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.

  • @vvvvv
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    91 year ago

    I’m okay with a bot posting episodes for popular series (which are guaranteed to have comments), but the abundance of zero comment discussion posts benefits no one. I propose we limit shinobot to top 10-15-20 popular series per season (by MAL followers or we can vote before the season starts). Anything else can be posted manually (it’s very simple anyway - go to /r/anime and copy the source text for the episode discussion, replace or remove one /r/community link and optionally link past discussions).