this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Currently airing show discussion threads are created by our resident bot, rikka@ani.social. If it doesn't make a thread for an episode that you want to discuss, see the user guide on the wiki for instructions on how to request that rikka make a thread for you to use.

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Spring Anime Season Kickoff and Discussion Thread [Week 14] (ani.social)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by wjs018@ani.social to c/anime@ani.social
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Happy Monday and happy April Fool's Day! I hope everybody is able to find some new shows to enjoy this season! Feel free to use this thread to talk about any anime-related topic you want, including the new lineup of shows for the Spring season. For reference, here is a list of all the shows this season.

Just as another reminder, as of today, the bot is going to be making all the episode discussion threads going forward. For more information on the bot and how to request a thread that was not created, see the wiki!

As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).

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[–] wjs018@ani.social 13 points 7 months ago (4 children)

tl;dr:

  • The machines take over today!
  • Wiki link to bot user guide (also in sidebar)
  • Wiki link to past episode discussion threads
  • Don't abuse the bot

Hi fellow purveyors of anime! Today marks an important day in this community. Namely, the day that our resident bot took over all the duties of episode discussion thread creation. You might have noticed that rikka has been making more and more posts over the past week or two as I have slowly let her take over a couple shows. I have added a link to the sidebar about how to use the bot for episode discussion posts, so hopefully it can be a fairly smooth transition.

I have also enabled her ability to create the summary post that is pinned to the community of the most recent discussion thread for each show (sorted in reverse chronological order of when she made them or I manually entered them into her database). Currently, I have set it up so that a show will stay on that post for up to 8 days. If it has been >8 days since the last discussion thread for a show, it will be dropped from that post. I am open to feedback about whether this time is ok. It means, for instance, that if a show skips a week, it will be dropped from the summary post for ~6 days leading up to the resumption of airing.

Something else about the bot I wanted to disclose is what I am setting as the initial engagement metrics to determine whether an episode discussion thread has enough activity to warrant the next episode getting a discussion thread. To start this new paradigm, I have set the limits very low. Namely, I disabled the upvote threshold and set the comment threshold to just a single comment. So, that means that as long as an episode discussion thread has a single comment by a user, then, when the next episode airs, a new discussion thread will be created.

I am hoping that, if people stop watching a show, then they will simply not post in that show's discussion threads. So, if there are no comments for a show's episode, then the show will simply be disabled when the next episode airs instead of having a new thread created.

Something to note is that thread creation by pm'ing the bot is not subject to this kind of engagement thresholding. For example, let's say a show's episode 2 thread has zero comments. This means that when episode 3 airs, rikka will simply disable the show instead of creating an episode 3 thread. However, a user is always able to pm the bot and get an episode 3 thread created that way.

I will be monitoring this because it is prone to abuse if users simply spam the bot with tons of requests for shows that they are not watching or engaging with. So, if you request a thread from the bot, please at least constructively comment in the thread that is created. Otherwise, what was the point? It is just a roundabout way of spamming the community.

In any case, please enjoy the Spring season as the new shows get started. Thank you everybody for all the contributions you make to the community (even you lurkers!). Looking forward to the new era of the community as we continue to grow.

[–] NineSwords@ani.social 10 points 7 months ago

All hail Rikka our chuuni overlord bot!

Thanks for all the work.

[–] 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@lemmy.zip 6 points 7 months ago

Rikka is getting a good start, I found out an episode has aired by seeing a discussion thread posted. Thanks for the good work.

[–] zabadoh@ani.social 5 points 7 months ago (3 children)

How is rikka going to handle recap episodes? I wouldn't expect any comments for most of those.

[–] wjs018@ani.social 3 points 7 months ago

I went back and checked the logs for Solo Leveling on my test-instance of rikka and I was correct in guessing that recap episodes are not listed in the AniList api. So, the recap episode would simply not get a discussion thread from rikka.

[–] SatouKazuma@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I haven't worked on Rikka specifically, but my assumption would be that said scenario requires a manual post creation for the episode thereafter.

[–] wjs018@ani.social 3 points 7 months ago

I went back and checked how my test-instance of rikka handled the Solo Leveling recap episode this past season, and it skips over the recap episode and resumes posting threads when there is a new episode. This is because the recap episodes are not listed in the AniList api that rikka uses to determine episode airtimes. So, if a user wanted to create a discussion thread for a recap episode, it would need to be created manually by me rather than automatically by the bot.

[–] wjs018@ani.social 2 points 7 months ago

That is a really good question. The answer is that it depends on how recap episodes are or are not presented in the AniList api, since that is what rikka uses as her source. I suspect that recap episodes are not presented in the api, so rikka will just skip over them without making a post, and simply make a post for the next sequential episode.

I wish I had paid attention to this during Solo Leveling's recent recap episode. Thanks for putting this on my radar. This and batch releases are probably the two outstanding issues that I don't yet know a good technical solution for.

[–] glilimith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Are there any plans to move rikka over to c/episode_discussion? I know originally discussion threads were only temporarily allowed here because shinobu was having problems, so I'm curious what the plans are going forward. Either way, rikka seems to be working great so far, so nice work!

[–] wjs018@ani.social 3 points 7 months ago

No plans to move it at the moment. I think that this community has grown large/active enough that it can bear the volume of posts that rikka is generating. I have overall been pretty happy with how things have been going with the episode discussion threads in the anime community. If I had to be picky, I think that the volume of posting is a bit high right now, but I expect that to drop off as people start dropping shows and stop commenting in threads. Also, making that worse, anime news has been really slow ever since Anime Japan 2024 ended (2 weeks ago). So, the volume of posts other than episode discussions has been slow (I have been working on making some anime clips to post to help this issue).

[–] alphacyberranger@sh.itjust.works 7 points 7 months ago

Can't wait for Konosuba season 3

[–] 31ank@ani.social 5 points 7 months ago

Hyped for the new version of Spice and Wolf

[–] wjs018@ani.social 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Alright, another bot update now that things are going. I am going to have to make some changes to how it handles releases that happen asynchronously with the television airing time. Specifically, "The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases" had two episodes release on streaming platforms, but, as far as I can tell, only had one episode broadcast on TV. So, this means that the AniList api only showed one episode airing, causing the bot to make just one thread. I don't really have a good solution for this yet, but what I can try to do is create some way to manually create episodes ahead of time and then ignore the aired episode if there is a manually created episode thread already.

In any case, this likely won't get fixed for this season, but it has gone on my list of things to look at prior to next season.

[–] zabadoh@ani.social 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

While you're at it, rikka has some understandable teething problems:

Re:Monster https://anilist.co/anime/169417/ReMonster

Has already dropped episode 1, but I don't see a rikka post for the episode.

It's in some folks' plan-to-watch lists that were acknowledged by @rikka in earlier posts.

[–] wjs018@ani.social 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This has been fixed, and as far as I can tell, the next episode is scheduled correctly. No idea exactly what happened there, but in rikka's database, the episode 1 airtime was scheduled to be the 4th rather than the 1st. I am going to have to dig into the code a bit and figure out what happened.

[–] zabadoh@ani.social 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I think it's a case of TV air date, which is different from stream date.

In Re: Monster's case, the air date is still April 5th, but it started streaming 3 days earlier on the 2nd

That is according to IMDB, under Trivia https://m.imdb.com/title/tt31514720/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv

And of course, most of us aren't in Japan waiting for it to show up on our TVs...

[–] wjs018@ani.social 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yeah, taking a close look at the code and some older, snapshotted versions of rikka's db, I think I figured out what happened. If anybody is interested in a very technical explanation, see below the line break. tl;dr is that the api was initially wrong, but was fixed too late for rikka to catch it.

Alright, technical explanation time. rikka polls the api for upcoming show times every 15 minutes. In order to make the query manageable to process, part of that query filters out any episode air times in the past from the point in time the query is made. So, any episodes scheduled to air in the next X days from the time the query is made are added or updated according to the result of the query.

What happened in this case is that originally Re:Monster episode 1 was scheduled for April 4th at 15:00 GMT according to the AniList api. The actual time that the first episode was released digitally came and went with this incorrect api result still in place. Then, some time after the correct airing time, AniList corrected their episode air time to March 31st at 15:00 GMT (the correct time). However, because this correction didn't happen until after the 31st at 15:00, rikka was filtering out this result from its api call. This prevented rikka from getting the updated time and making the discussion post.

I have an idea of how to resolve this edge case in the future. However, it is something that will take a bit of effort. I am going to bump this up the list of improvements to get in place before next season. This show's air times seem to be correct going forward.

[–] wjs018@ani.social 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Alright, I am on mobile, so I tried requesting the thread via pm. I got a message back saying that the episode 1 hasn't aired yet. I will fix it when I get home this evening.

I am guessing that the episode airtime in the api might have been wrong initially and wasn't updated. I will try to reverse engineer the bug.

[–] wjs018@ani.social 4 points 7 months ago

Small update now that the bot is doing its thing with the early shows and their first episodes. I found that not all the links in the Additional Links section are pointing to the right place. This is due to the links being placeholders in the AniList api back when I initially loaded up these shows to rikka's database. AniList have since updated the links on their end, but I hadn't fetched the new ones on my end. So, I have since done so, but the posts that have already been made won't get corrected until a potential episode 2 thread gets made. This is because each time a new episode thread gets created, every previous episode post gets updated with the new information.

[–] ReluctantZen@feddit.nl 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Haven't fully decided yet what I'm gonna watch, but at least I'll be watching the new Spice and Wolf, Hibike Euphonium S3, Yuru Camp S3, Misfit of Demon King Academy S2C2, Konosuba S3 and Date A Live S5. The last one I hope Kurumi plays a role throughout the season, because the last season was a slog until she showed up. She's one of the only interesting characters left in that anime.

Ones I'm interested in: Kaiju no.8, Jellyfish Can't Swim At Night (though I think it'll be on HIDIVE and sailing the seven seas on a TV sucks), The Fable and Blue Archive.

I will look into the other stuff that's airing and see what else is airing.

[–] mo_lave@reddthat.com 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

For the first time in a long time, I have a proper backlog of what to watch.

Currently Watching: Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun and Frieren

Spring 2024 Shows to Watch: Spice and Wolf and Sound Euphonium S3

Rewatch: Your Lie in April

Other PTW:

[–] wjs018@ani.social 3 points 7 months ago

Good luck with the backlog! I feel like I come out of every season with a couple shows that I plan on watching when I get a chance and then just never get around to. One of those shows for years has been the original Spice and Wolf. So, now that the remake is airing, I can just watch that instead.

[–] zabadoh@ani.social 3 points 7 months ago

If you'll forgive me for plugging other /c's...

I'm posting episode discussion threads for the new X-Men '97 show on !animationafter30@lemmy.world as I'm watching them, like [this one] I made (https://ani.social/post/2914210) for episode 1. Let's blow off the dust on that /c and get that rolling!

p.s. the show is really good!

p.s.s. Invincible has its own /c with episode discussions.