Rating Suggestion

So, I resubscribed even though I had initially decided not to, but that new Maakuro was too tempting. I figured I would make a tiny list of things I think could make the site better.

A Rating System

I want to be able to group issue chapters together by their approval from other readers. Competing sites (can't list names here) have things rated out of five most commonly, and allow you to search for content that ONLY falls under that rating. Being able to know what people approve of and like the most is a good way for new subscribers to find the best content in the backlog of chapters they weren't subscribed for when they initially released.

Reading Issues as a Whole

Fakku content that comes via the subscription is a simulpublishing of three different hentai magazines in Japan. The chapters are released incrementally over the month, but it's generally timed in a way that has all the content in each magazine released by the time the next one is out in Japan. After this content releases, though, it would be really cool if they were grouped together like the chapters of a book, and allowed you to read through them in one seamless session. This would also help the troubling task of clicking a bunch of links every time you finish a chapter while fapping. Any time you spend not looking at porn is wasted arousal!

A More Clear and Extensive Search Option

Currently, each chapter has a variety of tags, and you can search through groupings of content that has those tags, but the ability to diversify your search is poorly communicated. You can just type in a set of tags in the search bar, and the site will cooperate, but how did you know that would happen in the first place? Simply saying "add tags or exclude using -" would go a long way to helping new subscribers out. Also, as it stands, simply putting in "-vanilla" or something similar produces an error page. Combining tag groupings with ratings I suggested earlier would do great as well.

Book Deals

Currently, the biggest rift between good and GREAT content lies within the Fakku Books section. Bosshi, Hisasi, Gunma, and all the famous artists produce extended narratives with their hentai and they are released by Fakku as a complete set. While I don't know if the individual chapters of those books are excluded from subscriptions with the foreknowledge of being able to group them and sell them separately (I sure hope not), it is still a huge hit to people looking to subscribe that they cannot read the "best" content the site has to offer.

The books are also heavily advertised, as individual chapters come up during searches, on the main page updates, on tag subscriptions, and basically every single place you go on the site. It's obvious that the content is desired, and is thus heavily advertised, but it puts stress and frustration on subscribers who are already paying for content that could be considered inferior.

While including books for free with your subscription is illogical from a financial standpoint to Fakku, something like a 20% discount for subscribers would go a long way to gaining support for the subscription service, and make it feel more worth it in the long haul.



Hopefully my suggestions were sound and appreciated, and I only make my complaints in the hope that Fakku can continue to grow even better. Thank you for your time!

I find everything you said desirable. I myself suggested implementing a way of reading related issues somehow easier, so that you don't have to go looking for the next chapter after you finish one. Thumbs up.

I believe this was brought up before, and I believe it was brought up before by you.


Just one quick example with Gujira's Book

There was a chapter in there that was already released via subscription and that chapter Is still available to subscribers Then when the book was released that chapter was Re-released and brought up to book standards. So now we have 2 of the same chapter on FAKKU with different translation specifications one for people who subscribe and one for people who buy the book.

Otherwise back to your original topic everything sounds great.

Uh... thanks for the callout from eight months ago on a single sentence of my huge topic with visual aides?

And as you can tell, that initial topic that you referenced had me accusing them of directly doing so.

My mentioning in THIS topic was that I'm still not entirely certain on the subject. I didn't "assume" anything in this case. I just... still don't completely understand how things work in that regard >.>

My apologies for calling you out, I wasn't trying to do anything beyond posting, when I saw what you wrote in that little section I cut before my mind instantly went back to what I remembered being said before which is what I posted.

Other then that I believe what we have seen them do for Gujira's book and Key's book will be the norm (until a better option comes around) so that way subscribers have access to the chapters that they should have access to and Book purchasers will have access to the chapters they purchased.

Low key though... that's some scary memory XD

I don't even remember saying that!

I honestly think a rating system would result in every vanilla release being 4.5 to 5 stars and more "controversial" releases dropping lower. I think being able to see the most favorited releases would do the job on a more positive note. I can appreciate wanting to rate stuff though, I myself have collections named 1 through 5 that I use to rank stuff I've read.

Reading a magazine would be cool, especially if they included the front and back covers. I agree the search could use a little work.

As for the books. We can try to compare this list with Fakku's releases and see that, for example, no work by Bosshi appears to have been excluded. This is the sort of thing you should actually look into before throwing the idea out there. I get that you're not directly accusing them, but it certainly sounds like you have a reason to believe so.

In any case a discount for subscribers would be nice. Even 10% like the discount at Humble Bundle with their sub would be cool, even if the savings ended up being pretty minimal.

Practically speaking, a rating system would have everything at either 5 stars or 4.5 stars (if there are halves) with the exception of rape and netorare. It wouldn't be a wise use of development time. We'd prefer to help users find good content, for example by improving the Related Content feature and/or presenting Related Content in the reader itself after the last page of a chapter.

Reading through whole issues is something we have planned. However, there are several challenges. The most immediate problem is that we are still about 35-40 chapters behind, most of the older magazines aren't complete. In addition, the full print magazines have a lot of advertisements, and we have to decide which are worth typesetting and which are not.

I believe there are plans to better explain various search features, but it's lower priority than improving and expanding upon Related Content and Browse.

Wouldn't the comments in the chapter be a better gauge of what people thought?

>Rating System

Yes, thank you for saying this.


Spoiler: it still doesn't work. Fakku had a "most favorited" page before, it was like all vanilla.


Since when was that a sensible option? The comment section has always been garbage. Memes gets upvoted and unwanted comments gets downvoted.
Freaky are you becoming senile?

>A More Clear and Extensive Search Option
I agree with you that "-tag" in the beginning of a search produce an error message is dumb. Jacob pls fix.

The search feature operates exactly like EX. But Jacob should include some note somewhere as to how to use it.

If I remember correctly someone once mentioned on the forums that the ability to make reviews of chapters or books was in the works, I think maybe reviews would be more useful than ratings. Maybe the reviews could be rated by the users a bit like animelist

I was thinking... how can a review really work in this space? I think yes, in some cases reviews would help people make decisions for purchases (especially Doujinshi singles or Books) but we ought to take personal preference into account. Everyone has their own tastes and their own bias. If I were to review guro or ntr manga I probably wouldn't have a lot of positive things to say, aside from artwork. I try to do my best to not blindly hate, but I that doesn't mean I can still produce an objective review. Amusingly enough someone who likes those types of genres could probably find stuff they like by searching for negative reviews from people who love vanilla type manga. That's probably an indicator of a flawed system. I think it's best to avoid turning people away from content unless you're sure they won't like it.

I think a better system would be to have curated content. Perhaps long time community members in good standing could apply to be a curator and they can recommend or recommend against a certain work. This way readers can gauge how closely their tastes align with a curator's and that person's feedback can guide them in the future.

Actually I already try to do this with the collections system but I think it might be more useful to call attention to a "curator's" comments (or a full blown review if that's what people want). And I doubt a lot of people actively check my collections for updates so I think it might be a good idea to have a separate page for curation too.

This is a little off topic but I think FAKKU is not (and never really was) good at exposing old content. You can definitely do searches and check your favorite tags but the older issues (which have some really fantastic stuff) will still appear at the back of the list. You can always look up magazines by the issue, but the oldest stuff... is still at the back of the list. As the library goes these problems will only get worse. And I remember before the purge, I would probably spend a lot of time looking through Most Downloaded or Most Favorited. Those weren't all that useful and well they don't even exist anymore. Having curation might help address this as a curator could feature one or a few titles or even artists on their page (they could choose some daily favorites or something).

Thanks for sharing these ideas on how to improve the site. We do have some ideas we'd like to implement that have been discussed internally, but keep brainstorming as I think we're all open to hear what users would like. I've left a note for the developers to look into all of this.

Disclosure: Below are my feelings about this topic, not any promises/hints about changes to the FAKKU site/features/whatever.



This is one of my major points. Personally I feel like ratings will do one of two things, as said by others:

• Reduce Readership on less popular tags

• Be meaningless

If everyone rates everything 5 starts it's the same as not having a rating system. If only NTR/Forced is rated poorly, then it's also pretty meaningless because at that point it just re-states the tags on the content, and at that point we used development time to reiterate tags on content.

Now, where a rating system MAY be useful is for personalized recommendations. Ratings wouldn't be public, but associated with a user (You wouldn't see "Users rated this content 5 stars! or anything). Your ratings would be compared against tags and the system could gauge how much you'd like a certain piece of content and prioritize showing you content you'll probably like over content you probably won't.



The difficulty still is with visibility. How would we make it known that there are curated lists? It would also require that someone makes sure the curators themselves are active and, well, curating. While it would be awesome if this could be 100% driven by the community, I think there would need to be considerable development to make it work and make it visible. While it would "piggy-back" the collection system, there is no way, right now, to make user collections a piece of "content". This would likely be a long-term feature, but one that definitely has potential.



This is something that we may look into again, but the overall benefit seems to be pretty low, and here's why: People like what they like, and compared to a single book, the content in a single issue of a magazine is extremely diverse. Take X-Eros 43 for example: The first two chapters, in order are Today's the Day We... followed by Deflowered Maiden. Now there are people who aren't bothered by this transition, but it's definitely a major tonal shift going from "sweet first time sex" to "Blackmail induced schoolgirl prostitution". Also, we don't release the magazine in chronological order (spoiler alert!), so the "issue" would either be not true to the original order of the JP printing, or not useful until the entire magazine was released.

I think the "solution" here is to put suggestions at the end of chapters and either automatically advance to them or allow the user to link straight to other content from the reader.


On the point of "Chapters that are part of the subscription but are also now in a book": This is a tricky point. When we release subscription chapters we will almost assuredly not know if:

• The chapter we released will ever be in a tank

• We will publish the tank the chapter is in, if any

So once we do publish a tank with some subscription chapters in it we're faced with another problem: Do we, update the subscription release, and ostensibly give away the book chapter for free (which usually has updated art/titles and sometimes additional pages), or keep both? We're working on figuring it out.

Sorry for the wall of text, and I'm not trying to be a big old grump here. I want everyone to be able to read whatever they want, easily. I want people in the west to see ero manga as more than just "Oh sweet my favorite anime characters are fucking" (Which is 100% cool, btw, just not everything it has to offer). I want people to see ero manga as more than just "fucked up shit and tentacles". I don't want ero manga to be "porn for nerds!" or "otaku porn". I want people to see ero manga as art and enjoy it however they want.

I think the best way to introduce readers to more content that they might have otherwise not found by themselves is with tagging. Doing it this way, readers can find similar content and artists that might cater to their taste. Of course for this to work, everything needs to be properly tagged and there needs to be a plethora of tags to choose from.


Steam's curation system is hardly being used anymore, so I don't think that will be a reliable option.

Although that might work if it's something fakku curates on the front page, like how pixiv has highlights, fakku could have a artist/tag showcase to present chapters that are worthwhile.

I would say that's Valve's fault. As far as I can tell they haven't done anything to improve this feature in a while. Furthermore that anyone can be a Steam curator is a little off putting to me. There are many thousands of them and I only care about a small handful. I don't think this site would need that many. And to make things worse, an independent curator is free to simply be lazy or update unpredictably. If FAKKU content was curated, I would favor having selected volunteers who would be encouraged to stick to a schedule for updating their page or whatever. What I have in mind is another browsing page that's meaningful for users to visit regularly.

If you look at the Browse page there are a few "popular categories" with their own lists. Maybe that's helpful for some people but I'm sure better things are possible.

@harry I definitely understand that adding site features like this isn't trivial. I just wanted to put my thoughts out there. Hope something from this discussion might help make the site better

As was said above, good suggestions. I'll start thinking about a few of these, lots of things we could do to improve things I think.