Happy Monday and happy April Fool’s Day! I hope everybody is able to find some new shows to enjoy this season! Feel free to use this thread to talk about any anime-related topic you want, including the new lineup of shows for the Spring season. For reference, here is a list of all the shows this season.
Just as another reminder, as of today, the bot is going to be making all the episode discussion threads going forward. For more information on the bot and how to request a thread that was not created, see the wiki!
As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).
Alright, another bot update now that things are going. I am going to have to make some changes to how it handles releases that happen asynchronously with the television airing time. Specifically, “The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases” had two episodes release on streaming platforms, but, as far as I can tell, only had one episode broadcast on TV. So, this means that the AniList api only showed one episode airing, causing the bot to make just one thread. I don’t really have a good solution for this yet, but what I can try to do is create some way to manually create episodes ahead of time and then ignore the aired episode if there is a manually created episode thread already.
In any case, this likely won’t get fixed for this season, but it has gone on my list of things to look at prior to next season.
While you’re at it, rikka has some understandable teething problems:
Re:Monster https://anilist.co/anime/169417/ReMonster
Has already dropped episode 1, but I don’t see a rikka post for the episode.
It’s in some folks’ plan-to-watch lists that were acknowledged by @rikka in earlier posts.
Alright, I am on mobile, so I tried requesting the thread via pm. I got a message back saying that the episode 1 hasn’t aired yet. I will fix it when I get home this evening.
I am guessing that the episode airtime in the api might have been wrong initially and wasn’t updated. I will try to reverse engineer the bug.
This has been fixed, and as far as I can tell, the next episode is scheduled correctly. No idea exactly what happened there, but in rikka’s database, the episode 1 airtime was scheduled to be the 4th rather than the 1st. I am going to have to dig into the code a bit and figure out what happened.
I think it’s a case of TV air date, which is different from stream date.
In Re: Monster’s case, the air date is still April 5th, but it started streaming 3 days earlier on the 2nd
That is according to IMDB, under Trivia https://m.imdb.com/title/tt31514720/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv
And of course, most of us aren’t in Japan waiting for it to show up on our TVs…
Yeah, taking a close look at the code and some older, snapshotted versions of rikka’s db, I think I figured out what happened. If anybody is interested in a very technical explanation, see below the line break. tl;dr is that the api was initially wrong, but was fixed too late for rikka to catch it.
Alright, technical explanation time. rikka polls the api for upcoming show times every 15 minutes. In order to make the query manageable to process, part of that query filters out any episode air times in the past from the point in time the query is made. So, any episodes scheduled to air in the next X days from the time the query is made are added or updated according to the result of the query.
What happened in this case is that originally Re:Monster episode 1 was scheduled for April 4th at 15:00 GMT according to the AniList api. The actual time that the first episode was released digitally came and went with this incorrect api result still in place. Then, some time after the correct airing time, AniList corrected their episode air time to March 31st at 15:00 GMT (the correct time). However, because this correction didn’t happen until after the 31st at 15:00, rikka was filtering out this result from its api call. This prevented rikka from getting the updated time and making the discussion post.
I have an idea of how to resolve this edge case in the future. However, it is something that will take a bit of effort. I am going to bump this up the list of improvements to get in place before next season. This show’s air times seem to be correct going forward.