Interesting. 
Iāve updated that as you suggested, and still no luck:
Iām also seeing an odd-looking update on my Activity feed after moving my current time to ep. 5, 0 min:
I was actually thinking about suggesting that as well; itās such a long list to scroll through, haha.
Ah. There actually was a bug there, but Iāve fixed it for you 
You can also always just put āAnyā if youāre not worried about the location. And then if you see a provider you like, you can click the icon to see a list of the regions itās available in
Whoa, smart. 
Thanks for the tip!
Should I be seeing the bug fix now? Or will that come in a later update?
It should be fixed
Ah! I see. So thereās a bug with grading from that tv season page (doesnāt ever show the grade prompt for in progress books, need to fix that), but you will find the grade prompt in your account dropdown in the top nav OR in the gradings section of your dashboard 
You banged out two bug reports in one issue!
Looks like both are showing up fine; thanks! 
What can I say; I like breaking things. 
Feedback Needed
So letās chat TV stats! Fair warning, this is getting into the weeds
The Functionality We Need
Natively needs to know when you watched a tv episode or a partial tv episode. This is important for showcasing your episodes watched or minutes watched over time. Currently, there are three places we can look:
The Problem
What happens if you generate a bunch of watch sessions and then later on, you edit the start and end dates for a tv season to be way earlier, like sometime last year? What happens if you generate a multi-episode watch session and then go to one episode and change the dates to something other than the watch session? How do we resolve these conflicts?
Proposed solution
Conclusion
I know itās a little complicated, but thatās what happens when you have multiple sources of truth. Let me know what you think
I wonder if adding in re-watch capability would help in this situation or not? Two questions stick out in my mind:
Iām also a programmer by trade, so Iām familiar with the first question. āThis scenario would only occur to specific users at specific times, and itās probably not a general use case, but we need to know how to handle it or things are going to start looking weird.ā I think Iām generally in favor of your proposed solution in this case, though Iām not a fan of the last bullet. Natively goes out of its way to collect data, and by default not recording data sounds dangerous. I could easily see a scenario where a user, used to having at least the end date marked, marks a couple of episodes per day/week and doesnāt realize until they have tens of episodes marked done that none have any dates attached. I know I would be annoyed, at least.
The second question comes from just being a regular user here, and trying to figure out why anyone would want to mark ep. 1 of show A watched today, and then go manually change the watch dates to last year (or whatever). Or even weirder, changing the watch date of an episode in the middle of a watch session. One scenario that comes to mind is that maybe itās technically a rewatch, and the user is trying to āgameā the system by having both dates in? (Although I guess most arenāt going to be privy as to how Natively is keeping track of these thingsā¦)
Out of curiosity, how is a TV seasonās start date checked? Is it by the start date of the first episode, or is it stored separately?
Really appreciate all that feedback and good food for thought. I donāt have devs to bounce ideas off of!
On your āMy Videosā theres a little āeditā button next to the date. You can also change them from the āadditional optionsā popup. These are stored on the user tv season, not the episodes.
So, imagine that a user comes on and marks a season āfinishedāā¦ no incremental progress at all. Then I auto mark all the episodes finished at that point. Now, what if they come back later and start backfilling their start & end dates? Unfortunately, itās a likely situation.
This one I agree, seems a bit unlikely and Iām thinking that in the case of editing dates, I simply push you to the popup manager to prevent that issue? Basically push all date editing to one UI that can control the craziness a bit.
To be clear, youād still have the watch session data, it just wouldnāt be filled in on the little episode popup in the āepisodesā section of the UI. However, maybe I can simply surface the session date if that episode is a part of a session and thereby direct them to the popup dates manager from thereā¦ hmm.
Does that all make sense?
Perhaps when the user only marks the season as finished you should save the episode watch dates as null to basically mean āI donāt know, use the season datesā. Then those dates would only be set if the user is manually marking each episode as finished. And if someone is manually doing that itās probably a show they are actively watching, lowering the chance they change the season dates later.
Right, agreedā¦ I think thatās how iāll store it. I think the only difference iām proposing is if they want to edit the episode date for some reason, you are show the season end date and you are linked to the popup date manager iām proposingā¦ where you see all the dates of the season, episodes & watch sessions in one place, to prevent conflicts.
Aaah, I see now. Yeah, thatās definitely going to happen a lot. That actually makes me think it might be worth considering reversing the order of priorities: watch session > TV episode start/end > TV season start/end, since they lose granularity in that order.
Then we get to the question you posed earlier,
I think this is another case of Iād need to see a concrete use case to fully wrap my mind around taking the userās motives into account to accurately reflect the data. I guess I would still default to prioritizing the watch sessions, since we would have more granular data for that.
Just so weāre on the same page, which popup is the popup manager?
I do think this is a good idea. Also helps you with bugs when you update one UI but forget to change another, etc.
Weāre referring to this one, correct?
Anyhow, I would think that youād want some date to show here, otherwise the user is going to think thereās a bug somewhere: āI just marked this as watched on my dashboard; shouldnāt the date finished populate here?ā
What places on the site do you have in mind to show this āmaster session popupā?
I actually think itās a better user experience to have the more granular options be lower priority as itās harder to maintain the granular ones. Most people just want to edit the dates of the season and not worry about anything else. Thatās how iām thinking about it anyway.
I meant the āmaster dates popupā
correct
I do think that I want to indicate that the episode doesnāt have a specified date, but perhaps yeah I showcase somehow it is being āappliedā at a certain date. Iāll think on it.
Well, I donāt want too many popups here, so Iām trying to think this through.
Perhaps itās best that I simply have a āwatching dataā manager rather than a master dates popper, which would:
This āwatching dataā manager could live in the āadditional optionsā popup as a second tab. I eventually could add a ādata managerā for books & movies too. The āupdateā popup could eventually be a tab as well, pushing all these interfaces into on item.
Anyway, back to your original question, I think this sort of consolidated ādata managerā would be accessible via:
The more I think about it, I think I like this āwatching dataā manager approach, rather than a simple āmaster datesā popper.
Thatās me! Itās possible Iāll set episode watch dates on the (extremely rare) occasion that Iām watching an ongoing series (so I can rate the ongoing series), but otherwise I just plan to set the season dates. (And when I say āextremely rareā I mean that Iām now watching Oshi no Ko week to week, which is the third anime Iāve ever watched while it was airing out of the hundreds Iāve watched in total.) That said, I donāt necessarily care about the priority order as long as itās safe from a stats perspective to just set the season dates. I understand that if I do that I could lose some stats granularity when I watch something over a month/year boundary, but I donāt really care about that.
The second question comes from just being a regular user here, and trying to figure out why anyone would want to mark ep. 1 of show A watched today, and then go manually change the watch dates to last year (or whatever). Or even weirder, changing the watch date of an episode in the middle of a watch session.
Iāve had multiple series where Iāve watched a few episodes in the middle, months before. So say I watched Akatsuki no Yona ep 4-6 in Nov 2022, and then in Mar 2023, I watch eps 1-3 and 7-9. For convenience I might update via the watch session to āwatched 1-9ā, and then go fix the dates for 4-6.
As an aside, I didnāt even realize that existed until now. The fact that itās somehow different than the TV Season start/end dialogue, and that it has this āadd time time spentā option that the Season dialogue doesnāt have, is really confusing.
Thatās me! Itās possible Iāll set episode watch dates on the (extremely rare) occasion that Iām watching an ongoing series
On the other hand, I set the individual episode dates all the time. In part bc Iām expecting to see that reflected in stats at some point, and in part bc I just like that level of granularity (though itās cumbersome to do at present).
One piece where I think itās really relevant is the end of the month. Like if I watch ep 1-24 of a season in Apr, but finish 25-26 in May, I donāt want that to calculate/reflect as if I watched the whole show in May.
Also I have more than a few shows that Iāve spread out over months (and not necessarily in order). In part bc I watched a few eps last year, and then got motivated to watch the rest, when the Videos section got added here. Iām looking forward to eventually seeing that show up in the stats.
Thatās great to hear that youāre using the granularity! Iāve put a lot of work to get it so that Natively is a really flexible platform when it comes to tracking - my perspective is that language learners care much more about granular stats than normal readers / watchers doā¦ like timed reading sessions.
So donāt worry, all your hard work of inputting those dates will pay off. Itās a big part of the site. As you say though, the current system is a little confusing, which is what I think this new ādata managerā iām proposing will fix
The manual season start dates & end dates are pretty essential in my mind however - itās pretty key functionality for people who donāt care about the granuarity.
For sure, I didnāt mean to suggest otherwise. The new data manager sounds great btw!! And as always, thanks for all the thought and work you put into everything here!
Auto filling dates, came up earlier. Fwiw, I find it very convenient that the TV Season dialog auto fills the ādate finishedā for individual episodes. I wish it (optionally) affected the ādate startedā as well, perhaps via a checkbox? Not the end of the world that it doesnāt, but it seems a bit inconsistent that it affects one and not the other.
Also this may be a ātackle laterā thing, but with the stats, thereās also a question of what to do for rewatching in different formats. Like if I watch a show with subs, and then months later watch it JP Audio only, then it feels a bit weird and discouraging to either lose the progress of the first watch, or not have a record of the second watch, since theyāre different formats.
Side note, I found a small bug just now. On mobile, with collapsed series view, the TV seasons are listed as āBook #ā instead of Season #. Happens for multiple series. Example:
Yes, I know I often find myself doing the same.
Rewatch / rereads are a bit intimidating functionality to implement, but needs to done. While people certainly reread things, I think rewatches are especially important, so that functionality will definitely happen at some point.
And thanks for the note on the bug
