Novels Full Release, Friends & Messages, Guilds and More

Hey everyone,

We've shipped a lot of new features over the past few weeks, from the full release of novels and new community features to major changes to upvotes and rankings. Here's everything that's new:

📖 Novels: Full Release

Novels are officially out of beta and available to everyone.

There's already a growing library to get into, with new chapters releasing regularly. You can find the release schedule for each series directly on its novel page.

Most of our novels also have manhwa adaptations on Asura, and the novels are much further ahead. So if you've ever finished the latest manhwa chapter and wanted to know what happens next, you can now jump straight into the novel and continue the story.

Every chapter also comes with high-quality, expressive audio that brings the story to life rather than simply reading the text aloud. You can listen with your screen off, automatically continue to the next chapter, or bookmark a novel and pick up exactly where you left off.

We've been following your feedback throughout the beta, and now that novels have fully launched, we're also looking into giving Premium readers additional free chapters.

We do want to be transparent about why this isn't as simple as making novels part of Premium. Novels are expensive for us to produce. The translation quality we aim for, along with high-quality audio for every chapter, means our production costs are considerably higher than most groups releasing novels. Premium was also originally built and priced around comics, so it generally doesn't cover the cost of producing novels.

That said, we're looking into what we can offer, and if we can make it work sustainably, we'll do our best to give Premium readers access to additional locked chapters at no extra cost.

🛡️ Guilds: Season 1 Has Started

You've probably noticed guilds appearing around the site over the last 10 days. That was Season 0, a short test season that gave us a chance to make sure everything was working properly.

Now, Season 1 has officially started, and with it come the first guild rewards.

If you haven't joined one yet, guilds let you team up with friends or other readers and display your guild's tag on your profile and next to your name whenever you comment. The Aura earned by your guild's members through comments contributes to your guild's seasonal ranking, and starting with Season 1, members of the top 10 guilds will earn the Top 10 Guild achievement.

You don't have to compete for the rankings to enjoy being in a guild, though. Some guilds are built to compete, some are just groups of friends reading the same series, and others exist purely because their members want a cool tag next to their names.

Every guild also gets its own page for posts and announcements, a members-only section for things like Discord invites, and a dedicated group chat in Messages. You can reply directly to other members, mention individual people, or @everyone when you need the whole guild's attention.

💬 Friends & Messages

Until now, most interactions on Asura ended in the comment section. You could recognize people you regularly saw under chapters, but there wasn't really a way to connect with them beyond that.

You can now add other readers as friends and message them directly. Messages work in real time and support replies, mentions, spoilers, custom Asura emojis, GIFs and images. If you're part of a guild, you'll also have a group chat where everyone in the guild can talk together.

Messages also come with our own new custom emojis, and we've added them to comments too, so you can use them across the site.

You can start a conversation from any friend's profile or open Messages from the menu.

And for discussions outside the site, we now have our own official Asura subreddit, r/AsuraScanlations, where you can talk about series, share posts, and connect with the community.

🏆 More Achievements

We've also significantly expanded the achievement system.

There are now many more achievements to earn through reading, commenting, rankings, guilds, and simply being active on the site. That means there's also a lot more you can collect and show off on your profile.

The longer you've been around and the more you do on Asura, the more your profile will reflect it.

⚖️ A Fairer Upvote & Ranking System

Upvotes play a major role in the Aura rankings, and whenever there's a ranking system, there will inevitably be people trying to game it.

We've recently seen an increase in manipulated upvotes through bots and alt accounts, so we've reworked parts of the voting system to make it much harder to cheat and to make sure rankings actually reflect real users.

Here's what's changed:

If you've been using the voting system normally, nothing really changes for you. These changes are mainly there to make sure the comments and users at the top actually earned their place.

That's everything for this update. Novels are officially out of beta, Guild Season 1 is underway, and there are now a lot more ways to interact with other readers across Asura.

Find a guild, add some friends, and good luck in Season 1!