Yeah I totally agree and it’s on my to-do list. I think i’ll be adding a mechanism to edit the ‘date finished’ sometime this week, that’s easy. I do also want to add public goal tracking as well, but that may be a little while yet… I want to build more community exploration before I add that on (can’t do a public goal if no one sees it!). Love those ideas though 
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Awesome, so happy to hear! Reviews (especially written ones), gradings and book contributions are incredibly helpful right now… the site is starting to look less bare finally, but it still has a long way to go!
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Speaking of this:
Another use case:
In my case, stuff I’ve read 15 years ago (and possibly liked at the time) aren’t stuff I would read today, at all. I’d rather hide all that in the depths of my resources list than having it in the “Naphthalene recently read” section at the top 
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Yeah I’ll have to think through how to do backdating on a lot of different books at once. Goodreads does allow you to bulk update i know, but the last time i checked it, I don’t think I was terribly impressed with it.
Like I said, will be working on that this week, along with getting those series collapsible in your library. So i’ll keep you updated!
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I read キツネとタヌキのバカし合い today and thought I would grade it (I feel it’s level doesn’t match at all the level of other things in the system; it’s about the level of ゆるキャン△. However, I didn’t get the option to grade more things and going directly to the “grade this book” on the book page gave me:
but there are literally 0 gradings on the book 
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Yeah there’s a bug here…
Thankfully easy to fix the current state so the comparisons are surfaced for you, which i’ve already done. I just have to figure out how you got into that state and it looks like it’s affecting others too. Thanks for noting!
And while I have you here @Naphthalene … a few updates. I added your ‘recently added’ sort! I also sent you an email followup on one of your book requests, but maybe it went to spam?
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Thanks!
No, no issue there! I just thought I’d reply later then forgot
Might as well reply here.
For 異世界ピクニック, there are 6 volumes published. I do not know about amazon but they are available on booklive
For ながされて藍蘭島, I really do not remember, but I assume it would have furigana since I read that when I was N4
Checking the preview online, it does.
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Perfect - thanks for all that!
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Hi! I just wanted to say I love this site so far!
I also thought Id mention that I love how you have the different books in a series gradable, as they can differ quite a bit I think! Harry Potter is a good example, as even in English, the different books have different AR levels. Not only that, but some people don’t finish a whole seers, or just read random books in it, as this makes it easier for them to use the site to keep track of what they have read!
One thing I would really love to see one day would be a recommendations tab like the kind on Myanimelist, where it you click on the book, and then it has a list of remendations from users with a quick sentence explaining the recommendation.
Other small things that would be cool
I think you could have multiple editions, but not specific editions of the books. What I mean by this, Is that It would be nice if we could give a book a tag or category of Furigana, Semi-furigana, or No-furigana, to separate out those editions of the books. For example, Harry Potter has way more than 3 editions of their books, but they can be separated into those categories and would help people decide if they want to try reading other books, like if they want to commit to having no-furigana or not. This grouping can be crowdsourced, so when they ask for a book to be added, they select the category, the same way they select if it’s a manga or novel.
One of the other members mentioned “On each book’s page, you list each grading which is very interesting! “ and I agree with that!
I think it would be cool to have two drop down boxes, one holding “more difffults” and an another holding “easier than” and “rated the same” so it doesn’t crowed the page, but you can click the drag down to see some other books if they wanted to grab a book that way.
Someone also mentioned “Allowing crowdsourced tagging of books (like genre tags / general description tags)””
And omg, if we could tag books like you tag fanfic from AO3 or like novelupdates.com that would be crazy. It so hard to decide if you like a show, but by having tags, it makes it much easier to decide if you think you’d like it. I personally have trouble commiting to a book in another language if I’m not sure if I’ll like it or not (thats why my list is full of translated into Japanese books, lol) and tags would help that so much!
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Hey @MonnieBiloney! Everyone say hello to an OG user from reddit
Ok, so lots to respond to haha. I’m going to collapse my answers
On grading individual volumes in a series
Well, we only do that in a few exceptional cases, like long graded reader series and Harry Potter, that’s not the norm All manga series, for instance, are treated as the same level.
The reason is that usually people don’t remember individual volumes very well and most series don’t change drastically in difficulty. However, I do have a system for testing whether we should make an exception, just never shows we should. Another reason to not grade series as independent books is that usually people are choosing between series, they care less about subsequent volumes. For all these reasons, I decided to not grade the independent volumes for almost all series… it cuts down on the number of comparisons significantly too,
On recommendation tabs
I like that! It will probably be a while until I get to something like that (lots of features to do!), but i’ll note that down. I think I could get something similar by showing if a book is in a popular public list (an upcoming feature).
On editions
So, you can kinda do that now! I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you can add ‘Where To Find’ urls for each book and you can specify if it has furigana and even write a note. take a look at よつばと！
I do agree though, crowdsourcing editions will eventually come I think for various reasons. Some people identify their books by the cover of their edition. Additionally, book editions are a disaster - very confusing. Allowing people to add editions and make comments may mitigate that confusion… although it is a bit tricking to moderate.
On dropdown boxes
Interesting - potentially! The problem is that not everyone will agree . Some books may be both harder and easier. There have been quite a few good suggestions in this thread around how to showcase the difficulty gradings on the book page… . I agree, I can improve it a lot! Will definitely be addressed at some point, just a lot going on now haha.
On tags
I love it! Yeah tags will be awesome. I’ve decided to prioritize more community building features for the time being (like browse community / follow / public list generation) but tags is one of my highest priorities! It will come this summer for sure!
Really appreciate all those thoughts! Thank you!
PS: someone cough seanblue cough gave me a helpful tip for these threads with regards to quoting another comment. Simply highlight and click ‘quote’. It makes a link back to the quoted comment which is easier to navigate.
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For what it’s worth, I think the approach you went with makes sense. In my experience, difficulty rarely changes that much between volumes of a series (for both manga and books). I can think of a couple exceptions, but they really aren’t that common.
Related, is it possible to give a rating to an entire series as well? Or are ratings just for individual books? I feel like I can rate novels and light novels at the individual book scope, but not manga. To your point, for manga I don’t really distinguish much between individual volumes. Especially since a good portion of the manga I read are 4-koma comedy series, it blurs together even more than story-driven manga.
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I’m also browsing through a book’s gradings section, and the links there attached to the books being compared don’t seem to work. The links themselves seem to be valid, but I just get a blank page (besides the top header). Even going to a URL directly (example) doesn’t seem to work. The error I’m getting with that link is Cannot read property 'e3c14875-8fe2-4e55-901c-236434f2d176' of undefined, which is the GUID in that URL. In fact, even refreshing the page when I successfully loaded a book via the search gets it into this weird state.
And speaking of the search, I have a small QoL suggestion. When you show direct search options in this dropdown thing, being able to navigate through the options with the up/down keys and being able to then select a book to open via Enter would be really convenient.
It also looks like the search preview dropdown doesn’t include series. For example, searching for 本好き doesn’t show anything in the preview. You have to actually hit enter to go to the full search page to see that series. I think it would be really nice to include series in the preview dropdown as well.
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You mean a quality rating / review, correct? Currently no. My impression is that most platforms don’t allow you to write a review at the series level, correct? It’s usually just the book level.
It is a little complicated as, like you said, sometimes you can remember individual volumes and ratings do fluctuate from volume to volume. I could add series level reviews as well, just think it might be a little confused? I’ve gotten that suggestion a few times though, I’ll think on it.
Yikes, really? That sounds like an issue with the cookie policy popup i put in today. Did you get any cookie consent popups?
Yeah, I know. I’ll definitely do it eventually as it annoys me too, but it’s also quite a bit trickier to do well than you’d expect. I’ve done that functionality before and it always ends up feeling like too much pain for what it’s worth… but yeah, it’ll get done eventually. I currently don’t even have autocomplete on the search page, so, y’know, one step at a time
Edit: To be clear, I can’t replicate your bug, even in incognito 
Edit: Alright yeah, I’m able to replicate this bug now. It is the cookie policy. Granted if you respond to the policy (i’m not sure why you aren’t seeing it?)… it fixes itself. But yes, this is something to look into.
Yes, I did. I did custom and turned off the advertising, social, and unclassified cookies. So maybe it’s related to that.
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Speaking of cookies, there’s no way to edit one’s preferences after closing the popup. There’s something that looks like a button on cookie policy page, but I cannot click it.
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Well, I took away the cookie modal as it was breaking things… and now that button doesn’t work (it usually would). I forgot about. I don’t know if i’ll be able to reimplement it tonight, will let you know when I do though. Apologies on this
“move fast and break things” they said…
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It’s weird I tested that and it should work. Anyways I will get it working.
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alright it looks like the cookie consent banner will take a little while (have to chat with support). In the meantime, I’ve turned off all google analytics tracking and non-critical cookies. So I’m in the dark what y’all are doing on the site now
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So, I just wanted to take a quick moment to applaud you guys and hit you with some real numbers on how big an impact the WK community is having! Since I started this thread, Natively has:
- gained 259 users (nearly a 50% increase)
- added 1710 books (53 solo books, 119 series) (+90% increase)
- completed 2726 difficulty comparisons (+160% increase)
I mean just compare the search page now to when you all first saw it. N2 native content flows onto 3 pages! N1 native content is over half a page (I think there were 4 items before…).
I already am getting inbounds from social media influencers wanting to write up the site, some having been linked to this thread. So I know i’ve already said it many times before, but thanks for all your hard work! It’s making a huge difference! : -)
Also a big shoutout to Naphthalene (of course), bison, nikoru, Myria, ditto, pradd, belerith and bethie for the tons of grades you’ve each done!
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I just noticed that 蜘蛛ですが何か is marked as a light novel, but shows the manga cover. The amazon link also redirects to the manga.
If they requested the light novels, the link to the series is here
It’s nice to see Natively grow in real time!
Although, now, I don’t have much I can do for a while.
The solution is obviously to read moar.
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