v0.8.6 - Spring Cleaning
Published on April 14, 2025 by Joseph Milazzo
v0.8.6 is here and it's only fair to call this the Spring-Cleaning release as over the past 3 weeks, Amelia (@Fesaa) and I have closed out 65 issues from Github and polished a ton of the app. This release is packed with a lot of OLD issues finally being tackled and a few of them are quite annoying, so let's get started with the breakdown.
First, let's talk about the few enhancements that made it into the release. One of these enhancements was around Smart Filters and removing them from your customize list or renaming them. Both are features that weren't thought about in the initial implementation and just kept slipping through the cracks. Amelia took it upon herself to not only implement but also add some drag and drop reordering on the side nav for those that don't want to go into customize screen.
Another nice enhancement is around Media Errors. I implemented Media Errors after being inspired by Komga feature, but never gave it much more thought after that. You know what's annoying? Having 300 media errors that aren't actually reflective of the state of your media. The original thought was manually clearing the alerts, but why can't Kavita just do most of those checks for you? So that's what this feature brings. Kavita will check if files were successfully imported with at least 1 page or 1 word and clear out the issue for you.
The last big enhancement is around Reading Lists. I'm not a huge reading list user, but the folks over in CBL project have been discussing some polish that is needed and raised a great Feature Request. Some of these were no-brainers, so I took a few days and implemented some much-needed polish and exposed more metadata around the reading list. My favorite is not being in edit mode by default. If you have ideas on how to make the Reading List experience better, please add your ideas to the Feature Request. I have already confirmed I will be doing a big overhaul once I have a good picture of the features user's want and need.
With the enhancements out of the way, let's focus on the meat of this release, the bugfixes and polish. I'll open with one I know many readers are going to enjoy--the webtoon reader finally tracks the last page read when using the continuous reader 100% of the time. The nightly users and I tested this by reading a combined 700 chapters (500 of those were just @duplaja, go figures). Shoutout to @reinar for providing some code that helped me get the needed fix.
First, let's talk about the few enhancements that made it into the release. One of these enhancements was around Smart Filters and removing them from your customize list or renaming them. Both are features that weren't thought about in the initial implementation and just kept slipping through the cracks. Amelia took it upon herself to not only implement but also add some drag and drop reordering on the side nav for those that don't want to go into customize screen.
Another nice enhancement is around Media Errors. I implemented Media Errors after being inspired by Komga feature, but never gave it much more thought after that. You know what's annoying? Having 300 media errors that aren't actually reflective of the state of your media. The original thought was manually clearing the alerts, but why can't Kavita just do most of those checks for you? So that's what this feature brings. Kavita will check if files were successfully imported with at least 1 page or 1 word and clear out the issue for you.
The last big enhancement is around Reading Lists. I'm not a huge reading list user, but the folks over in CBL project have been discussing some polish that is needed and raised a great Feature Request. Some of these were no-brainers, so I took a few days and implemented some much-needed polish and exposed more metadata around the reading list. My favorite is not being in edit mode by default. If you have ideas on how to make the Reading List experience better, please add your ideas to the Feature Request. I have already confirmed I will be doing a big overhaul once I have a good picture of the features user's want and need.
With the enhancements out of the way, let's focus on the meat of this release, the bugfixes and polish. I'll open with one I know many readers are going to enjoy--the webtoon reader finally tracks the last page read when using the continuous reader 100% of the time. The nightly users and I tested this by reading a combined 700 chapters (500 of those were just @duplaja, go figures). Shoutout to @reinar for providing some code that helped me get the needed fix.
Another major fix, with the help yet again of Amelia, is the localization fix. Non-English locales have been having issues with Kavita for the last few releases and due to me not being able to reproduce the issues, I used a shotgun approach to fixing the issue. Luckily Amelia has such a setup and was able to fix it. Docker users can now remove the `DOTNET_SYSTEM_GLOBALIZATION_INVARIANT=true` from their compose file and Kavita should work across the board.
Docker users
Remove `DOTNET_SYSTEM_GLOBALIZATION_INVARIANT=true` from your compose files. It is no longer needed.
Lastly, Amelia polished a lot of the UI for the epub reader, closing out some annoying issues around scrolling, especially on iOS (which I cannot test against) and I focused on the backend, allowing for loosened parsing requirements, but still reporting the issue to Media Errors (Thanks to @vers-one for enhancing their library).
This overall feels like a great release with a lot of polish and stability. Many other issues were fixed, and I feel very confident in this release. The next release is planned to focus on the Scanner and see if some more instability can be ironed out and apply some more performance improvements. Amelia and I have been brainstorming and doing some research to see what overhauls we can make.
Lastly I want to end with an update that my time is still extremely constrained and will likely be this way going forward, so expect longer windows between releases.
The full release can be found here.
Added
- Added: Ability to delete Smart filter steams from Customize Side Nav and Dashboard
- Added: Ability to rename Smart Filters in Customize settings
- Added: Added the ability to reorder the side nav without using customize screen by clicking the actionable on Home -> Reorder (Thanks @Fesaa)
- Added: Added a new cleanup task that scans media errors and clears them out if they are ingested fine into Kavita
- Added: Added a new preference option for allowing Kavita to automatically switch into webtoon reader mode based on image resolution. Defaults to on.
- Added: Added the ability to see all people across a reading list, the time it would take to read, and age rating.
- Added: Updated many areas of Kavita to bring even better localization support. Everything in the UI should be fully localized now
- Added: Added support for partial (0.5) volumes for Korean filename parsing
Changed
- Changed: Allow volume title card overlay for more than just book libraries
- Changed: Updated hostname tooltip text to be more clear
- Changed: Added a toast message for backfilling events on scrobble page.
- Changed: (Kavita+) Changed button on Scrobbling Errors to a match button which can directly fix the issue, rather than the old edit and add weblink.
- Changed: Improved the tooltip for the scrobbling button to be clearer if it is on/off.
- Changed: Overhauled the reading list detail page to be more aligned with series detail page
- Changed: Reading lists will be in non-edit mode by default. A new edit button can toggle edit mode and bring drag handles and other controls.
- Changed: Added a warning when in edit mode about when drag handles are suppressed
- Changed: PDFs will now fall back to the Title in metadata for series
- Changed: Updated Angular to 19
- Changed: (Kavita+) Don't create scrobble events for specials as they will never match on AniList
- Changed: Updated wording and some styling to make the first impression better
- Changed: Changed how series downloads work to include the individual archives instead of unpacking them first (for non-image based series)
- Changed: Reworked the version update logic so that we don't pop the new version update so often. It will now pop once and if no action is taken, it will wait a week to pop again. The same logic applies to the you are X releases behind, etc (but longer windows).
- Changed: Updated dependencies and Security issues from downstream libraries
- Changed: Enhanced parsing code for (back cover) falsely being recognized as a cover image.
- Changed: Cleaned up how specials are parsed to allow supporting periods in the Title name
- Changed: (Epub Reader) When reading in Double Column mode, Kavita will now prevent seeing the same text twice by added an empty page when needed
- Changed: Allow users to type both localized name and series name to find a match on Related Series
- Changed: Made Library type and Sort options dropdowns alphabetical (localized)
- Changed: Removed the analyze task as it shouldn't be needed anymore
- Changed: Renamed Comic -> Comic (Legacy) and Comic (Comic Vine) -> Comic. The new comic library should be the primary.
- Changed: Moved the reset button for API Key to the right side, which renders much nicer.
- Changed: Aligned and corrected some styling for the Edit/Close button on setting items to be consistent
- Changed: Setting items that are not editable won't show the pointer cursor
- Changed: Setting switch items have the label appropriately wired and thus when you click the label, the switch will update.
- Changed: Details tab will show genre/tags expanded by default
- Changed: (Kavita+) Updated how JWT looks at expiration time for AniList Token.
- Changed: Moved Skipped scheduling ScanFolder log message to Trace as it's noisy
- Changed: Tweaked how localization cache busting is handled to try and get Transloco to respect cache busting
- Changed: For Admins (or users with access to all libraries), under Manage Users, sharing now shows 'All Libraries'
- Changed: Changed how epubs are parsed. Now, Kavita will try to open it expecting a valid epub structure (which isn't common without user intervention) then allow falling back to a non-correct epub (with degraded experience within Kavita). Kavita will record issue in the Media Issues tab.
- Changed: Ensure all switch elements link up with a label element for accessibility.
- Changed: (Kavita+) Switched Last modified to Created for when the scrobble reading event took place.
- Changed: Reading lists' age rating will now update when a series age rating is updated via the UI
- Changed: Moved Gmail/Outlook auto fill buttons from Host Name to Host setting
- Changed: Setting items will auto focus when switching into edit mode
Fixed
- Fixed: Fixed an issue with non-American date and number parsing
- Fixed: Fixed an initial blank page on settings due to a slow locale cache load
- Fixed: Fixes the environment variable for invariant globalization still being set in the Dockerfile
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where cbl import wouldn't allow importing due to the name clashing with another user, when it should have only checked your account
- Fixed: Fixed a lot of styling across the app and overall polish
- Fixed: Fixed a bug when updating email settings, it can error out after 2 changes
- Fixed: Fixed an issue where chapter ranges (1-3) could get an incorrect sort order
- Fixed: Fixed an issue with Mihon over-extracting image files (Thanks @arition)
- Fixed: Fixed a missing action handler for delete chapter from series detail page.
- Fixed: Fixed issues with selection on mobile devices in the epub reader causing pages to skip
- Fixed: Fixed TitleSort being used instead of SeriesSort for Series Sort field (Thanks @joshuaavalon for the help)
- Fixed: Moved loading icon up so it's visible even when having a lot of cards on library detail page
- Fixed: Improved the webtoon reader's ability to ensure chapters are marked as read from continuous reader which caused the last page to not get marked as read. (Thanks @reinar for the spur)
- Fixed: Fixed a bug in edit list that would break the UI when any comma separated values were used.
- Fixed: Fixed read more for chinese text
- Fixed: Fixed tooltips on series card getting overlapped (Thanks @therobbiedavis )
- Fixed: (Kavita+) Fixed an issue where some people's metadata could have broken urls due to an @ symbol in the url for their description
- Fixed: Fixed up the webtoon detection algorithm to be more robust
- Fixed: Fixed the scrobbling page not having working sorting
- Fixed: Fixed locale response being empty on first load (Thanks @nevivurn)
- Fixed: Fixed PDF specials using filename instead of embedded metadata as title
- Fixed: Stats charts shouldn't overlap anymore
- Fixed: Fixed the changelog for API/Removed having an extra -
- Fixed: Fixed a bug in the update series metadata where you wouldn't be able to clear out people field.
- Fixed: Updated chapter update API to allow ability to clear out people fields, genres, and tags.
- Fixed: Fixed reading list items overflowing (Thanks @therobbiedavis )
- Fixed: Fixed missing scrollbars in some dropdowns
- Fixed: Fixed an out-of-bounds from a reading list when reordering
- Fixed: Fixed Epub table of contents, when all under one node didn't show as active.
- Fixed: Fixed the inability to update server settings
- Fixed: Fixed release date not displaying correctly in the edit chapter model
- Fixed: Fixed 'never' being displayed in a bunch of places on certain locales
- Fixed: Fixed the incorrect date layout being used on certain locales
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where Top Readers on Stats page wasn't rendering the numbers correctly
- Fixed: (Epub Reader) Fixed chapter not always scrolling to the top. Was not able to reproduce but used a community fed fix. (Thanks @joonhuiwong)
- Fixed: Don't throw an exception when downloading a theme that is already downloaded but just let the user re-download it.
- Fixed: Fixed some padding on a few setting screens that got missed last release.
- Fixed: Fixed flashing no result message during loading of MAL Stacks
- Fixed: Fixed an issue on edit series/chapter detail page where language input would not show the language reliably.
- Fixed: Fixed issues with selection on mobile devices in the epub reader causing pages to skip
- Fixed: Fixed a bad url to the wiki page
- Fixed: Fixed an issue where search could not be selectable and would also close the pdf reader on ESC.
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where some fields weren't being ingested from ComicInfo due to a bug from last release
- Fixed: Fixed edit chapter modal, tag options weren't rendering
- Fixed: Fixed edit chapter modal not being able to have some metadata fields persist
- Fixed: Fixed an issue on edit series/chapter modal where adding data to a typeahead field, then switching to another tab would blank out the field.
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where Send to Email/Kindle was not properly sending the filename of the file.
- Fixed: (Kavita+) Fixed a missing blacklist path for Kavita+ background fetch
- Fixed: Fixed 'add to reading list' not working in volume detail
- Fixed: Fixed users being unable to open promoted reading lists via OPDS
- Fixed: Fixed reading lists, adding an unnecessary volume marker for EPUB specials
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where registration form was telling the user the email was required when it wasn't.
- Fixed: Fixed change email so that multiple toasts don't popup telling the user that email was updated successfully but also wasn't and link needed.
- Fixed: Fixed change email and change password not switching to view mode after save.
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where UI was not reflecting that an Admin cannot change their age restriction settings.
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where filter IsEmpty wasn't hiding the value input.
- Fixed: IsEmpty wasn't working for Collection Tags and Tags
- Fixed: Fixed a bug where Genres/Tags from ComicInfo.xml were being normalized
- Fixed: Detail page actionables were being hidden on mobile.