Hello Lemmings.

I will be attempting to make a federated anime tracker this summer, but I am not quite sure what features people would want and how I would get the details for animes, mangas, etc.

For the latter: What I thought was to either scrape other anime websites continuosly in the background, but this most likely is against the ToS of every anime tracking website, such as AniList or MAL. (I actually asked anidb.net for special access to their DB because apparently you can request access to it, but I’ve been left on read by the two staff members) My second idea was to make it an anime tracker website where animes are only user-submitted. And the user submissions would be approved by assigned moderators. However, I think this would be quite inconvenient. I’d like to get your opinions and/or ideas for this.

For the former: So if you have any requests or suggestions, please drop it down in the comments section.

Thanks in advance.

  • muhyb@programming.dev
    1·
    9 months ago

    It’s a slow system. MAL takes user submissions because they already have a big database and those submissions help filling the cracks. If you don’t have a database to begin with it slows things down, especially if these submissions will go by trust-based. Doing this by randoms is also very risky.

    However, I’m not completely oppose to that idea because it can be helpful for some areas. My suggestion is start with a basic dog tag system, where the anime name, alternative names, status (airing, completed), season and start date, studios (also licensors and producers), age rating etc. These information needs to be scraped for the fastest way to form a quick database, they are publicly available (even on Wikipedia) so it should be fine to scrape. You can even go full Wikipedia after got only the names. User submissions could be useful for the introduction / summary parts of the titles at this stage. For only names (and basic tags), you can scrape AniDB from this list. It’s just a search query so shouldn’t be against their ToS.

    You can also check Kitsu for ideas, I like their DB request system. Pretty basic but can be done differently with the power of ActivityPub.