the Anime Rec DB. decent, or a waste of my time?

[TyRanT]

Sothis i personally like the idea of the Rec DB however i am sorry to say this but i am a lazy bastard, and all though i do read the DB i find it hard to remember to make recommendations.

Please forgive me Sothis for being a lazy baka!


Sothis you are doing a great job with this place no one else could have brought it along as far as you have and i thank you for it.



Save hope dear friend..... Thats all one really needs....

[sothis]

ok, well a morning later, im feeling better about this.

granted, i got food poisoning last night and have been puking for 6 hours, so hopefully the negative mood was caused by the poisoning as well

i do work on the site partially for me, i just like people to notice it... kami, the global announcements i make surprisingly dont seem to work... generally they get many views, but no replies :/

anyways i still feel really really sick (just luckily not puking every 5 minutes anymore) so im going to go relax now

[LeCKeY]

I hope it was not from eating out if so sue!!!

[Lucky]

I was pretty sure that the rant wasn't like your normal self sothis, so I decided to see how you'd feel about it a day later before commenting - glad to see that I was correct in assuming that the rant was more about a reaction to a really bad day coming out, rather then an actual total annoyance with DB/forum. But remember, the issues that you complained about still stand - few users, and your heavy workload are still present, be it a good day or a bad one.
I think I'm going to sound a bit like a psycologist here, but please bear with me.

First of all, I'm going to assume that the issues you mentioned are real, and they indeed annoy you a great deal. At least that's the picture I get by looking at the first post of the thread. In other words, to make the work on DB more pleasant, you might want to address these issues. So let's see, the problems you mentioned and possible solutions:

1. Site is not as popular as you want it to be

no one makes recommendations anymore. no one. (no matter how much i ask.. with the exception of a handful of people that do a few every month). there are probably about 5 new recommendations per month.
no one submits screenshots, or even reads the mm's or threads in the anime rec information forum asking for them, or descriptions, or reviews.
and, the hits to the site are going down. most of the hits (about 1,100 a day) go to the forum. ive tried advertising, telling people when they ask in chat, asking friends, everything... it just doesnt seem successful to me.

Let's look at the online anime community in general. Perhaps the best examples of "successful" sites are www.animenfo.com and www.animesuki.com. Former is highly popular hit-wise and latter has a big established community. However, look at the average user on aforementioned sites - looking at animenfo's traffic maybe a total of 1-2% of all visitors actually review shows occasionally. And even so, ~90% of reviews on animenfo are trash, with all 10s or all 1s for grades, and of the rest, 90% are fanboy/fangirl styled "omg it's sooooo good" reviews. You generally have to go through a few pages of reviews just to fish out a single decent review for a show you want. With database, almost every recommendation is worth looking up
On animesuki, generally a download site, which is why it's so big right now, average user seems even worse. Many seem to think that by downloading things from BT they are actually giving something to community back, just because the BT also uploads things. These people rarely understand what's behind anime, and average posts are about "who should end up with who in drama anime x", "who is the l33test ninja in naruto" or even "omg, I've been on AJ's aniverse channel and it's dead. So AJ is dead too". While some of the fansubbers do frequent these forums, finding any interesting threads in their forums is like a treasure hunt in the dumpster. Comparing those "hugely popular" forums to "small" apn forum, I find much more interesting info with the few users here, then with thousands there.
The reason why I like these forums and DB in general is not because of them being "big" or "small". It's because I know that out of a few hundred members, almost all active ones are serious posters with interests similar to mine. Call me an elitist if you want, but this is the main reason why I rarely go to animesuki forums anymore - I simply prefer a small high quality site to a big low-quality one.
In general, if you wanted this site to be the latter, you've gone the wrong way in promoting it - instead of holding everything in tight control, moderating the reviews of the shows, and disallowing quick "this show is so l33t too" types of comparisons you've tuned away ~90% of online anime fans. But would you have wanted to have another animenfo? I don't think you did.

2. workload

i spend many, many hours (more so than you guys probably realise) not only making code changes to the site, but personally watching entire series that i dont necessarily want to see, taking screenshots, and putting up new series all the time so there is new things (this includes new series, which for the most part, no one votes on even though everyone downloads them). i had hoped that all my work would give rise to a great tool that people used (as in, more people visiting the site, even if its on a slow rise)... but instead, i see hits dropping to the site daily (this has been over the course of the last 6 months... always dropping), the number of recommendations has essentially come to a halt, and nothing is seeming to come out of it.

You take everything on yourself. Every single new show addition goes through you. Every single addition of screenshots is done by you. and additionally you have to constantly ask people to send more and more of these, because you know that otherwise they forget...
Things like programming required for DB cannot be delegated to other people - that I can undesrtand. But if you have to spend so much time on the DB, why not try to delegate the manual labor to some of the more active apn members? for example, couldn't you simply make a forum for "aniDB screenshots", "new series to be added to DB" and so on, and assign some people from apn as moderators that would have the rights to add new shows to the DB. They would go over the posts, and add reviews, and after the screenshots are aquired, they could handle adding those as well. I imagine this would descrease your workload at least a bit.


Since this is getting long, I'll make one last point before ending this rant: this site will never get as big as download sites of series review sites. The reason is simple - recommending service is not something you'd use daily or weekly, unlike sites like animenfo or animesuki. Think of it from average user's point of view: he/she aquires a show, likes it, decides to look for soimething similar. He/she finds DB, looks up the list of the shows he might like, and then goes away to aquire them. It's likely it would take an average user weeks to get and watch entire show. After he/she is done, they might come back and look for another one. However for reasons mentioned above, average users would rarely, if ever, post new review - and as I mentioned above, the review of an average user is not something you'd want to see in DB anyway. So it's up to the few dedicated people to post good reviews. As a result we get a relatively small quality site, and not an average animenfo clone site. And personally, I'm glad it is so.

**bows to lucky**

Very high quality post...

[LeCKeY]

I have to admit he was on point in that one.

[XMrNiceguyX]

Can't find any words to oppose that. What he said is 100% true.

I thought I read a flaw in his post, but I forgot what that was :p

Nevertheless, as Coldwinter says, a very high quality post.

[ZDragon]

Exactly right, Lucky. No one here could've said it any better. I admire you

[XMrNiceguyX]

But if you have to spend so much time on the DB, why not try to delegate the manual labor to some of the more active apn members? for example, couldn't you simply make a forum for "aniDB screenshots", "new series to be added to DB" and so on, and assign some people from apn as moderators that would have the rights to add new shows to the DB. They would go over the posts, and add reviews, and after the screenshots are aquired, they could handle adding those as well. I imagine this would descrease your workload at least a bit.

Wasn't a forum created just a short while ago under the name of: "Anime Recommendation Database Information", which can be used for that purpose?

(note the "can" there)

[Evilsnip3r]

Yes, good post Lucky.

Anyhow, the DV isn't a waste of time Sothis, I find it very useful for when I have no idea what to watch. But I think the reason why there have been no hits recently is becuase of all the new series out, and people now know what they want to watch so they don't need to go look at the DB. Anyhow thats my theory of why there aren't as many hits. But like Masakari said, just give it some time on the popularity thing, it'll grow more later we just have to wait a little longer.