Project: Asura Revival!
Hey everyone,
To preface, this is a bit of a longer announcement but it covers some important updates, so please read through it if you can.
We've been working on a lot of things behind the scenes, and I'd like to go over the most notable stuff with you guys.
Today is the 26th of March, and in the last 5 days we've:
- • Fully transitioned to the new site
- • Moved back to the OG domain! asuracomic.net → asurascans.com
- • Upgraded to a much more powerful server while somehow reducing our old server costs by 8x. Our server load now peaks at 10%!
- • Migrated all of our images to a CDN instead of self-hosting, so there will be no more downtime due to images overloading our server
With the website specifically, we have never been in a more healthy spot compared to now.
Group Updates
This week we were also able to make an incredible amount of progress as a group.
Fixing Managers
The group had a number of issues so one of the things I helped with was re-introducing "fixing managers", but improved. Fixing managers deal with fixing chapters that we notice have issues or were reported. Due to how this system was previously designed though, fixes weren't always being made. We've relaunched the role now in a way that eliminates motivation issues so you should start noticing fewer issues overall and much faster fixes when new chapters have problems.
Moderation Team
There were a lot of offensive and low-quality comments on the site with no one but me actively moderating them, so we put together a dedicated moderation team, and they were able to clear the entire backlog of reports (there were a lot) the same day. We expect to stay caught up moving forward.
On that note — if you're trying to maintain a token streak, please avoid posting spam comments. It makes the moderators' job much harder.
Team Restructure
We've also made some internal changes to how the team is structured to improve communication, speed, and overall quality:
- • Removed the Head roles and moved to a flatter setup so decisions and feedback flow faster
- • Trimmed the team down to focus on our most active and dependable staff, so your favourite series are handled more consistently
- • Will soon be moving a lot of repetitive management work to our new system, giving leadership more time to focus on the things that matter most
Reader-First, Always
With all that said, time to get to the nitty gritty.
Asura is and will always be a reader-first site and it's why we outgrew groups much older than us as fast as we did in the past.
We recognise there's been issues over time, and we're doing absolutely everything we can to go back to this, even with the limitations placed on us. And while we understand all the criticism from some of you over the years, I want to address a few of the ones that were riddled with misconceptions.
"Asura Scans has a lot of ads"
We are one of the few sites that run no ads, and we have not run third-party ads since roughly midway through last year. This was done to protect readers from NSFW and gambling ads and to avoid ruining the reading experience. Our earnings would be higher if we did run ads.
"Asura Scans is greedy because it has subscriptions"
Without subscriptions, we simply can't afford to run the site. If the goal were to squeeze as much money as possible, we could have gone with a coin-based system and charged per chapter, like other groups with a fraction of our readerbase are, and they are earning significantly more than we do. Instead we went with a subscription model, where our most expensive subscription costs a little over $1 per month, with 99.9% of the content on our site always available to read for free, with or without an account.
So to get to the point, please cut us some slack where you can, we're pushing hard to improve things, and Project: Asura Revival is moving forward faster than ever before!
I also wanted to go over new features on the site, but this announcement was getting too long. Sorry for the info dump :)
P.S. Dropped some Asura fan art in the comments.