When adding a series, the name should generally be as faithful to the original as possible (if tranlsated), generally either romanji, pinyin or RR (korean) romanization of the series title.
Translated titles, and the original title in Japanese/Chinese/Korean should be added to the series as Alternate Names. The search system uses the alternate name values for it's results, so the choice of the title is basically entirely just a function of maintaining consistency with the rest of the series present.
Currently, the author/illustrator system has no provision for tracking alternate names for an entry. This will probably change in the relatively near future.
At the moment, please use the roman alphabet version of the Author/Illustrator's name.
If the author is Asian, then the name order is the surname (family name) first and the given name
last, with the surname in all capital letters. For example: TAKAHASHI Rumiko.
If the author is Western, then the name order is the given name first and the surname last, with
both names NOT in all caps, ONLY in initial caps. For example: John Scalzi.
There are currently a fairly large number of duplicate names, both in the author and illustrator listings. This is a unfortunate side-effect of the way the initial data for the site was acquired, and a way to fix it is planned.
In general, sure! This site seeks to be as encyclopedic as possible for translated/OEL fantasy and science-fiction works.
Please don't add your series if it's fan-fiction in the more traditional sense of the word, e.g. fiction using characters from popular series by other authors, celebreties, or other such content. Content that is not fantasy/sci-fi is also less desirable, though again there aren't really formal rules yet, as unwanted content has not yet been an issue.
While these rules aren't strongly enforced (and haven't been an issue so far), the administrator reserves the rights to remove series from the site at their discretion.
Basically:
If there are any doubts, or you're just curious, feed free to ask on the forum.
OEL stands for "Original English Language". In the context of this website, it's used to indicate that a item that was originally written in english, as opposed to something that has been translated to english.
The term originated from manga publishing in the early 90's, and it's been adopted here because it's convenient shorthand for "non-asian", e.g. "Western", rathern then "Eastern", without the explicit locality.
When/If non-eastern translated content becomes popular enough to have a substantive fan-translation network online, it's use will probably have to be reconsidered, but that hasn't happened yet.
Currently, any series that has not had an update within the last 14 days will be listed as "possibly stalled", and any series that has not had an update in more then 45 days will be marked as "probably stalled or dropped".
The solution here is fairly simple, just release something, and the new release will reset the timer. If you're not the translator/author, talk to the translator/author to see what's going on, maybe they need proofreading or some other help you could provide to help speed up their releases.
Yes! Documentation is here.
Absolutely, but there are a few things you have to do.
Basically, you HAVE to be consistent in your release naming. In other words, you have to
ALWAYS have c. {chapter num} or chapter {chapter num} in each
chapter relase (v. {volume/book num} or volume {vol/book num} for volumes,
part {part num} for partial chapters).
Furthermore, you need to either have the series name in the release title, or (for wordpress/blogspot blogs)
tag the series in each post.
If you post occational commentary or other non-actual-content things, you must provide some way for the feed scraper to delineate between actual releases and the additional things. This can be as simple as having a tag that is only used for actual releases.
Critically, consistency is the most vital component here. Non-standard, or different ways of referring to releases can prevent proper parsing. As an example, one blog that was examined as a potential source often had "chapter 1, part 1", "chapter 1, part 2", "chapter 1, last part". This is surprisingly difficult to parse, since the extraction system has no knowledge outside of the single title it's processing at a time. As such, it does not know what was before the "last part", and therefore cannot extract anything meaningful.
If you're interested in seeing how it works internally, the chapter, vol and fragment values are extracted from the title by a specialized parser written specificically for that purpose (it was fun)! The relevant source code is here.
If you're doing the above, post about it on the forum,
drop me a mail at info at wlnupdates dot com, or submit an
issue on github, and I'll get it added
as soon as possible. Altneratively, You can bug me on IRC: I idle in #madokami on Rizon
under the nick fake-name.
The similar series list on each series page is calculated by looking up the series with the most tags in common. If a series doesn't have any tags or it has only generic tags, the similar series output will be incoherent or seemingly random.
If this bothers you, add more tags! Newly added tags will immediately improve the similar series search.
Sorry about that, Currently most of the names came form scraping the title tags of each site, and
then just doing a little manual cleanup. Drop me a mail at info at wlnupdates dot com, and
I'll try to fix it promptly.
Alternatively, the mapping table is here, if you want to just pull-request your
fixes.
Currently, all release and series titles, as well as series descriptions derived from the rss feeder system are re-cased under certain circumstances. Primarily, if the content is all lowercase, or > 80% UPPERCASE, it will be involuntarily Title Cased by the feeder system. This is because some people appear to have mis-placed their shift key, and others seem to have caps-lock stuck on, and either is both annoying and incorrect.
I'm literally using RSS for it's designed purpose. Why do you have a RSS feed if you don't intend it to be used as a RSS feed?