trackr.moe - The Future, or Lack Thereof

As of today, I’ve started the process of winding down trackr.moe.
This was not a decision I made lightly, but is one that I feel is required to make my life more simple.

Why?

If I were to put it simply, it’s that no longer have the time nor the will to maintain the site anymore. I have started a new job which has taken a lot of my time and energy, and I have also moved away from using the site myself as a main source of updates and this has been the case for almost a year now.
Although I’ve tried to keep it alive, I’ve been doing it somewhat reluctantly as it’s been source of stress over the past year.

What now?

The site will probably stay alive in some form, albeit locked down and without support.
I may still do updates if MangaDex breaks, or for site url changes, but that is about it.

I could hand the site over to someone else, however I’ve heard too many horror stories of that going completely wrong to really consider it.
The site is completely open source on Github, and all tracking data is exportable in some form, so if someone wants to fork it or even create their own version of the site, it should be fairly simple to do.

At the moment the plan looks something like this, although this may change:

• 02/07 (Today)
  • Registration closed to new users.
  • Report issue function disabled.
• 01/08
  • Normal updating of series on the backend has been disabled. This reduces about 99.9% of the requests the site sends out every day. This means series that don’t appear in site recently updated lists will no longer update. Sites that lack the ability to update via the custom updater will as a result no longer work (MangaFox, WebToons & ZeroScans) and as such will be disabled.
    New DB additions will still work, and will do a one-off update to populate the required data.
  • Github repo archived (Disables issues, pull requests, commits etc.).
• Before the end of the year
  • The site will most likely migrate back to the old shared server which may slow the site down a bit.
• Whenever a decent replacement pops up
  • Site will shutdown, although exports will still be available in some fashion.

After Thoughts

In retrospect, trackr.moe was a good learning experience.
For me, it was the first big project I created myself, and it’s gone above and beyond my initial ideas for it. I honestly didn’t expect the site to still be alive over two and a half years later, but here we are. Although I can’t say the site was ever popular, I’m happy that we kept a pretty consistant 400-500 active users over the past 2.5 years as well, despite no self-promotion outside the original release reddit post on /r/manga.

If by some miracle my life changes and I end up with loads more free time, I may reboot the site in the future, but honestly I would much prefer to see someone else take the idea and see what they can do with it.

If you’re curious about me, well don’t expect to see me anywhere as I’m pretty much a hermit, but I am somewhat semi-active on my GitHub, and you can also check my About page for a full list of other relevant profiles if you care for that.

Thanks for the support over the past few years, it’s been fun experience.