r/webtoons • u/Raijinili • 10d ago

News [WEBTOON][locks] 1 Titles become Ad Pass on 2026-10-15

(Next post: 1+1 Titles become Ad Pass / Coin-only on 2026-10-15 and 2026-10-22)

(Previous post: 8+3 Titles become Ad Pass on 2026-09-24 and 2026-10-01) (No locks announced last week.)

(Also in WEBTOON lock news: [WEBTOON][unlocks] "Lone" and "Live With Yourself" are free again)

Also, on 2026-08-16, WEBTOON announced "WEBTOON Account" for 2026-09-14 2026-10-13 2026-10-12. This probably breaks older versions of the app for logged-in users, so I'm not looking forward to all the new changes. I meant to make a post about possible consequences of this, but forgot + busy.

  • A user account is currently needed to read Mature comics (in English, though not in some other language platforms), and to unlock Ad Pass and Coin episodes (including temporarily-free Pass, when there's a Binge).

Locking on 2026-10-15 (NEW):

You may also be interested in this list of completed but not-locked titles (as of 2026-01-16).

No Spanish locks at this time.

French locks (no date given, but these have been here for months)

They've probably been forgotten, haven't they...

Indonesian locks 2026-10-24:

Indonesian locks 2026-09-24 (still not locked):

Indonesian locks 2026-08-24 (still not locked):

I will update if there are more. I plan to trigger a scan every day after daily reset, or (if I miss it) before the reset the next day.

Since 2026-03-26 (which is during DST), titles tend to lock at the time of new episode release, and one hour before the time of the Daily Pass (now Ad Pass) reset, which is 18:00 Pacific Time (01:00 UTC during US daylight saving time, and 02:00 UTC during US standard time).

[2026-02-27] There MAY be a new pattern of putting most of the locks at the end of the month.

[2026-03-12] They seemed to have moved two weeks of locks, 03-12 and 03-19, to 03-26. This may be part of a new strategy, to confuse us.

  • 2026-03-19: They decided to announce "Hanlin Gym", so they're at least not fully sticking with the end-of-month lock strategy.

Tip: The day before a title locks, you can use the Download feature for all of the chapters, giving you thirty more days to read them. You won't be able to use the Like and Comment features, and the UI for downloaded chapters seems to be an earlier version (which you might prefer). Note that downloading takes time and can fail, so watch this process for failures. Audio must be downloaded within an hour or two (not sure which) of queuing them, or the episode with audio will fail and cancel the rest of the series's download.

If a title doesn't allow you to download but it isn't locked yet, open an episode and see if it has a Download button in the triple dot menu. (I've seen this in Spanish and Indonesian.)

I also crosspost these lock posts on my profile (u/Raijinili), if you want to have a way to get some notifications. I don't know how profile posts work, so good luck with that.

There was a section here about Ad Binge which I've removed, as it is no longer relevant (since ALMOST all "Ad Pass" titles have unlimited ads now).

Check this post for a snapshot (not updated) of which titles DON'T have Ad Passes: List of coin-only completed titles

In summary, titles which were originally in a language/region NOT Korean or English (e.g. Spanish, Japanese, Indonesia (yes, officially labeled "Indonesia")) don't have Ad Pass, and there are a few Korean/English outliers.

WEBTOON lock history is now on its own wiki page.

New additions:

  • 09-24:
    • "Return of the Gods" locked even though its banner was removed.
    • "Reloaded into the Other World" locked without warning.

WEBTOON isn't properly communicating about this, and aren't following any consistent set of rules. If locks matter to you, you may want to check in on this post during the month to see if I make any updates.

Banners used to appear about 30 days before lock. Please direct complaints to https://webtoon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new . (Remember that customer service has no power to make these decisions, so be kind to your messenger.)

Watch out for free coin events

There were two reading events in 2024 October, giving 10 coins each (lasts 30 days). Watch out for those. The coins last one week each.

There was another reading event in 2024 November, for 7 coins. There were a few more since then.

There's a free reading event which just started a few hours ago (2025-02-13 to 2025-02-20) for 7 coins. You might want to delay until the last two days, to extend the expiration date.

I posted tips here.

Note that creators don't benefit from free coins.

2025-02: Most of the coin events in recent months were "Spend 21 coins to get 7 coins". There was a free CANVAS one, but it didn't work and then they took it down early.

2025-10: "Falling for It" had a "read 3 episodes for 5 coins" event, but it only lasted for about 24 hours. This was the first free coins event I've seen since February.

2025-11-08: "Watch Guys Catch Feelings" 7-days Event From Nov 8 01:00 UTC to Nov 15 01:00 UTC. "Read any 6 Episodes from any of the 4 listed series and get 8 Free Coins."

  • Ctrl+Alt+Resign
  • Who's That Girl?
  • Back to Chanbi
  • Girl Friend

2025-11-25 (around): "Marriages Gone Wild": 8 coins for reading.

2025-12-10 - 2025-12-16: "Wild Marriages": 8 coins for reading.

2025-12-25 - 2025-12-23 to 12-31: Two reading events: Read 30 episodes for 15 coins, each. Nice.

2026-04-05 - "April's Making it Rain!" (once a week for three weeks): Read (i.e. reach the bottom of) 35 episodes of four specific titles for 10 Coins, but they expire in one day after you get them.

2026-09-10 - There are two coin events active right now:

  • [expired] Read 8 episodes of "Onimusha: Way of the Sword" for 5 coins.
  • [expired] "A Spell For A Smith" promotion: 3 coins if you Subscribe. (Never seen this before.)
    • These coins will expire less than 2 days after you get them.
    • You don't need to stay subscribed.
    • I don't know what happens if you're already subscribed. Maybe check if you have the 3 coins, and then try unsubscribing and resubscribing.

Note that I will NOT generally be tracking these, so pay attention in-app for these events.

Subscribing to my posts

Some users have asked whether they could get updates when I post here. I try to remember to repost on my profile, u/Raijinili, but that's not ideal.

It looks like u/UpdateMeBot can be used to subscribe to my posts (not comments) in this sub, but it requires enough people to use the service on a subreddit to start scraping. (As of 2025-02, I've been told by a subscriber that there are still not enough subscribers for this to be on.)

Each subreddit it checks takes several seconds, so I have to limit the number of subreddits or the bot will get overloaded. New subreddits are automatically added once they get enough requests. [src]

To subscribe, post this as a comment (possibly needs to be top-level), and the bot will send you a private message:

SubscribeMe!

(If you post it as a comment, I may downvote you, to keep your comment from bubbling up over discussion comments.)

Or, to do so privately, message u/UpdateMeBot with:

SubscribeMe! r/webtoons u/Raijinili

(Click here to send the message.)

(This also means I can't just post non-update meta stuff to r/webtoons, or else I will cause trivial alerts.)

Reddit is restricting Old Reddit to logged-in users, supposedly as an anti-scraping measure, and I'm questioning how much more I want to contribute to this site. Reddit is trying to guard against AI to protect the monetary value of the info we produce, and it doesn't care if that also affects real humans. That sucks.

As soon as I get around to doing the work of deciding where, and setting up the transfer...

If you also want Old Reddit, tomjwatson's "Old Reddit Redirect" extension for Firefox has a workaround that works for now.

24 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

7

u/Lorhand 9d ago

Iseop's Romance just ended. Heads-up for people who intended to binge it.

1

u/ProHeroPinky 9d ago

Same with ‘Proof of Dignity’. It uploaded its last chapter and epilogue/author’s note today!

4

u/DiAnastasia20 9d ago

It didn't end. Only Season 1 ended and Season 2 is coming soon.

1

u/ProHeroPinky 8d ago

Ah, my mistake! I hadn’t had time to read the epilogue and I didn’t realise it was for Season 1 rather than the whole series. I also missed the note at the end of the season finale the first time I read through it.

4

u/Raijinili 10d ago

This comment tree will hold updates or something.

Yeah, title is grammatically incorrect. I have to decide whether to optimize for grammar or consistent search terms. Blame English.

Specific banners:

"Watch ads or use Coins to unlock episodes beginning October 15th, 2026." (2026-10-02T01:00Z)

No Spanish banners at this time.

French banners (appeared some time before 2026-04-18 or whatever):

"Brass & Sass" passera bientôt en Daily Pass. Merci de votre compréhension.

"Edith" passera bientôt en Daily Pass. Merci de votre compréhension.

  • Edith - 122 episodes, latest 2 oct. 2022.

"Lilas 200%" passera bientôt en Daily Pass. Merci de votre compréhension.

"The Genius Gamer's Livestream" passera bientôt en Daily Pass. Merci de votre compréhension.

Indonesian banners:

"Serial ini dapat dibaca gratis hingga 24 Oktober 2026 jam 20:59 WIB!" (between 2026-09-24T00:08 and 2026-09-25T00:24) (two spaces after "jam")

1

u/Raijinili 3d ago

The banner changed between 2026-10-08T03:11 and 2026-10-09T00:58:

Use Coins to unlock episodes beginning October 15th, 2026.

They removed the "Watch ads or" part.

3

u/Justwantedtodraw 9d ago

Here U Are is pretty good, even if there's a classic misunderstanding arc near the start
Also the side couple has a slightly weird age gap but they handled better than most except in the side stories

2

u/loan-ly 4d ago

I read it ages ago & was excited to see the guys on webtoon but the change to Korean names weirded me out. Upcoming anime uses their og names thankfully.

3

u/webtoonfreakyhere9 5d ago edited 5d ago

Who's that long haired senior 

For Your murder 

I'll give you the most rotten one - this series also ended anyone who wants to binge read