Manga Traders

Posted by Yukimura on 01/06/2009 3:13 pm

I've been rather busy so I'm late with my New Year's post and it's a cut down shadow of what it was supposed to be.  I had planned to make an awesome Year-in-Review style post that recounted all the major events that affected Mangatraders in 2008 but that would take time, which I don't have.  So instead I'll just cut straight to the most pressing part and add try to add in more of the fun details later.

As I've begrudgingly had to admit several times in the past, our financial position is less than ideal.  Our ability to afford server costs with the amount of money we get per month has been lessening of late.  For this reason we are forced to raise the donation goal from $800 to $900 in the new year.  While hitting this goal still won't completely cover the entire monthly bill for the site it will help to maintain the out of pocket costs of Mangatraders for us at a level that we're actually able to support.

On a related note, some of the sites financial burdens could be solved by moving from rented servers to ones we've purchased our own and sent to a data center that rents out rack space and bandwidth.  This scheme would be much more efficient than the current one as space and bandwidth costs are the same regardless of what server or servers use them.  Our current hosting companies charge large premiums based on the quality of servers that they rent and insane premiums if we try to upgrade the rentals.  Due to this we are forced to pay for servers that barely meet our needs and are severely restricted in how much we can afford to grow them.  It is for this reason that we will be starting up a separate donation drive in the hopes of raising enough money to purchase our own servers and wean ourselves away from the rental hosting companies. 

For the same monthly amount we pay now renting the 2 servers that are required to serve the website itself we could rent space for 3-4 servers of our own as well as almost 8 times as much bandwidth as we are currently allotted for those servers to utilize.  This would equate to much faster site load times, the freedom to be more aggressive with the features we can provide, and the ability to make server upgrades much more cheaply.  With an initial investment of ~$2500 we could completely replace the web serving side of the site as well as add a second webserver to further reduce site load times or even to increase download speeds for popular files by acting as a temporary file server.  We certainly don't expect to raise that kind of capital overnight but we're committed to the future of Mangatraders and hope enough others out there are as well to help support us in this venture into the future.

IOU: 1 List of Interesting Events on/at Mangatraders in 2008.

Well with all that said our thanks go out to everyone who has helped make Mangatraders a successful site.  To those who have uploaded, to those who have donated, to the site staff and helpers, to the people who fill in and update series information (only the people who do it right), to all the people who scanslate and of course to all the authors and artists who create the works we all hold dear the Mangatraders administration gives its thanks and hopes 2009 is a wonderful year for you. 

Happy New Year!

Posted by zraith on 01/02/2009 7:52 am

This week, our series spotlight has shined on Toshiue no Hito! If you are unfamiliar with this series be sure to check it out!

Series Summary:
The woman Tsutomu encounters in college was older and smaller than he is, and for some reason, looks like the same girl in his dreams. The heart-pounding love affair between him and the "older woman" begins.

NOTE: This is a manga for MATURE readers, if the tags Adult and Mature haven't clued you in on its contents.

Posted by Yukimura on 12/30/2008 5:47 pm

A minor coding mistake temporarily gave several logged in users a single users 'user identity'. 

Anyone who used the search system within a few minutes of about 6:25 PM EST Today (Dec 30th 2008) was probably affected.  The symptoms of this glitch are that the profile settings, favorites, watched series, etc for the affected user will APPEAR to have been replaced with those of the user in question.  Everyone's actual settings are safe, the site is merely displaying the wrong users data when you look at pages.  To fix the problem simply log yourself out and log back in, that should overwrite your session data and the site will start displaying your data like normal.  Changing profile settings or deleting Watches or Favorites will NOT help.

My Bad :(

In other news, a 'type' field has been added to the series page information.  The options for this field are Manga, Manhwa, and Manhua.  I have modified the search system to allow filtering search results based on series type (these filters are not available to general users yet) however there are presently over 3800 series that have not had a type assigned. 

Any registered user can edit series type by clicking the edit link next to any of the series data fields.  The more series that are typed the easier it will be for manhwa or manhua fans to search specifically for those types of series.  I have also added a feature to the search system to search only for complete manga (also not active at the moment), however only staff members are able to declare a series complete for the purposes of searching.  The staff and MT helpers are working hard to look through all the series on the site and mark the ones that are complete as such.  As of now there are 10 letters of the alphabet left to look through (I and K-S if you're interested).  Once we've got all of them marked I'll make the new search features accessible to everyone.

P.S. Merry Christmas, if you are into that sort of thing.

Posted by zraith on 12/25/2008 11:23 pm

This week, our series spotlight has shined on Salad Days! If you are unfamiliar with this series be sure to check it out!

Series Summary:
Salad Days is a compilation of short stories about the troubles one encounters in relationships and love. There are no true main characters, although some have multiple appearances along the way, and each story is unique. Exquisite art is displayed, along with emotions we experience such as the sadness or depression of rejection or breaking up, the warmth and love as we are with our companion, or the heartache of knowing your love is fruitless when it is one-sided.

Posted by zraith on 12/19/2008 12:51 pm

This week, our series spotlight has shined on Milk Closet! If you are unfamiliar with this series be sure to check it out!

Series Summary:
Many children mysteriously disappear in 2005. This is called it the "Reasal Phenomenon." A few children came back with tails on their asses. One of them was Hana Yamaguchi. Hana calls upon children with tails and creates the "Macro Cosmic Invincible Legion of Kids." These children can go freely back and forth from one world to another and with such special powers, they save missing children. But then, the Ali Troops invade this world. This is a fascinating science fiction drama about the wonders of the universe.