Musing a translation overhaul

The site is due some upgrades and I’m taking the opportunity to update some of the features and streamline the design. All these while maintaining WuxiaSociety’s goal to keep the site readable on all devices and ad-free.

I’m putting down some of the work I have in mind. Any feedback on the experiences you’ve had would be great in shaping how I make these changes moving forward

Better pagination

The current design splits the chapters into pages automatically but the comments section is for the whole chapter. I plan to manually split the each chapter into individual pages so that the comments are for that particular page.

Inline comments

Speaking of comments, they were disabled in the past due to excessive spam. I’ve added it back after putting up better anti-spam measures. And there is actually a new feature that I’m keen to try and generate more discussion among readers. We’ll be able to make inline comments.

This means you can highlight some text that you want to comment on, and comment about it. Others will be able to see that you are commenting on those sentences. It might help with capturing translation errors or clarify things that are unclear to readers.

My concern is I’m not sure how it might affect the readability having the comment icons showing up within the text. I’ll have to test this and see, and more importantly get feedback from readers.

Translation update

I’m looking to update the translations on the website while I’m going through this. We get a lot of feedback for the translations, especially those done by other translators in the past. Since it will be a rather major undertaking, I can only start with the in-house translations for this overhaul.

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Wow. I can’t imagine how the comments would be like but it sounds like a great idea!

Pagination has been an issue but I kinda live with it and I think most people do too. It’s already so much better than reading on other sites.

What I would add to this is to see more translations. Then again, so many sites are going down the paid route and I can’t see how it makes sense for you or the translators here to do it based on donations only.

Anyone here would be interested in crowdfunding the translations?

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Good question. Looking forward to the responses.

As always, thanks for the hard work! I like all the ideas. I sincerely hope they can bring in more people and engage with more readers.

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Cheers. Just sharing my passion for the genre. I would love to be able to just devote all my time to this.

Any updates on this?

I shared some updates in the Discord channel. I’ll post about them here in a bit.

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I can’t get on Discord and don’t really want to. So please post here if you haven’t already. I looked around but didn’t see any updates. Not pushing or anything. Just curious and a little lost (and left out from Discord)…

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Ah, sorry. It totally slipped my mind. There have been some restructuring. I highly recommend subscribing to our newsletter to get the latest updates.