Yes shame on you for contributing so much 
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Hi! Thanks so much for this site - it’s really useful!
This might just be me being really stupid but sharing just in case others have the same experience. Was just searching through to see if some manga I’m currently reading had been added (don’t want to add it myself until I’ve finished it so have an idea for grading but if it was already there I would have added it as in progress to my own profile) - I went to browse and couldn’t see any search bar so just started going through page by page. It was only after about three pages I thought “I guess at least I could put some filters on to try and speed things up a bit” - and when I opened up the filter menu I realised that the search option was in there!
I’m not sure if having search within the filter options is a normal thing (and now I will know it is there for the future) but just wanted to highlight that I had completely missed the functionality in case it’s an experience others have had, in which case it might make sense to move the search bar out onto the main browse page rather than having it within the filter options. I’ve been accessing on mobile - just in case that makes a difference.
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You’re completely right - including the search in the filters is a little unintuitive and in general, was a bit of a cheat by me 
I’d love to rearrange the mobile layout a little bit to look similar to Etsy:
This makes the search always available on mobile on any page… it just requires me to make two top bar menus, which has some other styling consequences as well. The filters for the search page would be a button underneath this.
So, not dumb at all and a very good feedback. I was hoping it wouldn’t be too big of issue for people, but I’ll bump it a little up in priority since it caught you off-guard!
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Thanks for adding all my manga!
I do have a request: I think it would be nice if we could set all data for finished books directly from the search page. Right now, you can only set your status. Having a popup or something to also set the finished date and score would be great. It would save a lot of time compared to opening all the books one at a time or in separate tabs.
I also found a bug on the search related to series. Steps to reproduce:
- Search for a series
- Click the arrow to show all volumes in the series
- Search for a different series
- Click the arrow to show all volumes in the series (doesn’t work)
This time the volumes aren’t shown. It looks like this happens whenever you don’t hit the arrow again to hide all the volumes before searching for the next series.
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… maybe, it’s just always a tradeoff between adding functionality and keeping a clean interface 
. I was hoping that you’d be doing those activities in the ‘my resources’ page, but I understand it’d be useful to have access in the search page. I can think on it.
Oof nice catch! I had gotten an error notification around this and was going to investigate today, but laying out the steps for reproducing helps a lot! Somehow I missed testing those series collapse widgets with search. Will fix!
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Hmm, I guess I can try just adding everything first and then editing it from the My Resources page.
EDIT: If not the search page, then maybe the series page would be a good middle ground. You can already set the status and score (including advanced scoring) from that page anyway.
I also can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but when editing the finished date on a specific book’s page, the year dropdown isn’t wide enough.
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@sweetbeems It looks like you missed ルミナス=ブルー volume one. (Or maybe it just wasn’t put as part of a series. Hard to tell.)
And something is up with the “S” in " ブレンド・S". Makes it hard to find when I include the “S” in the search term for some reason.
Some other things I’m noticing about reviews and the My Resources page.
- When opening the advanced review popup, if you cancel the “are you sure” confirmation appears. This should only appear if you tried to make some change. Right now, there’s not even a way to check if I put an advanced review without opening the popup, so I often don’t intend to make a change, making the confirmation (when I made no changes) annoying.
- You should add a way to clear an advanced (optional) score without having to delete the entire review.
- Related to point 2, maybe an icon on the My Resources page to indicate that you already have an advanced score set would be good. Or perhaps even just change the color of the pencil icon.
- Why not also use the the pencil icon next to the dates instead of having the “Edit dates” link?
- Does the (x) icon on the My Resources page mean you want to delete the entire entry? I’m scared to click it to even find out. If so, I think a trash icon might be better, as well as a
titleso more information is shown on hover. - It would be nice if filter information and current page were in the URL for the My Resources page, so that if you refresh you don’t lose your place (and so you can more easily bookmark things).
- Related to point 6, I find the default sort of date added to be very unhelpful. Particularly since I’m adding a lot of books I’ve already read, it basically doesn’t tell me anything. I’d much rather it be sorted by date finished, or even for the page to remember how I last sorted it.
Also, it’s too difficult to hide search results. Right now, the only way to hide the search results preview (when not hitting enter in the search bar) is to delete everything in the input. In my opinion, just clicking out of the input should hide the results.
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@seanblue FYI the pagination bug (double page 1) and that series expander with search are now fixed. Will address all your other comments soon, although they’re mostly just right and going on the to do list
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I think these are fixed? That “S” was odd I’m not sure what it was but I updated to a normal “S”. Search for ルミナス=ブルー now works… I think you were using a normal equals sign whereas the title was a strange equal sign copied from Amazon. Granted, my solution isn’t great either… I’ll try to look into these strange unicode symbols and see if I can get matches on similar symbols.
Yeah I know this one… it is annoying 
It’s just a little more work that I haven’t done, that review modal in general is just a bit sad, I agree. On the list.
I’ve almost gotten to this one, but keep getting bugs put ahead of it . Will fix.
Yep. I also think I should indicate advanced scores vs written reviews with a different icon on your public profile.
… Fair point.
It removes from your library yeah. I like a trash icon with a title.
Agreed.
I think I agree? I’m not entirely sure finished at is correct either. Some platforms (like bookmeter) avoid this by simply not having a general ‘my resources’ page… rather you go to finished books, in progress books… etc, which allows them to have intuitive ordering. I could see having some sort of ‘default’ ordering which first does in progress books by ‘started at’, then finished books by ‘finished at’ and then finally all other books by ‘added at’, but that also could be confusing. GoodReads does ‘added at’ as well, but yeah I agree it feels not terribly useful.
I could certainly have the page remember how you last sorted it though, perhaps that’s just the solution
Fair! I’m hoping to touch on that widget soon too, so i’ll keep that in mind!
As always, really appreciate all the feedback!
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Potentially! I’ll keep that in mind. That page will be changing a bit once I introduce series reviews as we talked about, which I’m not sure when that will happen. But perhaps it does make more sense there.
Heh you have and it’s on the list. Will do!
Well I guess I’m done for now. I added all my manga, set the correct finish dates, rated all of them, and did all the difficulty comparisons provided to me (besides a few skips). Are the difficulty scores refreshed once a day or something? I’m curious how my difficulty comparisons will shift all the manga I requested compared to my initial guesses.
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Awesome! Any temporary difficulty ratings (so new books) are immediately updated upon grading, so you should be able to view them now. Any gradings between two non-temporary books are updated on the hour. Search results are also updated on the hour, so their ratings won’t be updated for two mins
Edit: Although I just checked now for you…
こみっくがーるず : lvl 25 → 29
きんいろモザイク : lvl 25 → 29
おとなになっても : lvl 25 → 29
ヒナまつり : lvl 25 → 28
このはな綺譚: lvl 30 → 32
All the other ones only moved 1 level or less, so pretty darn good
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Ha, well I am the only one rating these (so far), and I already knew where they’d fit relative to one another. So it’s not all that surprising!
Though I am a little surprised I didn’t get more difficulty ratings available now that the difficulties updated from the first round of comparisons. Specifically, it didn’t let me compare all the 4-koma manga, like ご注文はうさぎですか, きんいろモザイク, ブレンド・S, うらら迷路帖, and ひとりぼっちの〇〇生活.
Like, it feels a little overly restricted to me. Yeah, ひとりぼっち is ranked well below the others, so not giving the option to compare it to the others makes some sense. But the others are all similar enough that I should be allowed to compare them I think. I also just added まちカドまぞく as dropped, and it only let me compare it to 魔法少女育成計画, which I find strange.
I also just noticed this filter option, but it shows all volumes in the dropdown list, which doesn’t make sense since we only do difficulty comparisons on the first volume.
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Yeah, I was expecting this sort of comment a bit more when I rolled out the grading system. I do think at some point I should allow you to generate limited comparisons yourself. I’m not sure how many people want that ability, but understandably some will and I do want to support you grading things you want to
However, I think it should be a limited ability as unlimited comparisons with my current system would give one user a lot of power to change ratings by themselves, leading to ratings bouncing around significantly. So there is a balance I need to strike there.
It is an interesting thought though that perhaps I shouldn’t simply generate comparisons based on how close their rating level is. There could be more interesting splits, such as the 4-koma manga. It’s certainly something to think about, but I’m not entirely sure how I would approach it.
You can only compare books within 5 levels of each other, so you simply didn’t have anything within that range except 魔法少女育成計画. Do note that it’s actually a bit more specific than ‘5 levels’ as the levels are rounded, but it’s 4-5 levels.
Heh, thanks for noting… haven’t looked at that in a long while!
Oh I should address this too… that shouldn’t really change anything. Once you hit 6 comparisons on a book, I won’t prompt you to do comparisons on that book unless it’s to grade another book.
So that’s why the comparisons I wanted weren’t available. 
Is that also to avoid the issue with too many gradings giving one user too much control?
Maybe you could do something like 6 system-generated comparisons + up to 4 user-chosen comparisons per book.
By the way, does a skip count towards the 6? In several cases I marked things as about the same, but didn’t feel strongly about them. With this limitation, I may skip comparisons I don’t feel strongly about if it lets me compare other books (assuming the level requirement is met). I honestly only rated them because I assumed the comparisons would go on nearly forever.
It would be interesting for sure, but certainly could be challenging. Rather than 4-koma and other somewhat complicated splits (which could require a lot of manual management on your part), you could consider things like author and publisher, and other information you can get from the Amazon API. The former probably wouldn’t help much, at least not until you get a lot more content. But the latter would generate a lot more comparisons and could be utilized right away, assuming you don’t mind adding publisher data to the information you gather when adding books. Most of the 4-koma manga I added are published by まんがタイムきらら for example.
If you did something like this, it could just be another bucket with limited comparisons. For example:
- 5 by level
- 2 by author
- 4 by publisher
- 1 completely random
- 3 by user choice
Obviously all of those criteria won’t always be hit, and those are just example numbers. But more options like this might benefit the overall difficulty rating system. The author and publisher ones would let you directly compare books likely to be somewhat similar in style. The random and user choice ones could help you avoid local optimums (so to speak) by adding in a little variety and randomness. I think this could be especially helpful for newly added books, in case the initial temporary difficulty is significantly off from the actual difficulty.
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Yes. It also doesn’t prompt users for an endless amount of gradings, which would be bad as well
Yeah something like that is certainly in the cards. The blocker is less about altering the current algorithm and more about creating a UI for manually picking comparisons.
No it does not. You certainly can use it to hack your way to comparisons you want
To be clear too, this 6 user grading limitation is really due to the Elo algorithm not being perfectly optimal for book difficulty. It’s a great approximation, but I’ll certainly develop something more optimal for books down the line which will enable me to do away with this condition… granted, I’m not sure when that’ll be. But don’t worry - the core unit of data will always be user comparisons like we have now (of that i’m very convinced), just the aggregate ratings calculator can be improved!
Yeah, I could certainly try to develop something like that. I agree, it could improve the comparisons as well. Although, I do think these sorts of tweaks are a couple of versions down the line… I’d prefer to simply allow you to do a few custom comparisons to rectify this bit of frustration for the time being, more straightforward.
Regardless though, thanks for laying out that plan for me! I will certainly be referencing back to it when I do start to dabble around in this area 
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Yes, I was thinking the same thing. Allowing a few custom comparisons would surely be sufficient for a good while!
And until you can get that worked out with all the UI work needed, I’ll just hack around it by skipping a little more often.
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I’m not exactly sure what you envision the limitation of the “limited ability” should be, but I’d really expect the ratings to jump around quite a bit, especially with the limited numbers of reviews per book that we currently have. Sometimes I’d even hope for them to jump around a bit, like e.g. in this scenario that I came across at some point:
It has improved a little bit compared to when I discovered it (back then 1Q84 was at level 33 as well) but this feels sooo wrong to me. In my mind 容疑者 and すべて are on the same level (or maybe すべて might be 1 or 2 levels higher), while I consider 1Q84 to be like 10 levels above both of them tbh. (This judgment is mainly based on my reading speed, i.e. how many pages per hour can I read. For 容疑者 that might be 10, for すべて maybe 8 on average, while for 1Q84 this is more like 4…)
So if (at this young stage of data collection) you restrict the comparisons to only neighbouring books (level-wise), you might miss out on the big opportunity of getting the big picture sorted out, I fear…
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For me, out of those 3 容疑者 feels easiest, with the other 2 pretty close together. But the main reason すべて feels more difficult to me is that technology features so heavily, and I simply don’t know much about it. Just by clarity of content/specific vocab, I agree 1Q84 is probably more difficult. Although I think the language (that is, grammar and general writing style) used itself isn’t any more complicated either.
Personally I struggled with the concepts in すべて more.
I don’t remember if I let that influence my decision though, or if I tried to base it solely on the writing itself. 
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