Anilist Imports
More of a question, before asking to integrate into a feature.
Has the complexities of implementing Anilist imports been discussed or pondered upon?
The whole dealing with Kitsu based titles being imported, how do users deal with duplicate titles with tmdb/tvdb/kitsu based variants etc.
As of now, all I can think of is a transitive import strategy, where one imports Anilist into SIMKL, and then SIMKL import into WeTrakr … but not quite elegant, sort of ugly process.
Would preferably want some sort of time-interval based sync to keep in sync with Anilist updates.
So how does all this work? The primary/ask or need is the capability of being able to track and see Anime titles in an automated fashion here too, when certain other third party apps sent updates to Anilist. Cannot say whether it is out of scope or not.
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Comments1
nattadasu
Jul 29
[disclaimer]: I’m not WeTrakr dev, however I am a dev behind https://animeapi.my.id which deals season/arc-level ID mapping across anime-oriented databases and Western/conventional database, and I’m well aware with this exact scenario.
While it is technically doable to import from AniList, MAL, or other Anime DB to WeTrakr etc, the complication is outweight the feature implementation. This is due to:
Basically anime-oriented database sites have very much different struct and approach than western/conventional database sites; former index every announced seasons/arcs, but latter is series-based
There’s no standard of how much episodes agreed upon across anime database, so let’s say you want to import Frieren Mini Anime from MAL to AniList… well, unfortunately, MAL merged all mini anime parts into one entries, while AniList has Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
However, this point in particular doesnt have much of issue since literally almost all anime databases out there tried to align with MAL guidelines, in one way or another
Using Frieren Mini Anime as example again, how can you properly map the special episodes index from MAL/AL to TMDB? In TMDB, you can’t apply the index 1-to-1, as there’s additional recap episode between the mini. Plus as you can see on Frieren main story, the episode count for what MAL call it S2 was merged in S1 on TMDB.
Assuming you’ve dealt with episode mapping madness, there’s still issue with older TMDB guideline where they fricking split episode into multiple parts. See and compare information about
Uchitama?! Have you seen my Tama?on MAL, AniDB and WeTrakr entry of it.FYI, this not limited to TMDB fricking itself; MAL isn’t innocent either with Saiki K.
If you care about accurate date-time of when you watched/scrobbled the episode, you should’ve set your activity history to not merge since day 1 of registering the account on AniList, and MAL XML does not contain this information.
By configuring this, dev could try apply the additional patch to sync based on activity history, but definitely might mismatch with your actual start/end date listed in your list entry
And finally, assuming you’ve dealt all of this, TMDB may append new entry, move or even remove the entry (either episode, season, or even series) at any given time if it does not comply with their guideline. If any 1st or even 3rd party using non-unique identifier (like simply identifying though S01E01 schema), it can break easily.
All of this process literally requires 3rd party (since WeTrakr is still beta and managed by solo dev,I think) to handle episode-level mapping and fix any confusing discrepancies, which unfortunately as you can see, it’s really hard to deal with, not to mention 3rd party may bail the project at anytime.
As you said, the only way that bodge this issue is by importing AniList data to SIMKL, then import SIMKL to WeTrakr, which definitely not elegant in a way.
SIMKL is able to overcome this issue since their anime database was mirrored from AniDB, so the mapping issue can be solved pretty easily, plus they do have proper team to handle series and episode mappings in any source db.