v0.8.4.2-ls60

CI Report:

https://ci-tests.linuxserver.io/linuxserver/kavita/v0.8.4.2-ls60/index.html

LinuxServer Changes:

Rebase to Ubuntu Noble.

Remote Changes:

A few small things slipped past.

I want to take this space to first apologize to our users that manually tag their metadata in Kavita. Post release has been an eye opener to the different ways uses of Kavita and a lesson learned to work harder to preserve data between releases. I always try, but sometimes big lift and shifts like this are needed and aren't easy to preserve data. I will take it on myself to strive for excellence and do what is feasible to preserve data. I don't foresee many major refactors like this happening in the near future.

On more positive news, MetronInfo.xml has become stabilized. This is a step towards advancing the metadata format for Comics and Manga (and potentially books in the future). I have worked closely with Brian (the creator) to include Manga into the format. Kavita is dedicated towards supporting the format, that work is planned for next year. Read up more about it here.

If you have a lot of metadata that was tagged just via the UI, you can try this script a user wrote to migrate the data. Grab a backup from v0.8.3 and run this against it. You need to update oldDb and newDb. I cannot offer support for this script.

I did convert this to python via ChatGPT and added instructions, it will be much easier but I did not test it. You can find the script here.

Fixed

• Fixed: Send to on mobile was still broken
• Fixed: Changed On Deck to use a workaround as a temp fix
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where on non-English locales parsing numbers would throw an exception and cause files to not be ingested.
• Fixed: Bulk library delete wasn't hooked up
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where updating chapter metadata with a new person, the normalized name was saved
• Fixed: Potentially fixed a bug where adding multiple people on a series via UI will throw an exception (Was not able to reproduce, but added extra safety logic)

v0.8.4.2-ls59

CI Report:

https://ci-tests.linuxserver.io/linuxserver/kavita/v0.8.4.2-ls59/index.html

LinuxServer Changes:

Rebase to Ubuntu Noble.

Remote Changes:

A few small things slipped past.

I want to take this space to first apologize to our users that manually tag their metadata in Kavita. Post release has been an eye opener to the different ways uses of Kavita and a lesson learned to work harder to preserve data between releases. I always try, but sometimes big lift and shifts like this are needed and aren't easy to preserve data. I will take it on myself to strive for excellence and do what is feasible to preserve data. I don't foresee many major refactors like this happening in the near future.

On more positive news, MetronInfo.xml has become stabilized. This is a step towards advancing the metadata format for Comics and Manga (and potentially books in the future). I have worked closely with Brian (the creator) to include Manga into the format. Kavita is dedicated towards supporting the format, that work is planned for next year. Read up more about it here.

If you have a lot of metadata that was tagged just via the UI, you can try this script a user wrote to migrate the data. Grab a backup from v0.8.3 and run this against it. You need to update oldDb and newDb. I cannot offer support for this script.

I did convert this to python via ChatGPT and added instructions, it will be much easier but I did not test it. You can find the script here.

Fixed

• Fixed: Send to on mobile was still broken
• Fixed: Changed On Deck to use a workaround as a temp fix
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where on non-English locales parsing numbers would throw an exception and cause files to not be ingested.
• Fixed: Bulk library delete wasn't hooked up
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where updating chapter metadata with a new person, the normalized name was saved
• Fixed: Potentially fixed a bug where adding multiple people on a series via UI will throw an exception (Was not able to reproduce, but added extra safety logic)

v0.8.4.2-ls58

CI Report:

https://ci-tests.linuxserver.io/linuxserver/kavita/v0.8.4.2-ls58/index.html

LinuxServer Changes:

Rebase to Ubuntu Noble.

kavita Changes:

A few small things slipped past.

I want to take this space to first apologize to our users that manually tag their metadata in Kavita. Post release has been an eye opener to the different ways uses of Kavita and a lesson learned to work harder to preserve data between releases. I always try, but sometimes big lift and shifts like this are needed and aren't easy to preserve data. I will take it on myself to strive for excellence and do what is feasible to preserve data. I don't foresee many major refactors like this happening in the near future.

On more positive news, MetronInfo.xml has become stabilized. This is a step towards advancing the metadata format for Comics and Manga (and potentially books in the future). I have worked closely with Brian (the creator) to include Manga into the format. Kavita is dedicated towards supporting the format, that work is planned for next year. Read up more about it here.

If you have a lot of metadata that was tagged just via the UI, you can try this script a user wrote to migrate the data. Grab a backup from v0.8.3 and run this against it. You need to update oldDb and newDb. I cannot offer support for this script.

I did convert this to python via ChatGPT and added instructions, it will be much easier but I did not test it. You can find the script here.

Fixed

• Fixed: Send to on mobile was still broken
• Fixed: Changed On Deck to use a workaround as a temp fix
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where on non-English locales parsing numbers would throw an exception and cause files to not be ingested.
• Fixed: Bulk library delete wasn't hooked up
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where updating chapter metadata with a new person, the normalized name was saved
• Fixed: Potentially fixed a bug where adding multiple people on a series via UI will throw an exception (Was not able to reproduce, but added extra safety logic)

v0.8.4.2-ls57

CI Report:

https://ci-tests.linuxserver.io/linuxserver/kavita/v0.8.4.2-ls57/index.html

LinuxServer Changes:

Rebase to Ubuntu Noble.

kavita Changes:

A few small things slipped past.

I want to take this space to first apologize to our users that manually tag their metadata in Kavita. Post release has been an eye opener to the different ways uses of Kavita and a lesson learned to work harder to preserve data between releases. I always try, but sometimes big lift and shifts like this are needed and aren't easy to preserve data. I will take it on myself to strive for excellence and do what is feasible to preserve data. I don't foresee many major refactors like this happening in the near future.

On more positive news, MetronInfo.xml has become stabilized. This is a step towards advancing the metadata format for Comics and Manga (and potentially books in the future). I have worked closely with Brian (the creator) to include Manga into the format. Kavita is dedicated towards supporting the format, that work is planned for next year. Read up more about it here.

If you have a lot of metadata that was tagged just via the UI, you can try this script a user wrote to migrate the data. Grab a backup from v0.8.3 and run this against it. You need to update oldDb and newDb. I cannot offer support for this script.

I did convert this to python via ChatGPT and added instructions, it will be much easier but I did not test it. You can find the script here.

Fixed

• Fixed: Send to on mobile was still broken
• Fixed: Changed On Deck to use a workaround as a temp fix
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where on non-English locales parsing numbers would throw an exception and cause files to not be ingested.
• Fixed: Bulk library delete wasn't hooked up
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where updating chapter metadata with a new person, the normalized name was saved
• Fixed: Potentially fixed a bug where adding multiple people on a series via UI will throw an exception (Was not able to reproduce, but added extra safety logic)

v0.8.4.2-ls56

CI Report:

https://ci-tests.linuxserver.io/linuxserver/kavita/v0.8.4.2-ls56/index.html

LinuxServer Changes:

Rebase to Ubuntu Noble.

kavita Changes:

A few small things slipped past.

I want to take this space to first apologize to our users that manually tag their metadata in Kavita. Post release has been an eye opener to the different ways uses of Kavita and a lesson learned to work harder to preserve data between releases. I always try, but sometimes big lift and shifts like this are needed and aren't easy to preserve data. I will take it on myself to strive for excellence and do what is feasible to preserve data. I don't foresee many major refactors like this happening in the near future.

On more positive news, MetronInfo.xml has become stabilized. This is a step towards advancing the metadata format for Comics and Manga (and potentially books in the future). I have worked closely with Brian (the creator) to include Manga into the format. Kavita is dedicated towards supporting the format, that work is planned for next year. Read up more about it here.

If you have a lot of metadata that was tagged just via the UI, you can try this script a user wrote to migrate the data. Grab a backup from v0.8.3 and run this against it. You need to update oldDb and newDb. I cannot offer support for this script.

I did convert this to python via ChatGPT and added instructions, it will be much easier but I did not test it. You can find the script here.

Fixed

• Fixed: Send to on mobile was still broken
• Fixed: Changed On Deck to use a workaround as a temp fix
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where on non-English locales parsing numbers would throw an exception and cause files to not be ingested.
• Fixed: Bulk library delete wasn't hooked up
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where updating chapter metadata with a new person, the normalized name was saved
• Fixed: Potentially fixed a bug where adding multiple people on a series via UI will throw an exception (Was not able to reproduce, but added extra safety logic)

v0.8.4-ls55

CI Report:

https://ci-tests.linuxserver.io/linuxserver/kavita/v0.8.4-ls55/index.html

LinuxServer Changes:

Rebase to Ubuntu Noble.

kavita Changes:

After rewriting 50K lines of code last release, I decided it was best to take a break and focus on the bugs that resulted and a few that had piled up. This release is bug focused, but of course I stuck a few big features in with it.

Scanner

One issue that has been cropping up as we attract more users with larger libraries or libraries laid out in the Publisher/Series style is the scanner. Users with large libraries modify their library quite a bit and the old scanner had issues with change detection. v0.8.3 had quite a nasty bug which required forced library scans to ingest new data. There was also the notorious FK issue that was more common for larger libraries.

To fix these issues, I rewrote the scanner from the ground up to be more reliable. This was a (painful) 3 week effort working closely with a dedicated set of testers on a canary release to be nightly and stable ready. The new scanner will be slower than the old one. As of now, I feel that once the main slow first scan is done, it's actually performing much better. With this new scanner, there were some other major changes.

People Re-architecture

In order to reduce the FK issue in the scanner, I also needed to tackle the 80+ hour re-architecture of how people work within Kavita. When I started, with my limited knowledge of the scene or what Kavita would grow to become, I implemented people as tags, much like how ComicInfo does. This is constrained when you want to make people more entity-focused, like having a dedicated page for them.

With this release, you can now view individual details of a person, set a cover and description about the person and see their works and individual issues they worked on. You can also browse authors and artists, like other software has. This is just the start, please leave feedback for me via Feature Requests, so I can build this feature out more and make it a richer experience. Note: Any Smart Filters that relied on people will need manual intervention to correct. A force scan will be required to regenerate writer information.

Special Keyword Removal

The last thing with the scanner was removing Kavita's ability to detect and classify certain keywords as Special. Like Omake or Annual would classify a file as a special. While this is extremely handy in the Manga scene, there were numerous reports over the years that required manual workarounds by users. In order to behave more reliably, I opened a discussion this year for removal and made the final call. Specials going forward will need the SP marker on the filename (or tagged internally).

CoversDB

Kavita has had the ability to download and display favicon and publisher images with a fallback repository being hosted on the main Kavita website. In this release, I've moved all that functionality and those images over to a new CoversDB repo. This repo will be the home for anything related to pulling images for Kavita instances. I plan to enhance this further as new features come to Kavita.

Small QoL Features

Last Read Filter is a new feature that allows you to pass a number that will be subtracted from TODAY, upping the dynamic function and allowing users to build Smart Filters like "Haven't read in a month".

Colorscape Polish The colorscape system has been polished even further. I spent a good amount of time adding some randomness, fixed a bug with colorscape resetting between navigation, and tried to tweak where colors go to avoid harsh contrasts. It's not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. If you're passionate about the colorscape system, I welcome collaboration.

Bulk Library Actions This is something @DieselTech has been pushing me to add and the time is finally here. For users that have a lot of libraries (like Diesel and his 200+), sometimes it's quite a pain to update the settings of them all or perform some actions. Now in Kavita there are some limited bulk options, like refreshing covers or copying settings from one library to another (Scan currently disabled).

Recap

This release has been a ton of work on my part, but I felt it was important to squash the bugs first and ensure Kavita remains stable while I continue to add more features and bring a richer experience to users. My next release is still aimed at finishing the UX Overhaul with attention on Kavita+. With the holidays coming up, it is expected that this will take longer than most releases.

For those that have seen, we have hit over 65K active installs. It's absolutely amazing that a small project I started due to Ubooquity not having metadata has turned into such a massive project with a huge userbase. I want to give my thanks again to those in the community that have raised bugs, feature requests, give support in the discord/reddit, those who give me donations via OC/Kavita+, the translators, and of course my wife that helps support me pouring so much time into the project. I'm excited to continue building Kavita and bring about more of our visions into the software and see what is possible.

People metadata will be removed on update. A force scan is required to repopulate in the new system. A force scan/first scan will be much slower than before.

Added

• Added: Manage Libraries now has bulk actions. You can trigger multiple scans (not file scans, but refresh covers or colorscapes, etc) or copy settings from one library to multiple. Shift+select works as well.
• Added: Added a new page for all People within Kavita. From this page, you can see their works across Kavita.
• Added: Ability to see individual chapters/issues (limited to 20) a person has.
• Added: Ability to add images to the person via UI/API. A more automated method is planned in the future.
• Added: Added the ability to browse all Writers and Artists (cover artist) in one page. This should help book users that like to browse by author. (Feature Request: #2556 - 23 votes) (Thanks @MrRobotjs for some css on the Person detail page)
• Added: Added the ability to trigger the general cleanup (which normally runs at midnight) manually in case you need to clear unlinked people, covers, etc.
• Added: Reading List and Collection cards now show a badge showing the number of series/items underneath.
• Added: New Filter option called Last Read which allows a number to be passed in and will dynamically calculate a date from TODAY() matched against reading time. This allows for users to build even more dynamic smart filters to find things not read in a month or read within the past 7 days.
• Added: Added back a lot of the metadata that had to be removed from the top of the series detail page in the UX overhaul, like Language, Release Year, Format, and Reading Time
• Added: Added Details tab to volume details page
• Added: (Kavita+) New Sync Details button on smart collections that shows an easier to digest view of Series and missing series.
• Added: Bulk send to is now available for chapters/volumes
• Added: Added bulk deletion for chapters/volumes

Changed

• Changed: Optimized a number of methods within the Scanner to reduce memory and CPU time
• Changed: Moved a lot of the chapter scanner logging to Trace.
• Changed: Scanner can now choose to parallel parse files when there are over 100 in a directory
• Changed: Changed how detection and scanning of dirty directories works. The scanner will now parse bottom-up to reduce any potential misses and avoid different layouts working differently. This has extra I/O checks but much greater reliability and should reduce the amount of work needed to ingest changes after the first scan.
• Changed: LocalizedSeries merging with Series is now done at a higher level and performs much better (in terms of reliability)
• Changed: People are now entity based which allows for a richer experience in Kavita.
• Changed: Clicking on any person in Kavita will now open their dedicated page which showcases their different works.
• Changed: (Performance) Some large refactors to the scanner to help with the FK bug. The scanner should be slower but consume much less memory, especially for well tagged systems.
• Changed: Kavita no longer parses keywords from filenames and groups as a Special. The way to mark a special going forward will be explicitly with SP01, SP02, etc. Specials can be flat in the series folder or ideally in Specials/ folder.
• Changed: Changed logging level on some of the loggers that could become noisy
• Changed: Refactored some of the post-series work to a separate thread.
• Changed: Ensure mobile actionable modal is fullscreen and centered vertically
• Changed: Update to Angular 18 and other backend dependencies
• Changed: When a setting is invalid, clicking outside the setting item will not close and edit is disabled.
• Changed: Changed the smart filters page to open in the same window (but still available to open in new tab)
• Changed: (Performance) Made the pipe that turns the language codes into full names use a dedicated API which is faster
• Changed: Improved the wording for Single Volume chapters on Series detail page (and person detail page)
• Changed: Kavita now uses a different repo for publisher images and favicons (https://github.com/Kareadita/CoversDB). Any changes should be made here.
• Changed: You can now edit the person name in the UI. If not corrected in the metadata, a duplicate person will be created. This will be tweaked in the future once Alia...

v0.8.3.2-ls54

CI Report:

https://ci-tests.linuxserver.io/linuxserver/kavita/v0.8.3.2-ls54/index.html

LinuxServer Changes:

Rebase to Ubuntu Noble.

kavita Changes:

The UX refresh release has been great, a lot of great feedback has come in, along with a few bugs that got missed during testing. I knew there would be some, especially when the new UX was 50K lines of code difference. I picked up as many as I could that didn't require large periods of time for testing. Unless there is anything major that comes, this should be the last hotfix and I will start work on v0.8.4.

Changed

• Changed: Instead of showing 'Special' on chapter cards that aren't real, show a dash instead
• Changed: Changed how the warning about Email settings and the Test flow worked to be less intrusive
• Changed: (Performance) Small memory improvement when returning reading list items over OPDS
• Changed: Changed 'Edit Series Information' tooltip to 'Edit Information' as it's now generic for other entities
• Changed: Adjusted the logic for displaying chapter information when the chapter belongs to a single volume.

Fixed

• Fixed: Fixed a bug where all chapter cards would always say chapter, instead of issue
• Fixed: Fixed some edge case styling issues on cards
• Fixed: Fixed the wording for the edit tooltip to be more generic since used on other pages, not just series
• Fixed: Fixed Cover Artists still showing instead of Artist in Search
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where task settings weren't saving
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where when highlighting text in a setting item, the setting would close. Now it will only close if you click outside the item and there is no selection.
• Fixed: Fixed an issue where validators would reject payload when password was over 32 characters
• Fixed: Genres/Tags margins on details tab wasn't aligned well with People information
• Fixed: Fixed an issue where Cover Image Size wasn't displaying on the UI
• Fixed: Fixed a bug when changing the bookmark directory would throw an error and not function
• Fixed: Fixed a few issues around smart filter loading for base url reverse proxy setups (aka domain.com/kavita) (Thanks @Fesaa for the issue and helping validate the fixes)

v0.8.3.2-ls53

LinuxServer Changes:

Rebase to Ubuntu Noble.

kavita Changes:

The UX refresh release has been great, a lot of great feedback has come in, along with a few bugs that got missed during testing. I knew there would be some, especially when the new UX was 50K lines of code difference. I picked up as many as I could that didn't require large periods of time for testing. Unless there is anything major that comes, this should be the last hotfix and I will start work on v0.8.4.

Changed

• Changed: Instead of showing 'Special' on chapter cards that aren't real, show a dash instead
• Changed: Changed how the warning about Email settings and the Test flow worked to be less intrusive
• Changed: (Performance) Small memory improvement when returning reading list items over OPDS
• Changed: Changed 'Edit Series Information' tooltip to 'Edit Information' as it's now generic for other entities
• Changed: Adjusted the logic for displaying chapter information when the chapter belongs to a single volume.

Fixed

• Fixed: Fixed a bug where all chapter cards would always say chapter, instead of issue
• Fixed: Fixed some edge case styling issues on cards
• Fixed: Fixed the wording for the edit tooltip to be more generic since used on other pages, not just series
• Fixed: Fixed Cover Artists still showing instead of Artist in Search
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where task settings weren't saving
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where when highlighting text in a setting item, the setting would close. Now it will only close if you click outside the item and there is no selection.
• Fixed: Fixed an issue where validators would reject payload when password was over 32 characters
• Fixed: Genres/Tags margins on details tab wasn't aligned well with People information
• Fixed: Fixed an issue where Cover Image Size wasn't displaying on the UI
• Fixed: Fixed a bug when changing the bookmark directory would throw an error and not function
• Fixed: Fixed a few issues around smart filter loading for base url reverse proxy setups (aka domain.com/kavita) (Thanks @Fesaa for the issue and helping validate the fixes)

v0.8.3.2-ls52

LinuxServer Changes:

Rebase to Ubuntu Noble.

kavita Changes:

The UX refresh release has been great, a lot of great feedback has come in, along with a few bugs that got missed during testing. I knew there would be some, especially when the new UX was 50K lines of code difference. I picked up as many as I could that didn't require large periods of time for testing. Unless there is anything major that comes, this should be the last hotfix and I will start work on v0.8.4.

Changed

• Changed: Instead of showing 'Special' on chapter cards that aren't real, show a dash instead
• Changed: Changed how the warning about Email settings and the Test flow worked to be less intrusive
• Changed: (Performance) Small memory improvement when returning reading list items over OPDS
• Changed: Changed 'Edit Series Information' tooltip to 'Edit Information' as it's now generic for other entities
• Changed: Adjusted the logic for displaying chapter information when the chapter belongs to a single volume.

Fixed

• Fixed: Fixed a bug where all chapter cards would always say chapter, instead of issue
• Fixed: Fixed some edge case styling issues on cards
• Fixed: Fixed the wording for the edit tooltip to be more generic since used on other pages, not just series
• Fixed: Fixed Cover Artists still showing instead of Artist in Search
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where task settings weren't saving
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where when highlighting text in a setting item, the setting would close. Now it will only close if you click outside the item and there is no selection.
• Fixed: Fixed an issue where validators would reject payload when password was over 32 characters
• Fixed: Genres/Tags margins on details tab wasn't aligned well with People information
• Fixed: Fixed an issue where Cover Image Size wasn't displaying on the UI
• Fixed: Fixed a bug when changing the bookmark directory would throw an error and not function
• Fixed: Fixed a few issues around smart filter loading for base url reverse proxy setups (aka domain.com/kavita) (Thanks @Fesaa for the issue and helping validate the fixes)

v0.8.3.2-ls51

LinuxServer Changes:

Rebase to Ubuntu Noble.

kavita Changes:

The UX refresh release has been great, a lot of great feedback has come in, along with a few bugs that got missed during testing. I knew there would be some, especially when the new UX was 50K lines of code difference. I picked up as many as I could that didn't require large periods of time for testing. Unless there is anything major that comes, this should be the last hotfix and I will start work on v0.8.4.

Changed

• Changed: Instead of showing 'Special' on chapter cards that aren't real, show a dash instead
• Changed: Changed how the warning about Email settings and the Test flow worked to be less intrusive
• Changed: (Performance) Small memory improvement when returning reading list items over OPDS
• Changed: Changed 'Edit Series Information' tooltip to 'Edit Information' as it's now generic for other entities
• Changed: Adjusted the logic for displaying chapter information when the chapter belongs to a single volume.

Fixed

• Fixed: Fixed a bug where all chapter cards would always say chapter, instead of issue
• Fixed: Fixed some edge case styling issues on cards
• Fixed: Fixed the wording for the edit tooltip to be more generic since used on other pages, not just series
• Fixed: Fixed Cover Artists still showing instead of Artist in Search
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where task settings weren't saving
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where when highlighting text in a setting item, the setting would close. Now it will only close if you click outside the item and there is no selection.
• Fixed: Fixed an issue where validators would reject payload when password was over 32 characters
• Fixed: Genres/Tags margins on details tab wasn't aligned well with People information
• Fixed: Fixed an issue where Cover Image Size wasn't displaying on the UI
• Fixed: Fixed a bug when changing the bookmark directory would throw an error and not function
• Fixed: Fixed a few issues around smart filter loading for base url reverse proxy setups (aka domain.com/kavita) (Thanks @Fesaa for the issue and helping validate the fixes)