I’ve used it a few times, but sure is not the main way I go with.
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Whoops! Oh no 
Well I guess you all got a preview look at the data manager if you opened up a movie item, yeesh. I like to update things in the background so as to not have massive changes all at once. Unfortunately broke this here before i’m ready for the data manager launch…
Thanks for the note, it’s fixed now! @Megumin @eefara @SophieShiori
Fwiw, I finally made a breakthrough with the architecture for data handling for tv sessions / tv data management. Will hopefully get that out soon now.
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If you were curious…
A way too long description of the data manager issues
First, for your recollection, I’m working on a data manager to give you better control over your reading / watching data which impact your statistics. As an example, for books this means a consolidated interface which shows all your reading sessions for a book in one place, along with the ability to edit. This will give you better ability to control exactly when natively thinks you read or watched something.
For Books and Movies, data management is relatively straightforward… you have start dates & end dates on the book/movie and then potentially ‘progress sessions’ which give more granular updates on when pages or movie minutes were consumed. In the data manager this is easy to surface.
However, with TV it’s a bit more complicated. Right now, we have potential progress updates from either individual episode data (marking episodes finished individually) or from watch sessions created by the ‘update progress’ popup… which can span multiple
episodes or be partial episodes. That means, in the data manager, you could either look at your individual episode data (when you started and finished the episodes) or a list these multi-episode spanning ‘watch sessions’ you see in the activity feed.
I’ve been struggling to figure out how to handle this and how to show this in a sensible way.
My solution is to only show your progress on a per episode basis. If you have a ‘multi episode’ spanning watch session, we just treat it as if you had marked the episodes finished individually. If you have a watch session that starts or ends in the middle of an episode, then we will create a ‘partial episode watch session’ that will live underneath the episode data as a more granular data item. In the data manager UI, you will be able to edit these as well, but they will be shown as a sub item of an episode.
The only complication is timed watching sessions. We can’t really break them apart without it being a bit confusing. My thought here is that these sessions will be editable and live under a separate tab of the tv data manager… however this editable data would only contribute to your timed stats (tv watching speed). Only the episode data & partial episode watch sessions would determine when you watched the minutes.
I know that was a lot of context, but figured if anyone might appreciate it, it’d be one of you all 
And I know some of you still find the notion of partial episode updates a little unnecessary… but as I myself have been using it, as I thought I am finding a lot of value in it. I ‘watch’ episodes more like reading 
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Is watching partial episodes a big use case? If I were you I would have just replaced pages/percent/minutes with episodes for TV shows and called it a day.
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I would say it’s less of a use case for Anime for sure. However, a lot of the kdramas I’m watching are around 60 mins an episode and I think it’s beneficial for a lot of learners like myself to be able to log something daily.
60 mins is very often too much 
I do think it’s a pretty big benefit, but you’re right there’s probably better things I could be doing. Oh well. Will be done soon.
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FYI - search seems to be down for the last five minutes. I’m trying to diagnose.
Edit: Unfortunately, I cannot even access my account on elastic.co to diagnose the issue, so it seems like they’re having serious issues. Will keep you updated 
Here I thought switching to Elastic away from Amazon search would make it more robust.
Edit #2: Elastic seems to be investigating the issue
Edit #3: They have confirmed there’s an issue, working on a fix
Edit #4: Fix has been implemented. Update rolling out now.
Edit #5: [NOW FIXED] We’re back!
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Fun fact: Elastic actually uses AWS (as well as GCP and Azure).
They also don’t have any SLA at all for basic subscriptions (same FAQ). Curious what issues you were seeing (though this is quite off topic so feel free to email me or ignore, I’m just nosy).
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Heh I don’t mind - honestly, I always welcome feedback on the infrastructure. You’re right. It’s definitely less robust from a purely server infrastructure perspective as now i’m adding another potential failure with Elastic.co’s service.
However, elastic.co has a lot better performance measures and alerting services out of the box compared to OpenSearch, which you have to configure yourself through Cloudwatch. And generally, I was hopeful that using Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch would be a bit better, as it seems to have more active development.
Frequently, in the past with OpenSearch, search would just stop working and I was at a loss why. Whether it was a memory issue or CPU issue or configuration issue… I struggled to figure it out.
So far with Elastic.co, when I have had issues it’s been pretty clear what the problem has been… until this outage! 
Edit: They actually do email support for the basic subscription, which has helped me in the past. And I’ve also been able to deploy a smaller cluster than on OpenSearch with less issues… not entirely sure why.
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I set a reminder for myself to reply to this and then still didn’t Whoops.
Anyways, since it’s veering off topic:
Elastic search stuff
I don’t actually use Elasticsearch at my current job but I extensively use AWS and am 0% surprised that you have to set up your own monitoring and that the UI was less than intuitive. I suppose I was mostly curious what drew people to the competition, having never used it and those are valid reasons. I suspect there may be more tilt towards AWS on a cost or configuration basis if someone has the time and support to accommodate that, but a more ‘out of the box’ solution for a one-person-company makes perfect sense to me.
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Right, it’s absolutely cheaper to setup your own ElasticSearch cluster on AWS (without using OpenSearch), which isn’t terribly hard to do. But for all the reasons you stated, yeah as a one person team doesn’t make much sense. And, in any case, we got elastic search costs to around $40 a month now, which I think is pretty reasonable
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Also, as an aside… speaking of configuring your own alerts and whatnot for AWS, can I just say CloudWatch is stupidly expensive? Like I had very few metrics & streams going and it already was above $60 a month. I ended up using NewRelic which is amazing, with tons of great out of the box monitoring and alerts… for $50 a month. CloudWatch pricing is pretty shocking tbh.
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Off topic stuff
FIFY.
Monitoring can easily spiral out of control re: spend. I’ve never used NewRelic but I currently am using DataDog and oh my is that a beast to keep the spend under control. We barely use Cloudwatch but that’s less for price reasons and more because Cloudwatch is a pain and we want something the devs will actually look at and interact with.
For me that title always goes to Redshift 
Although we do have a shameful S3 bill that I won’t go into detail about on a public forum, but I’ll just say: store things in a manner in which you can set up sane lifecycle rules and you’ll save a lot of money!
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Small Product Update
TV update only
We’ve moved TV Progress tracking to focus on ‘Finished Episodes’. This means by default you start at 0 episodes watched. There’s also a small ‘+’ sign for quick incrementing the episodes watched.
You’ll notice now too that the ‘update progress’ form only shows a ‘finished epsisode’ field. After some discussion with everyone, I think this will probably be more intuitive. If you’d like to mark partial episodes, you still can though! Just have to click ‘mark partial episode’.
One final note! Before this update, we encouraged you to set your current location to the episode you were about to watch with a minute = 0. So if you had watched episode 1, we encouraged you to set the location to episode 2 minute 0.
However, we’ve automatically moved those location back to the previous episode with minute equal to the runtime for that episode. So, back to our example, if there were 24 mins in episode 1, your ‘location’ now would have been automatically updated to episode 1 minute 24, not episode 2 minute 0.
If your location was not at minute 0, do not be concerned - the location would not be touched by this auto update.
If you all have any questions, let me know!
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To update the minutes spent on the episode, you have to do it from the front page dashboard instead of the episode within the movie item.
This is not very straight forward my opinion, as the field is disabled:
Also, there’s redundant information in this form, and the error is a bit non-specific.
At first I though it mean I should start the episode on minute 1. Granted it might be also part lack of coffee but I’d though I’d chip in.
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What exactly do you mean by redundant information? Agreed though, that error is a bit-non specific. Should say that the time spent needs to be greater than zero.
I could add a field for time spent there too, hmm. I was thinking we only have time data on the ‘update progress’ form, but i understand that people like simply using the episode UI too. I’ll think on it. As i’m back working on the data manager now, this impacts that as well.
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The time spent if I start on min 0 and go to min 25 is already known, putting that I spent 25 minutes is redundant, unless there’s a scenario where someone might be watching at 0.5x or 2x speed. Is that a thing?
Is just that if it can’t be done there, I’d change the input field for normal text, and maybe a tooltip saying where to update it. A disabled input field makes you think you are doing something wrong, or that something is not working properly.
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Well, it’s what I do, so yes. I essentially intensively read subtitles
Yeah I see what you mean. Good point.
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This is still a bit awkward. I went to mark episode 8 of Oshi no Ko as watched (I forgot to update it when I actually watched it). It says my current location is episode 7, 25 minutes. I change to episode 8 and then it notes that episode 8 was 24 minutes, but the minutes input still said 25. Do I really have to specify the end minutes manually? That’s from the Basic Info view. Should I be using the Progress Update view instead?
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Thanks for the update Brandon!
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You’re right, I haven’t updated the basic info view, good point. Will update.
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