So, I suspect that there is a bit of nuance here which we’ll have to think about. How do we handle ongoing series? If we have some way of knowing if the current season is ongoing, then I think it makes sense to auto mark the season finished for seasons which have no more episodes imminently coming.
I think TMDB has this information… or at least has if there are episodes upcoming. But it hasn’t pulled into my database yet. I think I will probably need to, but touching up the syncing process for ongoing series is on the plan for this week.
In addition to TMDB telling you when there’s an upcoming episode, you can probably also assume that after ~2 weeks of no new episodes that a show is finished. In the rare case that’s not right, a user can just provide feedback.
Also, you might be able to use a similar method to guess when a show is a split cour to automate (as much as possible) splitting seasons better. By definition a split cour means there’s at least a whole season (~3 months) between two episodes, so perhaps if you detect a month or longer gap you can just split it automatically. I don’t know if that will work for these crazy multi-hundred episode shows, but for shows like Komi-san or Spy x Family that just have two total cours with a cour in between, it should work pretty well.
Oh, I wasn’t actually expecting you to do anything about that hover thing. I just thought it was funny. Suppose I shouldn’t post stuff like that while there’s still real bugs to deal with.
Oh no, I actually appreciate all the little UI bugs that you submit in… usually people don’t bother to submit them and then I never know about it. So please continue
I would’ve spent the second to fix that if it made sense.
I typed that out in a bit of a hurry before, so let me give a few more details so I’m not so vague: the particular flow I’ve been using is: go to TV show page → go to episodes → mark as completed. (This page v)
when I click “Expand”, nothing appears. Are episode summaries usually supposed to be here? If there’s nothing to display, can the Expand option be hidden?
related, there’s a lot of empty space inside each episode container. Could our start/finish dates for that episode be shown there? Your finish date is auto-set when you mark complete here, but not the start date, and it would be nice to have an easy way to scroll through and see what I’ve forgotten to mark.
if the second bullet point is acted upon, might be a good idea to label the existing date on the episode as “Release Date” for clarity.
having a grey border doesn’t feel quite right to me as a casual user for completed episodes; feels like it should be green to show completion instead.
I’m not a huge fan of the current TV show updating method from the dashboard, so I don’t have much feedback so far beyond this: I’m always a little confused when I hit Update and see this popup:
With books it makes more sense: at the end of my reading session, I’m on page ##. But with TV shows, I’m not on episode 5, that’s the one I just finished. And when I finish episode 6, it feels weird to write down that my current episode is 6. Does anyone else read it that way? Something like “Last episode finished” makes more sense to my brain, at least.
Edit: one other thing. Going to (in this case) a movie’s page and changing the status from “Wish list” to “Owned” doesn’t update the activity feed. It normally should, right?
Yeah, originally I wanted the ‘update’ for the tv show progress to allow you to pick by episode right in the popup, but honestly felt the text field with episode information was more straightforward
Yes. I agree doesn’t make sense if there’s absolutely nothing there. Potentially could do your other suggestions too, food for thought.
I see. I guess I was hoping people would simply put Episode 6 Min 0 if they finished episode 5, just like you would a book… you list the place you’re at. I understand though that’s a little confusing… especially since when I mark the season finished for you it’s the last minute of the last episode.
“Last episode finished” is a little wordy, but happy to hear others thoughts.
It’s a bit weird that marking a show as finished generated two separate activity events. I don’t really think the “watched episodes 1-12” activity should be generated since I’m not manually marking episodes as watched. When I mark a book as finished it doesn’t also say “read pages 1-200” or anything like that.
Yeah that’s a bug… it’s supposed to collapse those activities
Happening on the books side too. Added to the list.
For a brief status update: I’m pushing to get this season split & season syncing update out this week. After that goes out, you’ll once again see the daily updates for all the small bugs you’ve been requesting.
I think it’ll be another 2 weeks before I think we’ll be through this initial phase of bug reports and broken features.
may or may not be relevant…
– I reset some shows I had from Finished to Owned.
– I started watching a new show this week. That should be about 100 min from this week.
– I have no idea how it’s calculating the rest of the 219 minutes.
Shows vs Episodes – It seems that individual episodes should be treated like individual volumes with books – that each one can be graded and Finished/Watched separately, and that you can click “Finished” at the end of each episode and it’ll auto-complete the time. The way it’s currently setup, where you pick the episode and pick the time, is a bit clunky.
It seems like it’d flow better if you could finish watching an episode, then come to the Dashboard, click Update, click “I’m Finished” and auto-complete the episode (move it to Finished). And then the next episode would jump into your “In Progress” list (with a notification that that’s what just happened).
Something seems to have broken with the importer from TMDB: added a movie earlier and no picture ever came back (showed in the preview though) and same with a TV Show I just added.
Waited a while thinking maybe it would sync eventually, but it hasn’t as of ~2hrs later I think. Thought I would report it since this has never happened to me on any of my other Movie/TV requests.
Would it be useful to mark shows/books with the current number of gradings? To encourage people to watch/read and grade some items that are getting neglected.
Or, maybe instead, there could be a separate search category for “hidden gems”, for people who want to explore less popular items that could still be good for learning, and that way, get more gradings. @brandon
I find it a bit odd that some season pages show two plot summaries. It seems like one is the series summary and the other is the season summary. For example: ３月のライオン S1 | L29. This is particularly weird for shows like ロマンティック・キラー S1 | L25 that only have one season but have two different summaries.
Hey Brandon - thanks so much for you work on the update I’ve been looking forward for a while, and it’s really exciting.
A bug I’ve run into is that my video episode watch dates are not reflected accurately on the series page or my stats page. For example: I watched much of Sword Art Online S1 in September 2022, but finished it in March 2023. Both the series’ Activity section and my own profile’s Stats page display the entire season as watched in March 2023. So even though I watched X-hundred minutes in Sep 2022, my stats show that I watched 0 minutes.
Anyway, thanks again for the update, and really impressed by how responsive you’ve been to all the reports & requests in this thread! お疲れ様！！
I had an idea sometime back to start a reading/watching club focused around ungraded items. Only problem with that is most things on the site are probably ungraded, so it wouldn’t be a super focused lineup necessarily.
oo. That’d be cool. Maybe one way around the lineup is to randomly choose 3-5 shows and put them up for a vote – the most-voted-for item becomes the next show in the club. (and same for books, of course)
Improved ‘Have feedback’ management flow (we got a lot of audiovisual feedback through that button so I had to make it more automated… sorry for the delayed responses!)
Finished responding to all the ‘Have feedback’ submissons
Mostly done with season split request & processing flow…
Fixed image issues with TV/Movie upload mechanism and backfilled issues @Bijak
Added series titles to all season titles @seanblue
I think the major issue that people have is they aren’t sure how to mark an episode ‘completed’ with the ‘current minute’ field. If you just watched episode 5 which was 24 mins, should you say your current location is episode 5 min 24? Or episode 6 min 0?
TBH, we treat them both the same, but I understand why that feels clunky. I think it’d be more intuitive if by default I autogenerate the minute field, but that can be clicked and overridden.
I’m not sure I totally follow the rest of what you mean though around grading each episode as if it were a book. And you can simply click the episodes ‘finished’ and it will autopopulate the minutes watched?
That’s interesting. That’s certainly good if you’re only marking one episode complete, less so if you’re marking many episodes complete. It’s also a totally different UI than the other items in ‘In Progress’, so bit wary to implement unless we think it’d help a lot. But definitely food for thought.
While I love the idea, I think the only people who’d be interested in it would be very small contingent of power users, who already are looking at the lesser popular things
I’d be happy to add a ‘temporary only’ filter which would showcase books without many ratings, if people want this!
That’s right. One is a season summary and one is a series. I’m happy to hear thoughts on that. Perhaps I only include the series summary if there’s no season summary?
For context, many people view the search through the series mode ‘one item only’ not ‘series’, so they often end up on the first volume. Having the series description there helps it be more engaging I think… but agreed double summaries are a little awkward.
I’ve noted that down, will investigate! I do know I have to dig into Audiovisual stats a little bit, I know there are a few things i need to improve there.
Thanks! I’m just happy how much feedback you all are providing
It’s the same idea as the next part of my comment, which you caught here…
To give more detail, currently, from the UI perspective, when you “update” an item, 1 book volume is the same as 1 movie is the same as 1 TV season. 1 book volume === 1 movie === 1 TV season
I was saying that maybe it should be handled more like this: 1 book volume === 1 movie === 1 TV episode
In the same way that I put down 1 book volume, call it done, and pick up the next book volume, I was thinking that I would put away 1 episode, call it done, and pick up the next episode.
Although, as I’m writing this, maybe some long-running shows (like Dragonball Z) are better handled at the season level and some shows are better handled at the episode level? Because I imagine, in terms of vocab, there’s not much difference between DBZ ep 124 and ep 125, but there’s a lot of vocab in each episode of a 13-episode drama.
I dunno. When I finished watching each drama episode – where I was pausing, taking notes, rewinding some parts – I wanted to go to the Dashboard and say “I’m finished!”… but I’m not finished. It’s click “update”, click episode count, click minute count, click “update”. Not as satisfying.
(Hm. I’m coming around to seeing the problem from your side. Maybe two buttons? “I finished the episode” and “I finished the season”?)
