Over the past couple days you may have noticed that our friendly @[email protected] had not been posting episode discussion threads. The reasons for this can be traced back to a breaking api change on an external website (see here, here, and here for more info). Well, thanks to the work of @[email protected] , our friendly neighborhood Shinobu is back (sans polls).
However, I thought this might be a good opportunity to gauge the community’s feelings about automated episode discussion posts. The fact of the matter is that our community at [email protected] is not as big or active as the anime subreddit that the bot was designed for. Most of Shinobu’s episode discussion threads spend their whole lives without ever receiving a single comment.
It makes me wonder if, because of the smaller size of our community, should Shinobu not make posts for shows that the people here aren’t really watching/commenting on? Perhaps Shinobu is limited to only posting threads for shows in which the threads have been active? At the moment, there is no automated way of enabling/disabling shows in this way, but it could likely be done manually with some sqlite database tinkering (I say as somebody not running/maintaining the bot).
I am not a mod or the maintainer of the bot, simply an interested party wanting to get others opinions that are active in this community.
On the one hand, if they’re not getting used then it may be better to get rid of them as they’ll clog up the community with threads people have no interest in.
On the other hand, how do we decide which ones to allow and which to filter out? If we only use shows that have previously prompted discussion then that prevents a show from being talked about if it only becomes more popular later on in a season.
One alternative is to only have a thread per show’s season. This would greatly reduce the amount of unused clutter in this community and could be a decent stopgap until this community attracts a large enough userbase to necessitate weekly threads. The only thing I don’t like about this idea is if a season runs a pretty long episode count, it may become harder to find in the list, and if someone starts an anime partway through its season then they may have to deal with spoilers if they come here to discuss it.
I see what you are saying. The one thread/season would definitely cause some spoiler issues unless there were some strict moderation. Your idea caused me to think of something like a pinned megathread with actively airing shows and their episode thread links in a table. Then, you could have the bot post the discussion threads to a separate, dedicated, bot-run community that houses all the automated threads. This would leave /c/anime more clutter-free, even if there is little activity on a lot of shows.
For example, the megathread could have something like this for the actively airing shows:
Helck
Also, just found out that this table does not render correctly in Jerboa on mobile. So, that might be an issue for something like this.