I’m actually quite interested on how you’ve been adding videos to your library, as I tried quite hard to make the English Subs category be visible. Have you been adding things via the big popup? Setting a default status and adding a lot of things with one click? Or with the popup below?
Do we think I should just get rid of it? It may just be simpler to have wish list alone. Can also change to ‘To Watch’
So this is a little dumb, but I believe the behavior is if you’ve ever had an item in a list, then the list filter will appear in your library. I think it should behave as @seanblue described though.
I think a single list just for “Plan to Watch” / “To Watch” / “Planning” (whatever) is pretty reasonable. Anyone who wants to distinguish between how they plan to watch can easily add a custom list.
Ha, yes please. It feels silly to take up space on the left side for empty lists.
Understanding now what I should’ve done, I’ll explain how my brain processed everything…
First, I’ve been adding videos through Search and Browse. When I found something I wanted, I clicked on Wish List, partly because it’s the default setting and partly because I figured I’d sort it later.
After it was in my Wish List, I used the gear on the right side to change the status. I clicked on Your Status, and with a quick glance my brain thought, along with everything else on the video side, “ah, this is setup the same way as the book side. these categories are the same as the book side”, missing that there’s an extra category at the bottom, also knowing that there’s a separate pull-down for subtitles. Then I clicked on Subtitles to choose ENG subs, but… “not allowed, use English subs status”… but… I’m choosing English Subs… I don’t get it… I guess if I watched it with ENG subs then it doesn’t count? I guess that makes sense, since the idea is to consume everything natively.
From then on, I gave up on tracking anything with ENG subs (btw, I’m typing ENG to distinguish from the menu). That said, I’m not saying that I want videos with ENG subs to be tracked in my stats or anything. But eventually, as I collected more videos in my library, it started getting messy. Then I wrote a post.
As I just figured out how this works today, I’m inclined to keep separate categories: one for videos that I’m ready to watch next (Owned, To Watch), and one for videos that I’ve never seen, never bought, or never downloaded (and haven’t decided how I’m going to watch, JPN or ENG subs) (Wish List). Just a name change.
Please don’t. It was exactly because I assumed the list was the same as for books, and because I didn’t see another option, and because I assumed the left side list was static, that I didn’t look for another category. Why have a category that’s on the “secret menu”? I know it’s popular to hide lots of things to give a ‘clean’ look, but I hate having to spend 20min on sites clicking on every pixel just to figure out what’s available. I’m a fan of obvious design. My two cents.
So I think this is the key problem area. I added that disallowed option “not allowed use English subs status” explicitly to direct people to use the status for English subs, but I think i’ve worded that option poorly. I think some people just read it as “not allowed”.
Do you think if the option read “Eng subs - use status Eng subs instead” that would’ve made more sense to you?
Yeah, I think I need to ditch owned for videos, agreed.
I can see your point, but it can be unnecessarily noisy and if we were to always enable all the status lists, then we’d need to add extra logic to make it sensible. For instance, if you only add ‘Finished’ books, you shouldn’t see ‘In Progress’ filter listed above ‘Finished’. It’d also be somewhat confusing to have all the list filters, but only items in ‘Finished’. We’d have to have item counts in the lists at the very least.
All’s that to say, in the current system of no item counts and a set order for the lists, I think it’s less intuitive to have all lists show up.
But i’ll keep that thought in mind, those list filters definitely can be improved.
Maybe it should read: “For Eng subs, return to Status, choose English Subs”
Instead of offering an unclickable option, allow people to click “English Subs” but then change the Status for them… In other words, the option simply reads: “English subs” …but when you click on it, it opens a message box explaining something like: This site encourages enjoying material in the native language, so watching in English is not tracked in the stats. Only material in Japanese is tracked. We will change the Status for this video to “Watched with English”. [OK][Cancel] …And then it’s automatically changed. After 1 or 2 times through this, people will catch on. This way, it doesn’t look like there’s a broken option. (Maybe those steps are not possible to do?)
I’m not sure I follow this. Compared to how it was originally envisioned, I can see that it might be confusing, but the current system has empty lists, and I haven’t seen any complaints about it. It doesn’t break the functionality of the site. And then if you change it to where lists disappear, then for users who have empty lists, won’t it seem like a bug on the site?
Also, for noise on the left side, there’s already 20+ genres… so… 6 lists is too much but 26 genres is okay?
To be clear, it doesn’t bother me either way, really – I just think the site’s behavior should be consistent.
And yes, an item count next to the lists would be cool.
Edit: to your earlier comment, it’s more the fact that the option is grayed out that made me think that it’s not allowed, not the words.
Now we update user tv sessions & activities when processing a season split. Backfilled previous splits as well, so all tv session activities should have the right episode numbers and seasons (applies mostly to @Megumin)
Added ‘approved’ emails to send when season split request is accepted
UP NEXT:
More bugs…
Syncing with TMDB. I think season splits are mostly done now.
I did not that some of the seasons seemed long… perhaps a season split is in order?
NEXT UP
allow people to trigger resyncs
showcase ‘ongoing’ status
I think I need to handle episode runtime updates from TMDB with tv episodes marked ‘watched’ by users. Minute calculations may not be updated for user stats.
I thought about it some more and, yeah, I think all you need is a “To Watch” list (ie. remove Owned and Wish List), and if you want to mark videos for different purposes, you can do so with custom lists. (I’m finding that the filters pretty much do what I need without having custom lists.)
So I’m thinking the lists would be:
Wish List – Watching – Stopped – English Subs – Finished
Other alternatives: Yet To Watch, Never Watched, Want to Watch
I think ‘Plan to Watch’ makes sense, It’s just slightly longer than Wish List… have to double check it works in the interface (want it to fit well on the button).
I agree though, let’s ditch ‘Owned’ for audiovisual. I’m not sure if I should make a custom ‘Owned’ list for everyone and duplicate the items onto the new list? Or if just makes sense to just assume most people won’t want the custom list.
I’m leaning towards the first option (duplicating).
“Planning” is the shorthand AniList uses when “Plan to Watch” doesn’t fit. I just don’t think “Wish List” makes sense because to me “Wish List” implies purchasing something.
What would happen to the items if you don’t make the custom list? Would they go onto to the same Plan to Watch list as the current Wish List items? Also, what do you mean by duplicating? I haven’t used custom lists yet, so I just assumed an item can go on a single list regardless of whether it’s built-in or custom. Is that true or does every item have to be on one of the built-in lists and they get “duplicated” onto the custom list if you use one?
Yes, the current Wish List & Owned items would be merged into on ‘Plan to Watch’ list.
Right now an item in your library needs to have a ‘status’ and appears on the list associated with that status. Custom lists are simply lists which do not have any correlated status. So yes, any item on a custom list must be on the status list too.
I could certainly allow you to add items to your library with no status and only live on a custom list, but I don’t have the system configured to allow that currently. My impression is that the current approach is pretty standard across trackers (AniList, GoodReads, BookMeter & StoryGraph all require a ‘status’).
Do you plan to address the weird duplicating of season titles in both Japanese and English across the board, or do we need to submit corrections for each individually?
This might fall under the issue I previously described with the video stats, but I noticed that the .episode-status dialogues don’t affect the Activity or Stats, but the .left-hand dialogue does. So the watch stats are reported incorrectly.
Issue: The Additional Details dialogue (under .left-hand ) updates the displayed Activity progress, but the .episode-status dialogue does not. This inconsistency is reflected in both the series’ Activity section and in my individual Stats section.
Steps Followed:
Mar 14: via Additional Details dialogue, I entered that I’d watched Log Horizon ep 1-11 (meaning it said "Current Location 12, Min 0)
Apr 7: via .episode-status dialogues, I corrected ep 1-11 to Started & Finished Dec 10, 2022
Apr 7-8: I watched eps 12 - 25, marking them each as started & finished after I watched, via .episode-status dialogues
Apr 8: After completing ep 25, I marked the series as Finished 4/8/2023
What displays in Activity:
Just now: lunacodes watched Ep 24-25 (25 min)
21 hours ago*: lunacodes finished ログ・ホライズン S1
2023-03-14: lunacodes watched Ep 1-12**
2023-03-14: lunacodes started watching
(see Notes section below for the asterisks)
What displays in Stats (for related months):
Apr 2023: Watched 49 min (half of that is SAO Alicization) Mar 2023: 2,078 min (a variety of shows, some of this is likely erroneous) Dec 2022: 0 min
The fact that I also watched ep 12 through 24 on Apr 7-8 is not reflected in either location
Notes:
*The time right now is Apr 8, 10:38 PM EST. So “22 hours ago” == Apr 8, 12AM EST, i.e. the beginning of the day
**The episodes watched should be 11 instead of 12. The Current Location field was set to Ep 12 Min 0. If showing that as Ep 12 is the intended behavior, then “Current Episode” is an unclear label.
Apologies for the brief delay in response, I had a brief vacation this past week (brother in town )
Interesting. I assume it’s that way on TMDB too? I think we’ll need to report individually unfortunately, as i’m not sure I could programmatically do it well?
Yeah, this is a part of the next batch of work. Now that I have a sense of ‘ongoing’ there will be a series of changes in display. That’s a good callout.
This is all really excellent feedback, thank you! After I deal with a few more ‘ongoing series’ updates - like grading ongoing series and a few mechanisms - I will be focusing on stats & activities. Have noted these things down and will address then
“Last Synced” information now appears on TV Season & TV Series pages
Can manually trigger a sync with TMDB by clicking the ‘sync’ button
Episodes to be aired (future episodes) are now shown if they are in TMDB (see here for example)
Next Up:
Display ‘ongoing’ series status on tv season & series page
Better handle progress bar on dashboard for ‘ongoing’ series items
Determine how to handle gradings for ongoing series
After that I think the ‘ongoing’ aspect of series will be mostly solved for the time being. I’ll be moving on to bugs for a little while and then stats. I have essentially 10 days until another week vacation, so this next week should have lots of progress updates
EDIT: I forgot to mention that I also now surface episodes that are not yet aired. You cannot mark these episode finished or watching, you can only view them until their release date occurs. FYI if you mark an ongoing season ‘finished’, it will only mark aired episodes finished. “Unaired TV Episodes” are in a completely different database table, so there’s no way you can mark them finished
Made genre filter a ‘super filter’ in the video search. Now, the second click on a genre subtracts that genre from the results. Also, each genre is an ‘AND’ filter now, not an 'OR. See all non-animation action content here. Note that I haven’t updated the library genre filter yet… will do shortly. @morteASD thanks for the UI suggestion!
Added season ‘ongoing’ status to tv season & tv series page
Duplicate seasons (新あたしンち) @Legato I’m not sure I should fix this. Perhaps we should delete the second season from TMDB? It seems more like a reboot than a second season of the same show (14 years apart)
SPY×FAMILY … season 2?. I decided not to separate ‘part 2’ into a second season. Welcome to feedback about that!
