For a while the Mahoro-chan bot has been posting titles, but they’re often not well upvoted or viewed and seem potentially more spammy among the titles that individuals are posting themselves out of interest. The bot was fine when this community was still pretty low on subscriber count but I’m thinking it might be past that time as engagement has gone up, and there were already other voiced concerns from members that even individual manga discussion posts were spammy.
I’m not a moderator anyhow so we’d either have to contact the bot creator (mentioned in the bot’s profile) or have a moderator do so depending on the decision.
Edit: I think @man_zonder_poespas summed up what I was thinking in a much better and concise manner in his comment: “Personally I like the idea that the chapter is posted by a fan of the series so that they’re relatively likely to respond to comments on the chapter. Y’know, have the idea that at least one person is invested in the thing being posted.”
I know we have engagement issues due to being new and very limited in size or if people are being scared off by just discussion posts. I do think that the larger the community, the better the chances of more discussion and more non-chapter posts since lurkers are always a majority.
Having some sort of pinned discussion posts as others have wanted, or a pinned awareness post to help drive more engagement I think would also at least be a sign for newcomers.
Perhaps a good way to handle this might be to have a single week’s updates mega-post at the end of each week with top level comments starting separate threads for each released chapter in that week?
There is a slight tradeoff though, it minimizes spam but also discussion on chapter releases in the beginning of the week would have to wait till the weekend
I’m not as fond of this option as it doesn’t as quickly notify members of new releases and garner as much engagement.
Yep it’s the main drawback, but the only way to actually notify people in a timely manner would be to keep it as is with new posts for every chapter
Also having the chapter-wise posts is a good thing imo. Coming accross random manga chapter updates on reddit has helped find some nice titles over time. It’s great for engagement and discovery both. So I think it’s safe to not classify these posts as spam and let the bot roll