I assume so. I think it might be helpful to have a tooltip next to the ‘algorithm’ gradings to clarify this, as I think it could be confusing for (new) users who may not have read the page about gradings. It might look a bit odd to the casual user to have ‘11 gradings’ above a list of 100+ comparisons that are also labeled as gradings.
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A question about this - Should this also have autopopulated all of the Audible links for books that were already in the database?
Some books have an Audible version listed on the book page on Amazon, but the audiobook is not listed on Natively (and therefore can’t be found via the audible search filter)
Examples: x, x, x, x, x
Any idea why? 
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Ah, that’s disappointing! Unfortunately, there are two reasons why this happens
- It was added early in Natively’s history (like before August of 2021). Applies to your first 3 links.
- The audiobook was added to the amazon page after the book was uploaded to Natively. Applies to your last 2 links.
Audible coverage will be spotty unfortunately. I’d encourage people to add these links if they don’t see them on the page!
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This one doesn’t seem so bad, there is a limit to how many there are so the community can potentially fill out the majority of them by hand eventually.
But this one seems a bit problematic. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Japanese book get published simultaneously with an audiobook. ‘Any new release that gets added to natively before it has an audiobook’ seems like the majority of them. If they all have to be added manually the coverage won’t ever be particularly good.
Is there something that can be done about this?
Perhaps automatically checking all titles/series that don’t have an audiobook linked already, every month spread out over the month or something?
Or if something like that takes up too many resources, perhaps a refresh button so people don’t have to fill it in manually? Seems like more people would use that.
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Unfortunately, automatically finding audiobooks is the issue. The API for amazon is not very good - even though they list the editions & audiobook together on the book page, there’s no access to that relationship in the API. Even amazon book series don’t exist in the API. Rather, the current process is to save the actual webpage html by hand and then auto parse the html for amazon ids and then ping their API.
I would love to automate that HTML retrieval, but Amazon is very aggressive with regards to scraping… they obviously don’t want it and just want you to use their terrible API.
You can execute some searches on the Amazon API and perhaps I can get it to work, however, it’s not totally straightforward. As I’m sure everyone knows, Amazon titles & authors are a complete mess. If I’m having to use edition titles and authors for my Amazon search for audiobooks… and then figuring out automatically how to determine if there’s a match (the amazon results returned are also a crapshoot), well it’ll have a lot of false positives & false negatives without a significant amount of work. The best way I think to determine a match would be via image, like I mentioned before.
I will be putting some more work into this area, especially when I try to implement the auto book-adder for Japanese, but it’s not a trivial task unfortunately.
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Hi all - I know i’ve gone a little dark this week, but that’s because i’ve been hard at work! 
I somewhat got sidetracked from polishing off book providers and moving onto content tags. Some things i’ve been working on:
- [code stuff] Moving the ‘about us’ page to NextJS (close, but not quite finished). NextJS will eventually power the whole site… not only will it speed up the site a bit, but it will help with search engines and also my development speed. Will be a big thing for me, hopefully only a small thing for you!
- Some bug fixing - @bibliothecary and a few others have logged a lot of bugs… some big, some small. I figured it made sense to try and resolve some of them… hope to hit a few more.
- STATS - I’ve finally polished off video stats! Not only did I add a toggle for ‘episodes’ vs ‘hours’ (that’s right, I moved minutes watched to hours watched)… but i’ve added all the good pie charts & reading speed! Check it out.
More stats talk
Stat calculations, along with the grading system, is the most complicated part of the site. I spent a load of time this week cleaning up and tightening up the infrastructure… so hopefully we see less issues here. The core improvement was getting all the code calculations running off the same calculator functions. This means that if the stats look right, then every other stat is probably right. It will also allow me to iterate and add more stats much easier in the future.
If you’re wondering what prompted this initiative, it was due to a bug @bibliothecary found and my subsequent dismay at trying to debug it. That shouldn’t happen nearly as easily in the future
Hope you all enjoy… and next week we’ll start to get into content tags !
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I found a minor bug with the stats page last night, it seems like the last graph for book stats always shows by “books” even if I selected “pages” (and interestingly the count is slightly different for July?). Hopefully this is just a straightforward fix 
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Oh, sorry about that! Yes it looks like I used the ‘books’ counter on the ‘pages’. Fixed that.
The reason why the were slightly different, is that for the ‘pages’ filter, I only consider books where the user has a ‘current_page’ > 0… however it looks like for Holoearth Chronicles Side:E ヤマト神想怪異譚 1 | L28, you marked it finished with a current_page = 0 (it looks like we don’t have page information there).
Anyway, fixed now… and was easy to diagnose !
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Oh interesting, I guess that’s because Amazon doesn’t have page information either 
Anyway, glad you noticed that so I could update it! Plus, speaking of stats, those extra 233 pages pushed me over 50K total pages read 
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Good work on all the stats, especially as it’s you least favourite task! 
Looking forward to content tags being implemented. 
Congrats, very impressive! 
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FYI some of you may be prompted to grade some older books. Due to investigation of @bibliothecary 's bug - Grading not available depending on how book is marked 'finished' - #7 by brandon - I found some user books in a bad grading state, which I’ve now resolved. You should have never been prompted to grade these books before.
Only impacts <50 users though, so not too many!
In addition, I’ve spent some time improving the tv episode quick ‘+’ progress button, so you’ll see some improvements there
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Now the + Will mark something as finished, if you watch the last episode, even though the series is still airing.
Whoops! Sorry about that. Fixed now! And I moved you back to in progress.
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Lots of duplicate activities on 페파 피그 S1 | L9, I’d guess relating to the ‘+’ issues:
I think it’s one for every episode watched in a given time, for example ep 24 & 25 has two activities:
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Thanks, I also noticed that when I hit the 19+ it marked as watched the 20 on the list, but in the activity it appears as the episode 19
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Quick Stats on my activity page does now only show: Manga and Novels (apart from Days Read and Total Books).
I am quite sure, earlier there were entries for all categories, like children books, light novels, short stories, and what not.
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Oops! Nice catch… should be fixed now
Edit:
@Megumin Unfortunately, while I was able to replicate that ‘19’ issue once, I can’t replicate anymore… not entirely sure why. Will be investing a little time into activities today so perhaps I’ll discover and fix.
Edit #2:
@bibliothecary that should be fixed now
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Ran into another TMDB issue. This is maybe not that big of a deal, but it was another case where I asked nicely that they fix it and was told no they’re doing it their way:
This anime ( 幻日のヨハネ -SUNSHINE in the MIRROR- S1 | L26 (learnnatively.com)) claims to have started on July 2, but really started June 25. So every week when I update watching an episode it’s for the one the week before since I can’t mark the one I actually watched. Would be nice if we could override what it thinks the air date of an episode is and mark it watched anyway
If anyone is curious the reason I was told no is that they went with the TV air dates and not the digital streaming dates which are a week earlier than TV
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I only tried to fix something once on TMDB but I hated everything from the process, the “non-fix”, how it was handled, but worst of all was the superiority attitude they have over there.
From my limited time, they are always right, don’t you dare say something, because chances is that you will be talked down in the forums for not seeing it as the same way.
@brandon should I log a TMDB override for series?
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Ugh, that’s unfortunate. I think this is probably a rare enough use case (i imagine it’s almost always the other way around), that I don’t think it justifies adding functionality for that use case yet. If it’s a more common problem, we can address it.
So, I’m probably not going to address it right now… but you’re welcome to log a product request and we can track how common it occurs there! Hope you understand.
Yeah it’s super disappointing to hear your poor experiences. In this particular case, I can understand why they’d like to keep it consistent, but regardless of the decision, they should be welcoming and sympathetic!
It’s hard to hold a good culture though as you introduce policies and expand… something you really have to focus on.
Edit: @Bijak You know, I can easily manually update the episode to allow you to mark it finished week by week. I’ve gone ahead and done this weeks. If I forget next week, just send a ‘feedback’ request and i’ll unlock the next one for you.
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