As we are aiming for a better environment where comic artists and publishers can feel at ease putting comics to MahShelf.com, there are things regarding copyrights we must make clear to everyone:

1. Copyright infringed contents are forbidden on MahShelf. All comics uploaded to MahShelf will be read though and checked by contacting the artists/authors/publishers. Any detected infringement will be banned immediately.
2. Copyright-free, fair-use (or the more popular term: Creative Commons) comics are allowed. Uploaders must link back to the original sources or mention the artists/authors/publishers’ names.
3. In case the artists/authors/publishers give their permission to upload their comics on MahShelf, uploaders must say so in the comics’ descriptions. MahShelf staffs will search and try to contact the copyright holders to confirm such permission. If no confirmation is received from the copyright holders in 1 month, the uploaded comics will be treated as copyright infringements.
4. Every artists/authors/publishers upload their own comics on MahShelf should also link back to their own sites if possible. MahShelf staffs will try to contact the copyright holders to confirm such publication.
5. In the near future, more filters and processes will be added to MahShelf to strengthen our commitment to protect comic artists/authors/publishers rights.

With great comics come great respectability. So to all comic makers out there, we give you our best regards!

The MahShelf editor team

• Explore: Yes! All 3 main categories (Comics, Manga, Others) are now in one place: the Explore tab. We have also made some changes with the sorting mechanism so you can find comics much easier.
• RSS Feed: Also in the Explore tab, you can now subscribe to each category to get the latest comics uploaded to MahShelf.
• Forums: As you can see, we have added a Community tab, with the whole new forums so everyone can go there and discuss whatever you want.
• Chat room: The Community tab has one public chat room. So if you feel bored, go there and shout out something
• Profile Info: More things for you to fill in and tell others more about yourself. Check your account and see the Profile section next to the Setting section.

• Enlarge button returns: since the last time we took down this feature because of some conflicts in the codes, many users have mentioned about putting it back, as reading in fullscreen ignores other things going on such as instant messages and mail notifications. So now it has been repaired, and has yet to show any error. One thing should be noticed though: after clicking the Enlarge button, an extra click on the Flash reader is required. If you try to roll the mouse wheel right after clicking the Enlarge button, your web browser will immediately exit the enlarge state.

• Better exploring: there has been a problem that everyone doesn’t know what to read and what’s hot right now. So we have decided to change the 3 tabs Comics, Manga and Others to display all books, instead of just featured ones. They are sorted in terms of Book views (Most popular), Book rates (Most rated), Number of comments (Most discussed) and Date added (Latest)

• IE6 issue: oh yes. There have been a hell lot of bugs of MahShelf in IE6. We are really sorry for the bad experience you had. But for now please bear with us and upgrade your web browser to a newer version, or switch to Firefox or Google Chrome. Thank you for your patience!

• CBR and CBZ issue: unfortunately for security reasons, we can not accept CBR and CBZ, or RAR and ZIP file types right now. But you can always rename the CBR and CBZ files you have to RAR and ZIP, extract them and upload to MahShelf for now. We will try our best to solve this issue in the near future.

Happy reading!

MahShelf editor team

Thanks for visiting MahShelf! We have been most impressed with the recent number of visits from our users. In this month we will keep releasing even more cool new features for reading and sharing digital comics online.

So, first off, we are extremely happy with the feedback we’ve known so far. We are determined to make digital comics become the most popular trend on the internet, and also, to turn digital comics publishing into a profitable business. That said, please continue to let us know if there’s something you’d like us to improve. Just try suggesting something to us, and we’ll prove how much we value your ideas and opinions.

Anyway, back to the new changes. Last month, we’ve added many improvements to the site. Some major ones are:

• New explore page and reading trend feature
  

We’ve been receiving many uploads each day. While this is really exciting, we realized that many visitors don’t know where to start reading or discuss. Therefore, we bring you the new explore page, which can be accessed by clicking on the “view all” link besides the “Books currently being read” in main page. From there, you can easily find the most recent, most viewed, most rated and most discussed books.

Also, main page of MahShelf has a feature called “Reading trends“, which shows particularly topics that are  favored by other readers.

• Reading history
  

Suddenly forget what you’ve finished reading? You can use the “History” feature to help you quickly turn to the books you’ve read. This feature only available when signed-in.

• Book updates
  

When you subscribe to other users (Or add them as friends), you will receive notificatons of their new uploads in your “Account” page.

• Send message
  

Sending personal messages to other users in MahShelf is now possible.

• Display name
  

So, sometimes you just want to change your nickname, eventhough you don’t want to change the account name. Now you can modify it from your Account page, in the “Profile” tab.

Starting from next week we will take this issue more seriously. We are relying on the whole community to help us monitoring the site’s contents. The “Report” button would be a helpful feature for you to inform us about inappropriate contents. We are working hard to bring you the best reading experience and social features of online comic books. And we will act immediately upon any report or feedback we receive.

Now to the good stuff…our Flash reader has been upgraded once more. It rocks! I won’t tell you everything we have done with it, as you can find them out yourself later. But here’s the best part: when you read to the end of a comic book, other related books will appear right inside the Flash reader. So now you don’t have to switch between Fullsceen mode and Normal mode whenever you finish reading a book.

Reading in Fullscreen mode is the best! And with this improvement, you will find it most convenient reading comics, manga and other graphic novels here at MahShelf.com.

Also, check out our Wiki page. You can access it by clicking the “Help” link on the top right corner of the site. This is where every usage of MahShelf.com will be listed and instructed. Your contribution in this page is mostly welcomed.

And to sum things up, we are very happy with this update. The future of reading comics online become a popular trend is within our sight. Thank you for your supports!

The MahShelf administrator team

As far as we know, Amazon storage has been very stable, we have not encountered any service downtime since the beginning of MahShelf and they offer an SLA for the S3 service, guaranteeing 99.9% uptime. You can keep track of their efforts over on their own Status Dashboard.

Meanwhile, we will release a newer version of MahShelf after the outage. Possibly we will fix some minor errors and improve some user interface experiences. Please bare with us and come back after a while, we know this is no fun, and we’re truly sorry of what happened.

Unfortunately, not every forum and blog allows HTML code due to some security issues. However, most of them support the convenient tag [flash][/flash]

[flash]http://somesites.com/flash.swf[/flash]

All you need is a simple hack with those tag by copying the book code

And append it to flash url like this

[flash]http://www.mahshelf.com/swf/external_player.swf?code=kEukYkEqk4[/flash]

There you go, enjoy sharing your books!

You can now add other users as friends, put comments in their profiles and subscribe to others’ bookshelves to receive notification each time they upload a new book. You’ll have to watch your own account page for the notifications, though. Later you will be able to receive emails whenever your friends upload new books, so you can be sure that you won’t miss any interesting stuff.

Also, uploading books is a lot faster now, as you can save template of the book’s descriptions before pressing “Upload book” button to publish a book. This feature is super useful for anyone who wants to upload multiple books with the same description (most likely chapters from the same series).

Last but not least, did you notice that our Flash reader has changed a lot? Take a look at this screen-shot:

See the loading icon besides the full-screen button? It indicates that the other pages are being loaded so that after you finish with the current page, next pages are ready for you to read. After all pages of the book have been loaded, that icon will disappear. Neat, huh? Just wait, there will be more coming up next week; probably something you can embed into your own sites or blogs.

Summer is coming. Have fun people!

–Odin–

• Set as “private” : private books cannot be found by other users through any search result, related book suggestion or the Bookshelf (Profile) of the users who uploaded those contents. If you want to read a private book, you’ll have to know the link of it. If you have uploaded some books that you only want to share with certain people, set them as “private”.
• Set as “not suitable for everyone” : if you have uploaded some books that have certain amount of mature content or might offense someone (but are not really violating MahShelf terms of use)…  set them as “not suitable for everyone”. When other users open these books, they will be notified with a warning message and required to Confirm that they really want to read the books regardless of the consequences.
• Disable commenting : Don’t want others commenting on your books? Chose this option.
• Disable rating : Don’t want others rating your books? Choose this option.

Some of you might have noticed the change of our ‘Flash reader’ recently. Indeed, we are testing the new reading application, which will make it most pleasant for you to read digital comics and books online. Summer is here! Have fun everybody

Kelvin