I’ve run into issues with the current database (TheMovieDB/TMDb) not respecting anime season structures. For example, in Dandadan, Season 2 is bizarrely treated as part of Season 1, making it impossible to properly mark episodes as watched or track progress accurately. This seems to stem from TMDb’s rigid rules that don’t align with anime’s unique formats, like “cours” (12-13 episode blocks) or narrative arcs.
This mishandling affects immersion on LearnNatively, especially for series with multiple seasons. It’s frustrating for users who rely on precise episode tracking.
I strongly suggest switching to TheTVDB.com, which specializes in TV series and handles anime seasons much better, often aligning with sources like MyAnimeList. This could greatly improve the experience for Japanese learners dealing with anime.
Has anyone else faced similar issues? Are there plans to evaluate alternative databases? I’d love to hear thoughts!
@brandon was recently made aware of the issue, and I think plans to find a fix? But yeah, a number of us have run into this. Idk anything about TheTVDB’s api - so no opinion. But if it’s a good option, and can reasonably switched to, that would be great - since this seems likely to pop up in the future
I’m not sure i can switch anytime soon unfortunately. I didn’t realize this benefit of thetvdb before implementing it on the site
You can send in a tv season split but that is cumbersome. Honestly, their policy is so stupid i’d be open to investigating it at some point to see if it’s really that much better.
If switching anime databases is too much work, can we allow syncing finished seasons to include the new episodes that are considered part of a new season?
So, Dandadan S1 right now only has 12 episodes. Hitting sync should load all 24 episodes from TMDb, and mark everyone who had “finished” S1 to “watching” or something.
Right now, syncing Dandadan S1 does nothing, presumably because it’s finished.
This way, we can at least track the new episodes.
This is happening for a lot of recent anime sequels. Just this summer season I’ve run into this issue for Dandadan, Kaiju 8-gou, and Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru. That’s 3 out of the 5 sequel seasons I’ve watched recently.
I’ll point out that this is a policy of TheMovieDB in general where they are going to start treating anime seasons as a single season if they have continuous numbers, rather than what anime watchers or production studios might consider a season more commonly in the community. Something like AniDb or AniList might be a better choice for anime given some of the decisions that TheMovieDB have made of late (I think TheTVDB is likely not going to be an option due to the licensing terms that caused TheMovieDB to split from TheTVDB in the first place)
I’m partial to this in the short term, but at the same time, I could see it creating some headaches, if Natively later switches databases, since a lot of shows would then have the wrong division
A good point - though on a programming level, that further complicates things by needing separate “Add Resource” forms (or I suppose at least an “is this anime” checkbox, so it knows the site to pull from)… Plus different scripts/functions for anime vs non-anime shows & movies, and probably some other “under the hood” changes.
And it’s probly tricky at best (and impossible at worst) to ensure that anime wouldn’t get added from tmdb or w/e… Which would probably lead back to square one
Which is to say, I don’t envy having to eventually work out what the solution might be
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