Title lol anyways for me i was into anime since 6th grade and started reading webtoons. Stumbled upon a manhua (just one smile is very alluring) and from there i found novel updates forum. Read some novels thanks to NU and met some great people ^-^
Searching for novels then noticed that most of it was on the website called novel updates~ The god of Destiny had planned it for me
I wanted to read further ahead of the manga that had novel adaptations and after searching on the internet for novel sites, here I am.
From anime Baka to Test, I find the manga, after that I know that the manga and anime came original came from novel. Search Google and find Baka-Tsuki and been hooked like fish and read many novel after that. The next thing, I hear we had batoto.com had a link that connect directly to the site that translates but still immature. After that we had Aho-update that replaced batoto but more clean and been update regularly. But not long after that, we had Novel Update that had more choices. That my journey that find the NU.
I was emo but I also had bad WiFi so I found a site that lets me access other novels I like. Now I'm here telling @Bad Storm I miss my youth.
I came from ahoupdate and in the forum, people like to recommend NU (for translated novel only) and at that time I prefer ahoupdate more because it give link to original novel/royal road. At that time there is only few novels to read and satisfying novel is hard to find. But later I slowly turned into nuffian and I joined the forum a bit slow....... And..... here I am!
I started with Meng Hao's big pp cultivation saga. I thought it could only get better from there and stumbled upon Invisible Dragon. Needless to say, there's no going back now.
I started to be aware of the existence of nu when i was reading BTTH manhua. but i only truly used it when i wanted to read only sense online past the manga.
Way back in 2016 I remembered somebody on Kissanime’s Disqus comments talking about Arifureta, Kirito Kirigaya or some such, and decided to give it a shot. I got hooked, kept on reading it during the dark ages when we had like four chapters that were skipped, a Google Doc translation that was barely readable, and more. I forget who was translating it at the time, but I know that they took forever to update, and saw that a site called Novelupdates kept appearing below it whenever I searched for Arifureta. I thought it was a pirate site at the time, but after I couldn’t find any more Arifureta I turned to it and…well, here I am. During that summer I had an ongoing headache that was triggered my motion, so I stayed cooped up in bed playing rhythm games on my iPad, and reading on it and my PC using NU. It was a great time despite my lack of movement. Not to mention I got to make some great friends through here, so I’m happy. Now then, I’m going to go read because I don’t feel tired enough to sleep because despite being on a swing shift schedule my body still feels like it’s on graveyard.
There was another site I was at. Can’t remember the name, but it was shutting down. Tony said he was opening a new site. I liked Tony. So followed him here. Been here ever since. In the beginning. Even before Tony. I was avid reader. I pretty much bought every fantasy/ science fiction out there (excluding Star Wars and Star Trek) that I was remotely interested in. I needed more books. That’s when I went online. So that was how my journey started. I found most mangas and comics are to short in RL. That’s why I read them online. I find the novels are better than the manga, but the manga are better than the anime. Go figure. I like fan fictions. I also love harems and Isekai since the beginning. And I guess I’ll always will. I was there when everyone was still thinking anime is for losers. I was there when no one knew what was dragonball or Pokémon. Lol. Now everyone has seen a little bit at least. Life strange like that. I hope this answers your question
Before Novel Updates was a thing there are several Redirectors like Bakaupdate and Batoto Novel Recommendation, especially Batoto for me because it was a forum where I first have many list of web novels and light novels. But what brought me to WN and LN are Sword Art Online and Zero no Tsukaima from Baka Tsuki, Legendary Moonlight Sculptor from RoyalRoad Legend, 1/2 Prince from Prince Revolution and Kill no More from Japtem, yes I was a big fan of Virtual Reality genre.
It's currently one of the best if not the best database available for this kind of thing, while I don't exactly remember the exact process of how I got here. The main reason I look through the database is because I want to look up stuff. As for the forum, I wanted to ask a certain question, and figured this forum might have a chance of answering me.
I actually started on Webnovel (lol). I had been mostly watching anime before but started to shift towards manga after discovering the world of BL. After reading translations of manhuas adapted from novels, I got curious about translated novels and webnovels in general (I was also a little worried that reading too much mangas/manhuas was making me illiterate ). Webnovel was (not surprisingly) the first result that came up when I searched for "webnovels" and I would read the free chapters, sign in every day, watch ads, etc. I also started writing my own novel(s) there but stopped updating after a while because it was stressing me out. I joined the Webnovel discord initially to promote my own novel but I ended up becoming really active there and met some friends who wanted to start their own translation group and I was (forcefully) recruited as an editor (I only realized later it was "editing MTL" so the role was technically a "translator"). Then I joined NUF to promote the novel I was going to translate. I didn't actually end up translating though, and became super active here instead (until I stopped and became dead for a while). I eventually stopped reading on Webnovel because there weren't any BL there and as a binge reader, I hated how they locked up later chapters and how slow it took to earn spirit stones.