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.
All spoilers must be tagged!
FWIW: I think anything we can do to increase discussion will be a boon to the community. That's why we collectively wanted an episode discussion bot in the first place, after all. With that being said, we probably overshot it. Rather than making it easier for everyone to join the discussion, we ended up spreading out the discussion too thinly. It's a sort of ghost-town effect.
So, what next? Well, I still believe in automation, though I think we need to redo it in a way that better fits the current size of the community. We should start small and build that back out until such a point that we can actually justify the one-episode-one-thread model. How do we do that? That's up to you guys, but here's a proposal to consider:
What do you folks think? I'm very open to thoughts & suggestions
I thought that this moment might be a good point to ask peoples' opinions because of the temporary outage so that people saw what it might be like without the bot. I personally agree with you that automation can be beneficial and help facilitate community involvement. Also personally, I think that the current Shinobu is great, but wanted to see what others thought.
Thanks again for the hard work of keeping our Shinobu running.
Err... there's really no need to explain yourself. You're just voicing what everyone else was already thinking, including me!
For the purposes of this thread please just think of me like any other member of the community. That guy who deals with the bot upkeep may as well be someone else entirely 😉