this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024

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Winter Episode Discussion Thread Guide (ani.social)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

While we all wistfully remember shinobu, the community here has been making discussion threads for the shows we have been watching. To try to make things a bit easier, I have tried to collect all the threads for the winter seasonal shows in one place. I will try to keep this updated as things go forward. Please let me know if I am missing a thread that you would like to be added. This was done in no particular order, but I did group series together.

I would also like to point out that some shows are still having threads posted by shinobu. The shows below should stick to the discussion threads that are posted in [email protected]. Each of the links below is to the most recent episode's discussion post as of the time of this update. Older episodes' threads can be found in the link table of the following posts.

I will keep this pinned for now to act as a hub to enable easy discovery of discussion threads for folks.

uncropped image credit: booru, full-size: 2048x2048

Episodes 1-6

Series	Episode 1	Episode 2	Episode 3	Episode 4	Episode 5	Episode 6
Chained Soldier	Link	Link	Link	Link	Link	Link
Delicious in Dungeon	/c/dungeonmeshi	/c/anime, /c/dungeonmeshi	/c/anime, /c/dungeonmeshi	/c/anime, /c/dungeonmeshi	/c/dungeonmeshi	/c/dungeonmeshi
The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic	Link	Link	Link	Link	Link	Link
My Instant Death Ability is Overpowered

| Link |

| | TSUKIMICHI -Moonlit Fantasy- Season 2 |

| | The Dangers in My Heart Season 2 |

Episodes 7-12

Series	Episode 7	Episode 8	Episode 9	Episode 10	Episode 11	Episode 12
Delicious in Dungeon	/c/dungeonmeshi	/c/dungeonmeshi	/c/dungeonmeshi

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I would also like to point out that some shows are still having threads posted by shinobu. The shows below should stick to the discussion threads that are posted in [email protected].

From context, including comments, I assume shinobu is a bot?

If I don't see any posts in [email protected] it's probably because I blocked shinobu?

Currently, there is no way to block/hide/ignore episode discussions in [email protected], right?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

shinobu is a bot

That's right. @[email protected] is the bot that was posting episode discussion threads in [email protected]. However, shinobu hasn't been working on the winter seasonal shows, so I have relaxed rules for this community to allow people to create threads for discussion here, at least until shinobu comes back or another solution is put in place to allow for episode discussion of currently airing shows.

probably because I blocked shinobu?

Either you have blocked shinobu or you have unchecked "Show bot accounts" in your user settings. I just checked your local instance and the posts are in the community there.

way to block/hide/ignore episode discussions

I would love it if this were possible right now. Lemmy badly needs something like a post flair system that lets you only see or ignore certain flairs. I understand not everybody wants to discuss currently airing shows, so I am trying to remain sensitive to both segments of the community as best I can. This is why, in the past, episode discussion threads were separated into a different community.

I think that if we turned on a bot posting every episode discussion thread to this community (like reddit does for example), it would completely drown out everything else. There are maybe 3-4 news items on a busy day here compared to ~5-10 different episodes that air on any given day. Lemmy simply doesn't have the volume of user-generated content (yet) to compete with a bot creating that many threads every day.

So, as a halfway point for now, I am allowing discussion threads here, but only if they are user-created. This means that any discussion thread here should have at least one actual human partaking in the conversation, compared to a deluge of threads that sit around with zero comments. Conversely, it means that people are more likely to see discussion threads that are not relevant to what they want from this community.

I am open to suggestions though if there are things we might be able to change to make things better. I can't say I am super thrilled with the current situation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

However, shinobu hasn't been working on the winter seasonal shows,

is it due to any sort of bug?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

It's a combination of things that have led to the shinobu outage...

Shinobu is a fork of the holo project, the bot that creates all the discussion threads in the anime subreddit. The maintainers over there don't release each new season's config file until a little bit into each season. I assume they have a mostly complete file they use for the subreddit and let it shake out for a little bit (to catch any errors) each season before pushing the finished file to github. This means that shinobu is likely to be delayed at the beginning of each season, even if the bot maintainer is able to implement the release immediately.

Speaking of implementing the release immediately...the shinobu maintainer got super busy with irl stuff by the time the release had happened for the winter season. So, it was delayed for a while. I haven't spoken with them in a little bit, but they had intended on merging the new season at some point. However, there is a limitation to the holo project's design that probably caused them to hold off as the delay grew...

Namely, shinobu (because of it's holo base) will post any and all episodes that it can find for a show in its database. This means that if the new season config file was loaded in after week 4 of the current season, it will go through and create discussion threads for episodes 1, 2, 3, and 4 for every show. This would completely kill the community's feed as a deluge of hundreds of posts are created in just a couple minutes. So, as the weeks grew without shinobu, I am glad that the maintainer held off adding the season's config.

All of this brings me to the future of episode discussion posts...

I wrote about it a couple weeks back in the general thread, but I am planning on a more complete write-up in the near future. Starting with next season (April 1st), there is a new bot in town with a new codebase to try to alleviate some of the issues with holo/shinobu as well as accommodate a smaller community like this one compared to the reddit community. The episode discussion threads will also be posted into this community rather than a separate one. Finally, I will personally be managing the bot so that you and I only have me to blame if something goes wrong or everybody hates it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Starting with next season (April 1st), there is a new bot in town with a new codebase

is it built using python or a different language?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Here's the code. I stuck with python for two reasons:

It let me heavily lean on the work and structure put in place by holo as that project is written in python.
I am not a dev by trade and python is the only language I am half-decent at since I occasionally use it for work (I am a physicist).

At a very high level, I basically took holo and stripped out features I didn't need or Lemmy doesn't support (community polls, pinned comment, etc.) and reworked the whole thing to rely on the AniList api for airing episodes rather than parsing the html of streaming/torrent sites. This gives a much more reliable process than my testing with holo. I also added a bunch of features to make my life easier to maintain an ongoing instance of it through modules to interact with the database via the cli rather than having to write sql queries myself.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

reworked the whole thing to rely on the AniList api for airing episodes

yeah that's actually the proper way but they actually use graphql than rest api right? hope you sorted it out properly. i hope the bot works well. always happy to lend a hand (my primary language is java but i will try to pull it off).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

they actually use graphql than rest api

That's right. I managed to figure out graphql through the requests library using AniList's docs. They are nice enough to include example queries in python, so all I really had to do was play around in their playground and craft the queries I want. I have had versions of the bot working on a test lemmy instance I host for a couple months now and I am pretty happy with it. So, I am just hoping that once everybody else starts interacting with it that nothing breaks. Most of my effort over the past couple weeks has been trying to think of ways it might get abused or broken by people and then fixing those edge cases.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Shinobu is coming back right? right ??

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Rumor has it that on very still nights, you can still hear shinobu wandering the digital wasteland, looking for winter shows that are missing from her database. She is doomed to never find them without a benevolent human to intercede and provide her the missing metadata. It begs the question, is shinobu real if she isn't posting? Does shinobu dream of a ghost in the shell?

The real answer is hopefully soon. I know chaorace said that they plan on doing it late at night so as not to destroy the local feed during the day when the instance is the busiest. I keep waking up each morning expecting to see 50+ shinobu posts, but not yet. I actually have been keeping a post draft ready to populate for the day that shinobu returns to try to gather all her links in one place. In fact, this post was mostly a copy/paste of what I have prepared to try to organize the shinobu post dump.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I admit, I was starting to wonder how one sends flowers to a sick lemmy bot. 😅