I'm interested in how others find good manga (or anime, or movies for that matter. We don't have to constrain it as much) and what helps them to do it. I've been trying to tackle this from a usability standpoint of the website in general and I've discovered that it is quite a difficult problem.

So, I was wondering what works well for you that is on the website now, what doesn't work well for you, and how it could be better?

A few suggestions or have thought up are:

• To have a "users who read this also liked this" feature


• show random related mangas by genre


• have some sort of listing of top mangas calculated someway (perhaps a ranking on series record activity, ratings, as well as other aspects)

So, what are your thoughts?

well, i do it completely randomly and usually by word of mouth. Perhaps, users who read this also read this then.

I do it the same way NeoShweaty does it.

But there is another way, I sometimes just click on a manga in the Releases area if it's done by a group I know or has a title I think is interesting. And if the picture/desc seems good. I download it and see.

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Back. Yet again.

Good mangas are hard to find. Sometimes you get traped by lame mangas like Ragnorak(which got a good name). I suggest we set up a top 50 manga of the year list for every genre.

[ok, Ragnorak isn't thattt bad, but its stories and dialogue is sooo lame]

Last edited by lambchopsil at 10:40 pm, Aug 30 2008

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Life, what would it be without so much wrongs and rights?


Star Trek XI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZiR-NETDr0

right but can you think of any way to help guarantee a match quicker?

I check our a few of the mangas i don't know on the new releases page and see if they seem intresting. If i am really looking for something new i will check the Genre Browser or look for other series of a mangaka i like . ( i do all of that here at www.mangaupdates.com, the home of manga on the net since 1943 )
A good thread on the forum was the 5 favorite titles and 5 favorite mangaka, that helps finding stuff by the mentioned method of he likes a lot of stuff i like so i will also like the other stuff he likes.

I don't think you need a new system feature, if people would rate more series it wouldn't be a problem. Thats what the ratings are there for, right?

A feature like "people who read this also read this" would be nice in theorie, but i don't think it would be easy to implement.
People can always just check the forum threads.

When selecting anime to watch or manga to read I'm usually guided my the rating system. If there's enough votes, even biased ratings don't mean much.

Together with the Bayesian estimate system this works perfectly - the best examples are anidb and ANN.

Although I consider this to be the most effective system out there, it won't work with m-u, I'm afraid - a title needs at least 200-250 votes to be unbiased, and that requires both time and popularity of the website.

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Don't waste your time or time will waste you.

There's really no way of knowing if a manga is good or not. For example, a lot of the "top 50 manga", in my opinion are bad. On the other hand, some of the not-so-famous mangas are pretty good. I guess the only way to know for sure is to read them......

[don't you hate it when you can't find a good manga]

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Life, what would it be without so much wrongs and rights?


Star Trek XI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZiR-NETDr0

yea... that's why i'm interested in trying to fix that problem, haha.

About that Bayesian estimate thing.. perhaps i should just let everyone vote without actually having to make a comment in the series section.. then maybe we'd get more votes...

This might be something that only I would use... but I like looking for things by random...
So it would be nice if a "random manga/mangaka/etc..." feature could be added...
I don't think that it would be difficult to implement and it would be nice...
Also as an added feature, you could always add options to check for the random search... like only completed series, by genre, rating > n (you chose n) etc...
Well that might make it harder to make... but I think that, that way, more people might be inclined to use it...
Well just an idea that floated up my mind this morning...

i like the "show random related mangas by genre" idea, and maybe to top it off, list them in order of rating?

since i'm a very picky reader when it comes to my manga, what i usually do to go about finding ones is either searching for them or sometimes i visit sites that i stumble onto by accident.

such as Emily's Shoujo manga page, or strawberry scented shoujo manga scans, and from there i read through the description, and if it catches my eye or i like the plot i go check it out at other sites and then i try a first chapter peek to see if i'll like it. another thing i go by a lot too is the image of the cover, or the main character. However from experience i can well state that sometimes the image is not 100% accurate, because i find another image somewhere else of that same series, and it makes me rethink twice about skipping the manga.

other times, if i see just scans and all i can find on the series is the japanese title i start searching by title, or author, or even any english letters on the image. A lot of it comes from searching though.

my suggestion could be that if someone sees a certain manga they like, then it would catch their interest if they saw something such as "other manga that may interest you by the same author." or even "similar manga in same genres"

or i guess even "others who read <title of manga> also read <titles of manga>"

so far that's all i can think of, as soon as i think of more i'll definitely post it later.



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dancing on angel wings~~

Yea, we've discussed that. Eventually when I get time I'll add it. Thanks for the suggestion.

hey guys I have a sugestion that I believe might be easy to inplement...

since now you gave us the new list thingy why don't you make use of its full potential... what I mean is something like if you are looking into the completed manga section why can't you check that list by ranking? or if you are looking by genre why can't you do nothing else after that, this last one is the one you can actually implement more stuff into... you see in my "opinion" the search by genre should be a advanced search mode where you have the genre stuff plus all the other options.

thks a lot this is my personal rant and nothing else the list is great I just thought that this would help and is fair to say that is not as hard as it sounds

PS: hey I have one more why don't you block the ranking for series that have lets say less than 10 votes since this totally messes with the ranking any new series -bad, really bad- someone with a weird taste comes and gives a 10 and then thats it until someone that doesn't like it comes and votes it will be there in first place and if is unpopular and noone else reads or votes then we are stuck with it.

thks a lot.... \>_</

Last edited by oluap at 5:44 am, Feb 25 2007

If you order by rating, a series has to have at least 15 votes before it will show up on that ranking. (As you can see, there are only 6 pages of series right now).

The reason you can't really do a lot with the ordering by ranking is because we don't have enough series ranked yet for it to really mean anything. I'm going to wait a while until we get more ratings before I do anything with that section of the site to improve it. I also have the stat of how many people have a specific series on their list and what list its on too. I can do some interesting things with that I think too.

I'm not sure what you mean "other options" When you're doing search by genre, you can select just about every option for the series page except for rating. (Which was done on purpose)...