Anime

Before getting to the meat of the content, I wanted to bring people's attention to the newly formed !lightnovels@ani.social community. @NineSwords@ani.social has run this communtiy excellently for a while now over on the ml instance. They are provisionally starting up the community here due to the defederation issues. So, if you want to learn more about where your anime come from, check it out. With that, let's get to the meat of my post this week...

I wanted to give a little bit of a meta update this week rather than talk about shows. There are a couple things that I have been working on or thinking about for the community going forward that I wanted to keep people here in the loop. It isn't something so important or finalized as to devote a whole thread to though, so I have compiled them here instead.

Episode Discussion Threads

I have gotten some feedback that episode discussion threads would be better separated to a different community because some users just want the news/general discussion rather than all the seasonal episodes, like it was prior to the Great Shinobu Outage™ of 2024. So, I wanted to gather some feedback from people here that care enough to read this far. I am not making any decisions until next season at the earliest, this is just to help test the waters of community opinion informally.

• Do you want to keep episode discussions in this community or move them elsewhere like before this season?
• If we keep episode discussions in this community, would you want a bot to automate their creation or keep them user generated?

I won't give too much of my opinion on these questions so as to not color the feedback. One thing I will say is that, no matter what outcome happens, I am not going to keep a manually updated table of the episode discussion threads again. It has been a lot of work to keep the thread up to date (and I haven't bothered to keep the shinobu posts up to date). I am committing to finishing up this season, but...never again.

Comment Bot

I had a bit of a discussion the other day about how to possibly implement a bot that can be summoned in comment threads to provide links for a series. I have written basically zero code for this so far, but I think it is technically possible to do if the community would find it helpful. Basically the idea would be:

1. You @mention the bot in your comment and the search term for the series you want links for. Something like:

@bot-chan@ani.social "Frieren"

2. The bot then replies with a set of links and info for the show. Initially, this would be pulled from the AniList api. So, for the example of "Frieren" it would be something like this:

Sousou no Frieren • Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

Is this something that the community would find useful or want? I haven't really poked around the AniList api too much, but I think things like a synopsis would also be possible to include, as well as things like a banner or cover image for the series. If you want to see an example of this on reddit, you can look at /u/Roboragi.

Community Wiki

I know that many of us were/are probably visitors to the /r/anime community on reddit. One of the great resources they have there is the wiki. Things like recommendation pages, watch order pages, and discussion thread index pages have all been things I have used in the past. Is there interest in a wiki being made for this community?

I have a couple wikis that I host for my personal and D&D group use, but wouldn't have too much trouble spinning one up for this community. If so, I plan to make use of the git backend to wiki.js to enable anybody to contribute through github pull requests if they are able. That would also enable some automation to keep things like episode discussion index pages up to date through incorporating that into a bot.