"What are you reading?" Archive

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Updates

2022-06-05: Merged Contents of Different Sources By default, you can now see all reviews regardless of where they were written, rather than having to navigate to different pages. Additionally, user details also include the user's history from all sources.
The main pages now show a "Source: All" selection in which you can change it to a specific source.
2022-05-29: Sorting added Entries can now be sorted by either content or the date they were added, rather than just having their default order.
2022-02-12: New VN Titles VNDB drastically changed the way VN titles work. Due to that I had to rewrite the parsing and change the data structure of the archive. You will now see the main title of an entry, which will in most cases be the name of the English release or a mix of the romanized Japanese title combined with the English title.

As a little bonus, I also added better Japanese support. While you should usually only see latin letters, you can search for works with their original title (even just using Hiragana works).
Example: To find the entry for "Saya no Uta ~ The Song of Saya", all of the following filters will include this VN:
1. "Saya"
2. "沙耶"
3. "さや"
4. "Best VN"

As the VNDB database will change heavily over time with this change, please be prepared for inconsistencies and erros in the following weeks.
2021-12-26: r/vns Archive Started The r/vns subreddit now started a weekly "What are you reading?" topic as well. Posts from that sub will now be collected in a separate database - both archives will always have the exact same functionality with only the data being different.

You can find it here: /vnswayrarchive/
2021-07-26: Self-Replies Now Considered as Part of the Reviews As more and more reviews go over the 10,000 character limit of Reddit by the reviewers replying to their top comments, these are now considered as well. User pages have all posts merged into one and all statistics will handle them the same way.
2021-03-01: Issues Resolved Everything should be working again. Thanks to yorhel from VNDB for quickly giving feedback and fixing an issue due to the changes!
2021-03-01: Issues Due to VNDB Changes Due to VNDB making some changes in their database, this site is currently having some issues.
Known problems: Recommendations not working anymore, Some user votes are messed up, content not updating.
I'm currently working on a solution and in contact with them to resolve this ASAP.
2020-11-17: Recommendation Search Bugfixes Fixed some issues that lead to no results appearing although there should have been some for Visual Novels that are not as popular. For example, when looking for "Little Busters! SS" without English restrictions, no results were coming up. This should only have happened when searching for English only (as it's a Japanese release).
This might have some influence on other results as well - hopefully for the better!
2020-11-07: Content Search Field Hidden Minor update: As a lot of users seemed to be confusing the content search field and the filter field (looking for VNs using content search), the content search has been hidden away in an "Advanced Search" button and needs to be specifically activated. Links to user details also have been simplified.
2020-11-05: Better Size Dynamics and Further Recommendation Improvements As a first attempt to better support bigger screens (1440p, "4K" etc.) the text sizes and designs will now expand a bit when the screen is overly large. Unfortunately I can only test this on a 1440p ultrawide monitor, so if you notice anything is off, please let me know. An open issue is that the design scales back when the window itself is not viewed in fullscreen of those devices as the test is only on the window size rather than the monitor pixel density.
Additionally, a bug was fixed in the recommendation engine where users adding their VNDB ID with only 1 vote got no results even when adding additional VNs. The assumed average rating if none available has also been increased from 5.0 to 7.0 so that recommendation results don't seem too low.
2020-11-01: User Details Pages You will now find a link to a user overview page in the "By User" list. It will show basic statistics and previews of all posts. This will finally enable users to share a link to their specific profile.
If you have any further ideas what to show in the profiles, please let me know.
2020-10-31: Recommendation Engine Ultrawide Support The design of the Recommendation Engine has been adjusted so that the screen looks more stable regardless of resolutions. This way the site does not look broken anymore on ultrawide screens.

Additionally, the assumed ratings for the top 10 recommendations are now shown. Note that the highest recommendation might not necessarily have the highest rating as tags are also considered for it.
2020-04-20: Amount of Reviews Small update: The amount of reviews will now be shown in brackets after each entry (e.g. beside the titles in the "By Title" selection). This should give a better overview within search results.
2020-04-19: Review Search You can now filter the archive further by searching within the reviews itself. For example, if you're curious what people thought about Kasumi in Dies Irae, you can use the new search with the search term "Kasumi" and use the filter to only show the entries of Dies Irae. You will now have a list of Dies Irae reviews that mentioned that name somewhere in the post.
Please note that posts dealing with multiple VNs at once will lead to some false positives here, since I can't be 100% sure what part of the review is about what VN. This will unfortunately remain an issue.
2020-02-23: Extended Recommendation Catalog The recommendation catalog has been expanded to everything that VNDB has to offer, rather than just titles that have been reviewed in /r/visualnovels at least once. Note that the site might load a bit now due to this extension.
This will lead to very different results within the VNDB mode, as well as improving analyzing your own interests when using a VNDB ID with VNs that were not reviewed in reddit so far.

As always, I will monitor how this affects the results. Previously users mostly interested in sexual content had very subpar results, so this will hopefully improve that area. Nevertheless, recommendations for sexual content still have a lot of room to improve - adding fetishes when analyzing genres screws too much with recommendations for users not interested in that, while keeping them out basically leads to random recommendations with sexual content that might be tailored towards completely different tastes. Still trying to find some middle ground there. Please make use of the type filtering to get better recommendations until then.
2020-02-20: Better Recommendation Type Filtering The type filtering of the recommendation engine has been overhauled - you can now also exclude types and decide if all should be included or if one is sufficient. You should see a green "thumbs up" icon when adding a type - just click on that to change it to a "thumbs down" and it will be excluded. To change if all or just one of the types should be included, click on the "AND" text at the title (which is the default and expects all tags to be included contrary to before).
On a side note, I upgraded the server since the machine was basically at its limits with the integration of the recommendation engine. It should now be stable and run smoothly for the updates to come.
2020-02-18: Considering Genres for Recommendations Recommendations will now also see what kind of genres you seem to enjoy and consider those as well in the search (aka content-based filtering). A manual selection of VNDB tags has been used for that, as the structure of these tags unfortunately doesn't seem very fitting for that kind of usage. Automod-chan will also inform you about your two favorite genres now.
As always, this is still very experimental. Next up in the pipeline is probably letting users banning tags as well so that you can get rid of certain recommendations.
2020-02-16: Recommendation Languages Fixed The Recommendation Engine previously suggested titles in the "English only" mode that were only released in English as a Demo and/or Trial. This has now been fixed, making space for other titles.
Additionally, when having very limited results some random titles have been shown as recommendations, rather than leaving the places empty. This should also work properly now.
2020-02-15: Recommendation Algorithm Adjustments Some details about the recommendation algorithm were changed. It now considers that different users do their ratings within different ranges.
For example, you might have had very high similarities with a user who has rated a lot of things with a 9 that you did. If that user rates almost everything with a 9 on average, while you rate everything with a 6 on average, the similarity obviously isn't that high. This should now be considered. I will keep an eye on the results, as this can potentially lead to some weird results as well (users far away from you now have a negative influence, so it's possible that bad titles get pushed up since people who generally disagree with you have rated it low).

For tech nerds: Changed from a general vector similarity approach to an adjusted cosine similarity approach.
2020-02-14 (2): Bugfixes Just noticed that the tags of the recommendation engine weren't working anymore - both the recommendations and the soulmate picks will now be filtered by the tags, so they will only appear if a VN contains at least one of the tags.
Additionally, I changed the links of the archive itself so that they open in a new tab, rather than in the same window.
2020-02-14: Recommendation Engine Improvements Thanks to all the great feedback, several improvements have been done for the recommendation engine:
  • - It's now using collaborative filtering and should have much better results
  • - It now has an English only variant (active by default)
  • - It now automatically updates votes and languages once per week.
That means the archive will also benefit from vote updates in case you change your vote for a work over time.
The categories of the recommendations also have changed due to the algorithm and will now show a percentage of how similar you are to your soulmates, as well as having their highest rated VN you have not read (and weren't picked by a previous soulmate) instead of the risky picks.
2020-02-09: Recommendation Engine It's been a lot of work, but I'm finally able to introduce the /r/visualnovels Recommendation Engine!

Currently it's still working with very simple algorithms, but I'm hoping that it will already be useful and fun to use.

By default it uses the "Reddit Mode", which only considers voted reviews of this archive. You can always change it to "VNDB Mode" to consider votes of the whole VNDB database.
2020-02-04: Bugfix + Using New VNDB API Updated VNDB API calls to the 2020 standards. I also noticed that some users referenced their VN via the release, rather than the page of the VN itself (vndb.org/r). I added a logic to the crawler that will request the VN ID based on this and update the database accordingly. This means we probably lost some reviews in the past - if you notice any missing or if there are issues with new reviews due to my changes, please let me know.
2020-02-02: Optimized VN Search with Aliases Alternate titles aka aliases are now also taken from VNDB and will be considered when searching in the "By Title" list and all statistics. For example, you will now actually get the "Raging Loop" reviews when searching for it, rather than having to look for the weird "Rei-Jin-G-Lu-P" entry. Same goes for searching "SubaHibi" etc.

Please let me know if you feel like any sort of search term should lead to a specific VN and I can manually add additional ones. No, "best vn" is not a valid alias.
2019-02-16: Lazy Loading Rather than loading the whole content when visiting the page, specific reviews will now be requested once you click on a main entry. Statistic tables are excluded from this change. This should decrease loading times immensely and lead to a more fluid experience.
2018-12-26: Statistics! Hooray! Major update: You can now browse through different statistic tables - a lot more information will now be collected and summarized in those, including fetching the VNDB ratings in case users have linked their profile in the flair! Have fun playing around :). How about putting the filter to 2018 and seeing how your review year has been?
2018-12-25: Report Function To help with cleaning up falsely registered reviews, every entry can now be reported (red "report" button on the right of every entry). I will receive an e-mail notification for new reports regularly and can then manually review and hide them from the list. Usually, they should be hidden within the next 1-2 days. Thanks to 8cccc9 for this idea.
2018-12-24: Sort by Date + Marking New Entries The archive can now also be sorted by date - every thread will get its own entry, untranslated topics are marked as such. Additionally, any entry written within the last 14 days will be marked with a golden *NEW*.Thanks to Bunny_Stats for the suggestions. Merry Christmas everyone!
2018-12-23: Added More 2014 Entries and Manual Links The database has just been updated - it should now contain entries with manual vndb links (e.g. with www), as well as more entries from 2014, which reddit's search currently doesn't bring up. Manually added entries from the original archive without vndb links might be added as well in the future.