As promised, here’s this week’s update. It is primarily a maintenance release, with updates for a bunch of sites, and support for some new ones that have been recently requested.

You might see an error message from the updater after it downloads this update. I noticed a bug in the new updater that slipped through during Release 1 that will cause the message to be shown at the end of the update process, even if nothing actually goes wrong. It can be ignored without a problem, and the updater has been fixed so that it won’t show up next time.

It’s been a while since the last update. For the people still hanging on to Windows XP, you might need to update manually for this one. Update files are now hosted on GitHub, which enforces the use of TLS protocols that .NET Framework 4.0 doesn’t support. You won’t have to worry about this going forward, though, as the improved updater is able to deal with this for future updates.

On the surface, there’s not a whole lot going on with this release. There are a few site fixes (particularly for some higher-profile sites), and support added for sites that quite a few people have asked me about. Little bugs have been fixed here and there (such as being able to save WebP images into PDFs).

The majority of my time with this update was spent on internal rewrites, cleaning things up to make the software easier to maintain going forward. It’s been over 5 years since HDoujin Downloader was first released, and the layers upon layers of patches and updates has started taking its toll on the software’s maintainability. Fortunately, my work on this release has started putting a dent into it. This will allow me to add some new features I’ve been sitting on for a long time that this problem has been holding me back from.

Aside from that, I’ve rewritten the updater, particularly in response to the issues that occurred a while ago. It’s hard to find a reliable file host, and with the way the updater was built, if certain files became inaccessible it would stop working properly and require updates to be carried out manually. It’s now a lot more robust in that regard, capable of pulling updates from a variety of sources in the event one of them stops working.

If you’re one of the many people waiting on a particular request or bug fix, the goal is to get back into regular weekly releases, which will most likely be available every Sunday (this update was scheduled for Sunday as well, but ended up taking a little bit longer). More updates will be available soon as I work through the backlog of requests.

The next big goal is moving site support modules outside of the application, into external scripts where they can be updated and modified more easily. This will allow for faster module updates, especially since it won’t require the entire application to be recompiled just to get a few sites working again. The old scripting system was a step in the right direction, but its execution was too flawed to be truly useful. The next iteration of this feature will be far more usable.

If you have any problems with this release, please report them. If you need to downgrade to the previous release, it will remain available here.

As anticipated in the previous release post, the update to the updater (“updater.exe”) caused the new version to get incorrectly flagged by several antivirus vendors. It’s since been white-listed by all major antivirus vendors, as can be verified by the VirusTotal report. Unfortunately it’s still flagged by several heuristic engines, but there’s little I can do about that.

Of course, the updater is clean– Its behavior just tends to upset heuristic engines (“hey, this can download files!”). As a small-time software developer, this is unfortunately something I have to deal with on the regular, and I thank all of you users of HDoujin Downloader for your understanding!

Unfortunately, Google Drive and Dropbox have temporarily disabled the download links (I’m still waiting for a response from support to get them enabled again). As a result, the updater won’t work properly for the time being, but I expect it to be working normally again within the next couple of days (this is not the first time this has happened).

In the meantime, those that still need to update will need to do so manually (detailed instructions are here). Until this issue is sorted out, the latest release can be downloaded from Mega:

• The updater has been updated

Firstly, this update contains an update to the updater (that’s a mouthful). The update is meant to address an issue some users reported where the update would “finish” partway through and then leave them with a corrupt executable.

The bad news is the updater (“updater.exe”) frequently gets flagged by antivirus software every time I make changes to it, and this time is likely not going to be any exception. If your antivirus software is complaining about the updater, let me know so I can submit a false-positive report.

If you end up having problems and need to downgrade for the time being, Release 309 continues to be accessible here.

• Other things have been updated

As usual, you can check out the changelog to see what’s been done. One of the biggest fixes is related to Cloudflare, which rendered quite a few sites not-working when they updated their browser verification challenge. This release includes a fix for that, and some other Cloudflare-related bugs I came across in the process. It should hopefully be working great for everyone, but if you have any problems, you know the drill: Let me know!

Other than that, there are some fixes for a few sites a lot of users contacted me about, and some other changes that aren’t user-facing (a good deal of refactoring, which this code base has desperately needed).

• Hey! What about my request?

I hear you! Some people have been waiting quite some time to have their requests added to the program, and I get more every day. As many users have probably noticed, I’ve fallen behind with managing to reply to everyone in a timely manner due to some personal circumstances. Rest assured that if you’ve left me a comment, or sent an email I’ve seen it, and I’m wading through them. That said, if you feel like you’ve been waiting for too long, don’t hesitate to check in or send a reminder. I welcome it.

All things considered, this is a relatively minor update. The plan is to kick it into overdrive, get through all the requests, and pump these out on a weekly basis, starting today. Look forward to it!

As is tradition, Release 274 is being flagged by Windows Defender as “Win32/Fuerboos.A!cl”. This is a generic heuristic detection, which means it’s being flagged because it “looks like” something that could potentially be malicious. This is of course a false-positive, and it will hopefully be cleared soon in one of the next definition updates. I’ve already submitted a report to Microsoft, so all we can do now is play the waiting game.

In the meantime, if you’re having trouble running the program, you can add HDoujin Downloader’s folder to your exclusions list. You can find instructions explaining how to do this here. If you had better luck with Release 273 and want to downgrade until Release 274 is whitelisted, you can also download the previous release here.

Since this happens every couple of releases and I’m always flooded with messages asking about it, I’ve made a FAQ page you can also check out with more information about why this happens and how to fix it.

Hello everyone! As some of you are already aware, November has been an especially busy month for me, and early December will follow the same trend.

I have not been able to respond to messages as quickly as usual, but I still read them regularly (so if anything urgent comes up, I can offer a quick fix). If you have been waiting a while for a response, hold out for a little bit longer and I’ll definitely get back to you. Don’t forget you can always use the support forum if you have a question; there are kind users there that know what they’re doing!

On that note, things will start getting back up to speed in about two weeks. You can of course still expect regular site updates (usually each weekend at the latest), but new feature requests are going to be on the back burner for a bit.

This is definitely a stressful time of year; the approaching holiday season is more than welcome. I hope you all get to spend some quality time with your waifus. ♥

With the recent release of Release 261, Avast has started flagging HDoujin Downloader as malicious. This happens every once in a while when the program changes enough that it’s no longer picked up by the whitelist (this is a recurring problem with Avast in particular).

The last update has been submitted for whitelisting. As the developer, I can confirm that this is a false-positive, but if you’d rather wait until it’s cleared, usually they whitelist it within 3 days. Otherwise, you may add the program folder to your exceptions list to prevent it from being deleted.

Overenthusiastic “anti-virus” scanners are the bane of small-time developers.

Update: It has now been whitelisted in Avast’s latest definition update!

Release 247 was uploaded today! You can check out the changelog here.

In addition to adding support for a few new sites and improving/fixing support for others, there have been some heavy changes “under the hood”, specifically involving how the download filter works. On that note, a few annoyances should be solved, and it will work progressively more smoothly in coming updates. If you have any problems with it in this release, let me know.

The updater has been updated as well, and it will now display more information when downloading updates.

However, because of these changes, the signatures of HDoujin and its updater have changed enough to break the white-listing by various antivirus vendors (VirusTotal report here). This has been solved for the most part, but there are still two who have yet to clear it (Baidu, and TrendMicro). If you use either of these programs and find HDoujin has been flagged, don’t worry! it’s a false-positive, and it should be cleared soon.

This week I’ve managed to take care of quite a few bug reports and minor feature requests, and I’m pretty happy about that. It’s been slow lately, but things are getting back up to speed. I hope to carry on with this momentum. Tomorrow I’m going to focus on replying to all the emails I haven’t gotten to yet.

If you’ve been having trouble with bato.to lately, I recommend updating to Release 220. I rewrote the code for handling Batoto downloads so it should now be twice as fast and far more reliable. Some users have been experiencing issues with the default image server that Batoto uses– If you’re one of these people, try selecting a different image server under “Settings > Downloads > Site-Specific Settings > bato.to”, and it could help.

Speaking of help, at the beginning of the week I mentioned thinking about adding some sort of public issue tracker. I’ve decided to do that in the form of a discussion form, which is now available at: https://doujindownloader.com/forum/

Please check it out! There’s not much to see right now, but I hope for it to grow into something like living help documentation.

The goal is to get people asking questions over there instead of through comments here. That way it acts as an easy-to-navigate, searchable archive of all of the questions people have asked, which makes it easier for people to find the answers the need, while also making things easier for me, since I don’t have to keep answering similar questions all the time. It will be checked just as often as the comments left over here.

There’s a “How-to Guides” section, which I’ll populate over time with detailed guides explaining how to accomplish various things things with HDoujin. There are a lot of features that really aren’t well-documented, so not many people (aside from those that requested them) know about them– I hope to change that.

Improvements will continue to be rolled out throughout the week!

As usual, a good amount of time has passed since the last post.

People often ask what the plans are in terms of adding new features and when they should expect to see this or that. For that reason, I’m going to try to start writing periodic status updates to keep everyone informed about the development of HDoujin.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve gotten tons of new feature requests, and a few bug reports. First of all, I love the feedback, so please keep it coming! I want HDoujin to be the best it can be, and every suggestion counts towards that, however niche!

Secondly, with the large number of requests, I’ve got a lot to take care of. For the past while I’ve been focusing on bug reports over adding new features, since I’ve been a lot busier than usual (it’s always good to make sure existing features are working well before trying to add new ones). For this weekend, I intend to set some time aside to start processing all of the messages I’ve received. If you haven’t gotten a response yet, please hang in there.

Because of the volume of requests, I’m thinking of adding a public issue/feature tracking system where users can vote for what features they’d like to prioritize, or something along those lines (discussion/Q+A forum?). It would also make it easier for users with the same problems/ideas to communicate.

In any case, I appreciate everyone’s patience! Some people have feature requests they have been waiting a while for, but you have not been forgotten– I’m doing my best to address everyone’s needs.