For a while the Mahoro-chan bot has been posting titles, but they’re often not well upvoted or viewed and seem potentially more spammy among the titles that individuals are posting themselves out of interest. The bot was fine when this community was still pretty low on subscriber count but I’m thinking it might be past that time as engagement has gone up, and there were already other voiced concerns from members that even individual manga discussion posts were spammy.
I’m not a moderator anyhow so we’d either have to contact the bot creator (mentioned in the bot’s profile) or have a moderator do so depending on the decision.
Edit: I think @man_zonder_poespas summed up what I was thinking in a much better and concise manner in his comment: “Personally I like the idea that the chapter is posted by a fan of the series so that they’re relatively likely to respond to comments on the chapter. Y’know, have the idea that at least one person is invested in the thing being posted.”
I know we have engagement issues due to being new and very limited in size or if people are being scared off by just discussion posts. I do think that the larger the community, the better the chances of more discussion and more non-chapter posts since lurkers are always a majority.
Having some sort of pinned discussion posts as others have wanted, or a pinned awareness post to help drive more engagement I think would also at least be a sign for newcomers.
The bot is probably the same bot used on /r/manga to automatically post chapters from Mangaplus and similar services. This is usually a burst of activity during the weekends and a few submissions over the week.
It’s just a quiet place when no one really wants to comment on anything really.
Given it’s basically a direct port of the bot I don’t particularly care. Really the “problem” is the real content of communities like these are the discussions but there’s been absolutely no concerted interest or activity to drive people to visit and participate. Taking out bot updates for some series won’t change this.
I agree with your statement. The bot is more of a tool, and it’s up to us to generate the discussion to get new users to come over here.
But I think we should still have it here regardless. Even with minimal discussion, it still helps to show that there are people here who want this to be a good place to discuss Manga.
Personally I like the idea that the chapter is posted by a fan of the series so that they’re relatively likely to respond to comments on the chapter. Y’know, have the idea that at least one person is invested in the thing being posted.
Edit: in addition, if I wanted an overview of every single new chapter, I’d just go to mangadex. I’d like an overview of chapters that people are actually interested in discussing, instead.
I think we should. If anything, I’d say it should post more of the popular mangas like those being posted by people like you right now.
People just aren’t very likely to make a discussion post even if they’re an avid reader; they’d rather discuss it in an existing post, and not do anything if there isn’t one.
There’s too much to worry about like the formatting and timing (posting it even a few hours late will probably miss alot of comments) of it for most people to bother making one.
At the moment, the source code of the bot seems to look at only mangaplus and takes some sort of catalogue of what might be at the top of the release day, which often includes some less popular releases at the moment. This does miss out on a lot of other popular titles that aren’t mangaplus, though of course new bots could be brought in to fix this.
I do agree that not having a super timely bot to post immediately upon a popular title drop release can result in some missed comments, but I actually think that the majority of user posts here so far are fairly timely. I don’t speak for everyone but I used to actually use r/manga for all my updates rather than an aggregator or tracking site since I liked seeing the discussions at the same time, so it wasn’t as paramount for me that the posts were immediate upon availability.
This comment here and that I’ve also added to the body of the main post I think better sums up my original post’s intention as well as to what I think could help with actual user engagement. Having chapters being posted by one actually invested person could give way to better engagement.
Nothing is more sad than seeing a post of a title that you are excited to talk about only to see it that it has 0 comments. Atleast with people you’ll can find some solace that perhaps the poster might’ve seen your lone comment.
Any post with 0 comments is a loss for the community so I’d avoid it if possible.
