose, or your participation as a reader. Though this is a message we've said before, we really are thankful. This past year has been characterized by the constant back and forth between us upgrading our site and events happening that increase our traffic past the limits of those upgrades. The most recent upgrade that split the API off onto its own server has given us a bit of breathing room, but it was a flawed implementation that we plan to continue to improve on in the near future.

During the last week of December of 2019 into January of the following year, we experienced legal issues which resulted in us taking down the site for a few days and discontinuing our use of Cloudflare in exchange for DDoS-Guard. I'm sure barely anyone remembers it at this point, it feels like a decade has passed since the start of COVID, but it was uncertain how the site would fare. To say we've made a recovery since then would be an understatement. As shown in the following graph, our traffic has grown 306% from the previous year according to Google Analytics (users with adblock are untracked). It's easy to see why the servers would struggle with the increased demand.

piCifze.png


We've only been able to survive this increase in traffic because of the creation of MangaDex@​Home, the P2P network solution made by site volunteers 7 months ago that allows people to donate their storage space and bandwidth to serve images to readers in place of our own image servers. Our serving capacity was limited to just 2 Gbps (250 MB/s) with Path Network (considering their service to us is free, it's insanely generous) before the creation of MD@​H and we were maxing out that connection nonstop. With MD@​H, we're hitting total network speeds of around 8-12 Gbps (1000-1500 MB/s), a significant improvement over where we were before (completely needed for Solo Leveling releases).

Screenshot-2021-01-20-014703.png


Advertisement Follow-up

Following up on our previous announcement where we said we would run an ad from December 21st to the 28th, we've finally received payment for said ad after some unexpected transfer delays. Our total upkeep cost at the moment is $920. Running the ad for a week covered two months of our current server costs. Admittedly, we were expecting a larger amount given the size of our audience, but it's still an amazing amount for something we only did for a week. We have no further plans to run ads.

Android Stats
Apple Stats

Going with Affiliates

In the previous thread someone mentioned why we "don't have a banner for donations instead". While it was a good idea, people don't really know how to donate via cryptocurrency or it's too convoluted for their liking. So instead of donation banners, we plan on exploring the idea of having banners that lead to our affiliates page. Kind of similar to a banner asking people to donate in the way that both involve people wanting to support MD in some way. Not quite ad banners because it doesn't advertise for any service specifically, just asking people if they're interested in supporting the website and giving them options to do so if they click on it. We'll make another announcement when we implement it, so look forward to it.


Example banner, banners should be humorous like the april fool banners we run, not outright begging. Wikipedia ad parody by Teasday

Mega Anniversary Contest Winner

Congratulations to IReadTooMuch for winning our anniversary Contest with their entry, Love is War. They'll receive a $50 Amazon or Steam gift card, a steam game from @Lymus, and an indie game from @Kafka. Thank you as well to all the other participants, your submissions were enjoyable to watch.

v5 When?

The full site rework that is MangaDex v5 is still in progress. We may look into recruiting additional devs familiar with Symfony or Vue to speed up progress, but availability is always the most important factor since this is a hobby and not a job. Hopefully the site condition stabilizes long enough for us to complete it this year. We want it to arrive just as much as everyone else...

Just like the two years before, we'll end this off with quotes from all of our staff (WE MISS YOU HOLO!)

Holo - Former Overlord/Owner
I'm loving retirement. Not having to wake up at 3AM to fix the servers is great! It is wonderful to see MD continue growing. Hopefully we'll see v5 released this year!
ixlone - Admin
Still looking for a TL to do some loli doujins
bocchi - Developer
I haven't done anything yet as a dev but
ClqznUiVEAAwKuL.jpg
carbotaniuman - Developer
When I was a young lad I read manga here for fun but the servers kept crashing. @Asyncantiunredoify got mad at me complaining and told me to help, and I guess I now manage MD@​H.

I also wanna take this space to shill isekai villainess manga. Peace and prosperity, and may fate stay the night with you!
fugiman - Developer
When I was brought on as staff I was shocked they'd trust someone just for helping make MD@​H. Now I know better. The servers catch fire every other week, the user-base won't stop growing, Plykiya has pinged me so many times they've learnt to fear it... Please. I need more non-shit isekai manga. It's the only thing keeping me going.

Just kidding, I don't do shit around here. Shout out to VTubers.
Plykiya - Developer/Public Relations
I plan to create a world where crossdressing boys attempting to seduce their more masculine male best friends is a regular thing. You're all invited.

My crossdressing website should be finished this year... send femboys for motivation, thanks
rdn - Developer
This year has seen too many technical problems and firefighting because of the user growth. This corona meme cant end fast enough so you goddamn weebs stop reading so much manga all the time. jk ily

Bonus meme
ks3Nbvc.jpg
Teasday - Developer
2020 was hardly the year anyone hoped for, neither for life in general nor (more relevantly to me) for MangaDex development specifically. We may not be as far along as we would've preferred, but thankfully the year wasn't without any improvements. While this website on the surface looks and functions pretty much exactly as it did a year ago, we've been making some steady progress with not only the complete site redesign (known as v5) but also some significant changes in the background, allowing us to better stay stable in the long run while our active userbase seemingly keeps ballooning. A special thank you to the MDaH team and client volunteers for saving our asses.

More importantly, thanks to everyone for another year of quality scanlation, giving us the reason to keep pushing forwards.
Xnot - Developer
Ever since I became staff, it's been an endless cycle of the site struggling to keep up with traffic, upgrades being done later than we wished due to spaghetti code and no money, and then everything breaking due to the changed infrastructure. While it might not be the fastest or have the largest manga catalogue, I do think a site like MangaDex fills an important niche, and is absolutely necessary for the scanlation scene as we know it today. Although most of my work on MD has consisted of fixing minor annoyances, I hope I've managed to make the site more bearable for some. Honestly, I've barely even been reading any manga for the last several months, so I guess I really am still here just to suffer. To all the staff members, md@​h clients, and people who have gone through the trial of donating memecoins, thank you for making this possible. To all the rest of you freeloaders, you're welcome.
BraveDude8 - Moderator
Turns out when the two biggest aggregator sites die three months apart right after the universe bans everyone from being outside, traffic tends to go up a bit. Thanks to everyone running an MD@​H client for keeping up with our ridiculous new bandwidth usage, and thanks for sticking with us through the various issues this year.
Electromaster - Moderator
Another year flies by. Can't believe its been 3 years. The site has come a long way in that time. Onward to another year of great manga.
Lymus - Moderator
Another-nother year, huh?
Time sure flies, we've had our highs and lows, mostly fighting the unbelievable amount of new users coming to the site...

Even more isekai this year, esp of the Otome variety with genre-savvy protagonists, which isn't bad.

Go read Maiko-san Chi no Makanai-san
very cute and apparently getting an anime sometime this year.

And as always, remember No Scanlation Without Drama!
Daviot - Forum Moderator
Try not to be a jerk
Kafka - Forum Moderator/Public Relations
It's been 3 years already? Wow, it all went by so fast ^^;
Thank you to everyone who has made it possible, starting with Holo, Ix and the devs that started this project (o7 we miss ya Holo!) to y'all reading and sharing manga in our platform, and of course, everyone who has donated their money & servers on MD@​H to keep us going.
I know it hasn't been an easy year for anyone... but, at least we know we have our favorite manga to keep us going.
Thank you for reading!
woulez - Forum Moderator
Another year has passed and I for one can only hope that what lies ahead of us is better than how 2020 was in general. I'm very happy that we have all these scanlators around that help brighten our days, translating all that content for us to read while we endure the circumstances of Covid-19.
I'm also super thankful for this community and our staff for all the fun times we have on a daily basis.
Zephyrus - Forum Moderator
Feels like 2020 was a decade packed into a year. Let's hope 2021 is a better year for us and the for the rest of the world. I've heard that if you sacrifice enough virgins to the Old Ones, they will enslave the Devs and force them to launch the long-awaited V5.

Long Live MangaDex.
Henny - Public Relations
Well, here's to 3 years of spamming art retweets on our Twitter 👁️

Anyway, go read Kokou no Hito and more yuri
Arvid - Designer
Well, ever since I discovered that Manga exist, MangaDex has been a considerable time-sink. That has been going on for 2 or more year or so ... honestly I have lost the feel for time ...
Anyway, here is hoping for many more years :D
And maybe, just maybe, I might also start being productive this year lol

Reddit AMA

We will be answering question on Reddit too, see you there!
 
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love u guys <333 ever since i joined this site and got to watch it grow, i've fallen in love w/ it

ty for ur hard work!!!!!!!!
 
An old man gave me a sharp object for my journey
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Yes, we do believe automod didn't like it. We're looking into it.
 
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Mina-san, let's all make a promise to meet back here in another 3 years to see how much the site has changed.
 
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Congrats to the winner.

And thank you to the MangaDex staff for doing such a great job at keeping this website mostly alive.
 
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Devs sure do love New Game! but won't translate it 🤔. In all seriousness Congratulations and thank you all for your hard work!
 
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Congrats guys. I'm here with you ever since bato.to redirected me here 3 years ago. I am seasoned freeloader now
Best jokes from mods, of course
Finally, by tradition: f**k SL!
 
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Been with manga dex as scanlator since 2018-08-08 and hope for many many more years with mangadex, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK AND CONGRATULATIONS ^_^
 
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I can't believe my MD birthday hasn't passed yet a lot of stuff happened. Congratulations for keeping this alive! I don't know where else I would be reading manga, I prefer this site to any others.
 
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