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”?)
I think an episode of anime is more along the lines of a chapter of a book. Since we rate and compare shows at the season level, I think it should stay similar to a movie or a volume of a book. I don’t think most people watch one episode and “call it done” unless they are dropping the series, nor do I think most people would want to grade difficulty or quality of individual episodes. (Again, to me that would be like grading or rating chapters of a manga or chapters of a novel, which feels weird.)
Sounds like you just want something like this + sign that AniList has where you can increment one episode at a time, right?
Agreed. Just like it feels weird grading the difficulty of an entire long-running book series (like 本好き).
You saw my next paragraph, right?
One thing that’s different about the video side of natively is that the progress marker is episodes and minutes (two units of measure), instead of just one unit of pages. (This would be confusing with books, too, if we decided to track pages and words – “I finished reading 34 pages and 15 words”. )
I did, but I think for most series grading each volume (or episode) independently would be hugely detrimental to the site, because then later volumes would often go ungraded. Not to mention I think it would just be overwhelming. Personally if I was prompted to grade volumes of a series after the first on a regular basis I’d probably just give up and never grade anything.
In case you didn’t know, Brandon does allow some series to have their volumes graded independently, in cases where the difficulty differs greatly between volumes (Harry Potter for example). I’m not sure how often he’s utilized it though.
I haven’t read many long running series yet, so it’s hard to comment much from personal experience. That said, the only long running series I have read (through book 21) is 本好き, and I don’t think the difficulty varies enough to justify grading each volume independently. I could perhaps see grading them by arc (which would require Brandon to make them separate entries or else find some other way of grouping the volumes), but even then I’d probably mark them all as “about the same” if I compared them to one another. While the later arcs are slightly more difficult due to political aspects and larger cast, for me at least it’s still in the realm of margin of error that I’d call “about the same”. If they were graded by arc I’d be surprised if they ended up more than 1-3 levels apart in the end.
(All that said, I always seem to be an outlier in perceiving 本好き’s difficulty, so your mileage may vary.)
Yup. I think we’re on the same page. By the end of my post, I just wanted an easier way to declare an episode “finished”. I agree with you that, because of the separate gradings causing later episodes to be neglected, breaking up a series would be bad.
Yeah, I’m generally quite hesitant to grade volumes independently for all those reasons. I actually launched Natively allowing you to grade every volume as if it were an individual book and the amount of gradings generated was absurd.
Long rant on series grading
I think series grading only really makes sense if the books can be read standalone and/or vary quite significantly and clearly in difficulty. I also think people need to realize that for series where each volume should be read sequentially, then the first volume difficulty grading is by far the most important. The later volume difficulty is only really important if it dissuades people from continuing the series. If the later volumes difficulty don’t prevent you from continuing on, I think that the first volume difficulty rating serves as a good recommendation for what sort of level you should be at to start the series
All that being said, I agree that we all want accurate difficulty ratings and it would be ideal to showcase whether a later volume is a bit easier or harder, as that does reflect in our stats and goals. I think though that we may have special handling to cover that… namely have a special optional grading mode called ‘series variance grading’ where you compare sequential volumes of a series. These gradings could be showcased on the volume pages and could generate a general ‘variance’ score for the series, but would not impact the actually difficulty rating.
I actually implemented this at when we launched, but it added a lot of complexity and not too much value at the time, so I removed it. At some point though, i’d love to add that back in again.
Yeah I think that makes sense. I’d also say that the popup could always autogenerate the mins for you so you wouldn’t have to put them in if you didn’t want to.
This is a bit after the fact, but I would appreciate something like this! I noticed we can currently exclude temporary ratings, but not the opposite, so the extra filter would be welcome!
Maybe a bug?
I unmarked all the Conan episodes I haven’t watched yet. And I unmarked 1 too many (1066), so I remarked it as watched. But it does not show up in the feed.
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. 
