Manga Traders

Posted by zraith on 11/13/2009 7:17 am

This week, our manga spotlight has shined on Arakure & Cage of Eden! If you are unfamiliar with these manga be sure to check them out!

Arakure

Series Summary:
Sachie Wakamura just lost her mother, and her estranged grandfather has shown up to take care of her. The only problem is that Grandpa is the head of a yakuza gang! Sachie tries to continue living her normal life, but she can't run far since Rakuto, one of the most popular guys in school, is part of her grandfather's gang and her new protector. Soon, Sachie finds herself falling for her bodyguard. But she's the granddaughter of Rakuto's boss, so he can never show his feelings for her. Can Sachie find a way to fit into her new family and seize her chance at romance?

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Cage of Eden

Series Summary:
Akira and his classmates are traveling on a plane when it crashes onto an island inhabited by species thought to have been extinct. The situation becomes increasingly desperate as some of Akira's classmates are eaten alive, while some kill others in desperation. Now Akira and a few other survivors are trying to survive what seems to be a horrible nightmare.

Posted by zraith on 11/06/2009 6:53 am

This week, our manga spotlight has shined on My Girl (SAHARA Mizu) & Solanin! If you are unfamiliar with these manga be sure to check them out!

My Girl (SAHARA Mizu)

Series Summary:
Kazama Masamune - a single 23-year-old man...has a kid? During the season of cherry blossoms, his beloved passes away. He happens to meet a little girl outside work and realizes she is his daughter who was raised in secrecy by his lover. The worst spring of his life is transformed into a painful yet vivid spring.

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Solanin

Series Summary:
Slice of life with a young couple, Inoue Meiko and Taneda Shigeo, and how everyday occurrences affect their lives. Meiko begins contemplating whether freedom without purpose is really the same thing as boredom.

Posted by Yukimura on 10/31/2009 3:06 pm

Once again someone has requested that Mangatraders implement site wide genre filtering due to a fear of the inherent horror that is the yaoi genre.  As much as I dislike the idea of universal genre filters I am tired of hearing this request and so I am willing to seriously consider the idea if there is more than token support from a few scared prepubescents who think reading the titles of yaoi will somehow turn them gay.

The basic idea of the filter is that if you opted into it it would be impossible for you to find links to series that contain any of the filtered genres, assuming they were marked as such, when using the site.  This would include the daily uploads page, the Latest Uploads and 'Newest Series' sidebar items, the series search system, the series list and extended series list pages, and the series relations lists on series pages.  File search and One Shot page filtering are NOT up for consideration at this time but may be in the future. 

I am posting this poll because I want to get an idea of how specific I can get away with making the system without having to deal with too much more complaining.  Adding an option to specifically filter out certain predefined genres would be easier and cause less strain on the site than giving everyone the option to choose what to filter amongst all the genres.   My hypothesis is that the majority of people who would use a genre filtering system would choose to filter yaoi and shounen ai anyway so this poll is structured the way it is to confirm or deny that idea.  If there is enough support for a more generic system I will consider it but I don't want to hear complaining about site performance from anyone who chooses to opt into such a system.

If you are reading this on the front page click "Read Full Article" to vote in the poll.  Please vote even if you don't care one way or another since I really want an excuse not to do this and if enough of you don't care I can spend my time on more useful things.

EDIT #2
Thanks everyone who voted and/or posted their thoughts on this issue.  I got some good ideas from reading the responses.  Here's what I worked on most of yesterday working on instead of sleeping b/c I just love you all so much (once again praise and adulate me to your hearts content).

It turns out excluding series based on genre is a lot less work for the server than I thought it would be thanks to something I did for the series relations system so I will be adding an exclusion capability to the Extended Series List sometime in the next few days.  You'll be able to exclude genres just like you can require them when browsing for series.  As an added, unrelated treat I am adding support to sort the ext series list based on the newness of files in the series so you'll be able to see what series have had new files added recently.  I'm not sure if this is particularly useful but it's already done so there. 

I will also be adding 'tool tips' to the Newest Series and Popular Series side bar links and the Series Links on the Latest Uploads page.  These will display all the genres of a series when you hover over the link for it.  IE users, your browser is being lame as usual and the tool tips appear to the right of the link text instead of under it like they do in Firefox despite everything I've tried so far.  If anyone has a solution to that particular problem I'm all ears.  This is about as far as I'm willing to go in facilitating the 'I don't want to have to see 'those' series on the whatever list at this time.

My next (front side) priority will be the advanced search system which will essentially be the 'Extended Series List' with a text search option and including files instead of just series.

EDIT #1
I've read through all the responses to the thread so far and I appreciate all the feedback given.  From the poll it's obvious the majority of you who care enough to read my posts and act on my requests don't care about this 'issue'.  That said those of you who do care matter too and there have been some good alternative ideas suggested so far.  I've also noticed a lot of snark in the comments and while I agree with much of the snark I want to set the record straight on something.  The type of feature requests that prompted me to make this appeal to the community have been less related to downloading and more to browsing.  The crux of the issue, as far as I understand it, is that browsing for new series is 'too hard' for some people when the list of series to browse includes series with genres one does not wish to read ever.  I've noticed a lot of people saying "don't like it, don't download it" and while I agree with that statement I don't think that is the issue the people complaining/making the suggestions are bringing up and it shouldn't be brought up in this particular discussion either.

I understand that looking for new manga to read is a difficult issue and that understanding is the only reason I was willing to entertain this filter notion at all.  My ultimate goal is balancing ease of use and functionality for you users, the allocation of the site's resources, and the allocation of my own time and energy.  I originally made the Extended Series List to address the sort of issue we're talking about here and from the comments I've read so far one of my priorities will be looking at adding a genre exclusion list to that page in addition to the genre inclusion list already provided. 

Another pretty good idea I have seen is making all the genres of a series visible from the newest series and search results links so people can save the two precious mouse clicks it would take to discover a series is not one they want to learn anything more about.  I don't exactly like the idea of having to send even more information to everyone's browser on every page but showing more information to everyone would ultimately take less of a toll on Mangatraders' resources than the site trying to hide different information from different people.

A third idea which is already in the pipeline for whenever I get the time and motivation to do it is a more advanced search system.  I have always thought it was unfortunate that you can't search for a title AND an author AND and a set of genres all at the same time with our search system and I plan to rectify this eventually.  Unfortunately the time requirement for creating (and testing) such a system is not trivial and I am only one person.

Finally, in the interest of a more informed userbase I have added a list to the Forum version of this post.  This list shows a count of all the series that include each genre recognized by Mangatraders.

Posted by zraith on 10/30/2009 12:27 am

This week, our manga spotlight has shined on Shut Hell & Wolf Guy (TABATA Yoshiaki)! If you are unfamiliar with these manga be sure to check them out!

Shut Hell

Series Summary:
In the days of old existed a woman warrior named Shut Hell, the Evil One, feared even by the Mongols, said to be the strongest army in history.

At first, she was just a normal Tangut's soldier frightened by the mongol threat, but after coming close to death so many times, she found in herself a superhuman strength.

On the other side, a young mongol prince, Yurul, is fascinated by the Tangut's, his enemies' writings, and is worried for the future....

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Wolf Guy (TABATA Yoshiaki)

Series Summary:
Akira Inugami just transfered into his new school. The principal and teachers fear what may happen because Inugami was placed in the same homeroom as the school's biggest problem and gang leader.

His hometeacher Aoshika is going out of her mind tyring to figure out what happened the night before where she could have sworn she saw this same Inugami beaten alive and then hit by a car by a large group of thugs in a park. But somehow, Inugami, who denies everything of course, is alive and without a scratch attending his first day at his new school.

Posted by zraith on 10/23/2009 12:47 pm

This week, our manga spotlight has shined on Komatta Toki ni wa Hoshi & Usagi Drop! If you are unfamiliar with these manga be sure to check them out!

Komatta Toki ni wa Hoshi

Series Summary:
Fujishima Takara goes to high school and will start living in a dorm because he has lost all his family except for his father, who's always away for his work. Takara has to share a room with Hosaka Kiyomine. Living together isn't easy, and many rows ensue. Kiyomine is very introvert, while Takara is just the opposite. At first the two get on each other's nerves because of those differences. But things turn towards friendship and later on towards love.

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Usagi Drop

Series Summary:
When Daikichi returns home for his grandfather's funeral he meets an unfamiliar child in the garden. Later, his mother explains to him that Rin is grandfather‘s illegitimate daughter! The presence of the child causes embarrassment to all relatives and nobody wants to adopt her. Daikichi, annoyed by such attitude, decides to take care of her himself. How will the cohabitation between the bachelor and the quiet Rin evolve?