Shana Project Blog

The latest set of changes are mostly pretty boring fixes (with the exception of one long sought after feature! See the last dote point). Though in exciting news we did ban 3 IP ranges spanning about 200,000 IP addresses (read of for details).

The new Anime season has begun and with it, many new shows are being released in Hi10P. This raises 2 issues. First, how to play them back; luckily, there are many ways. This site has some good info. Though if anyone has a solution for people using Mac OS X Leopard (10.5, not Snow Leopard), please let me know =(. Second: how to differentiate between them in Shana Project. I’ll try to come up with some solutions, but any ideas are welcome; so please leave comments if you have an idea.

Anyway, here are the changes since the last post in order of implementation:

• Fixed some torrent links not working due to specially encoded values.
• Fixed some some of the record keeping with regards to download counts and popular shows by not counting duplicate downloads from the same person (and some other related changes)
• Some misc changes to marginally improve performance and stop bots from indexing certain pages.
• Banned 200,000 IP addresses (3 ranges) located in China due to massive bot activity — This has resulted in a performance increase of about 10 times. Yay! In related news, I’m yet to delete any bot users (coz I’m lazy).
• Fixed some critical backend bugs causing problems with matching follows and merging titles.
• Implemented a temporary hack to stop 8bit releases (released after a Hi10P release) from stomping on the better original version. Need to come up with a good way of dealing with 8bit and 10bit releases… any suggestions welcome!!!
• Changes to the series page:
  • Added “follow this series” link
  • Added links to more information from AniDB, ANN and YouTube
  • Added a custom scrollbar that looks nicer for series with lots of info
• Fixed a minor issue with multiple “Unknown” seasons being listed on the follows listing page for some users (thanks for reporting this!)
• Added ability to edit follows. You can now edit follows from the follow list. Editing a follow will cause that follow to be deleted and re-created which any modified settings. This means any existing matches will be deleted. However if the new follow matches some files you already downloaded, they’ll still be marked as such! =)

I hope you all find the changes useful. Please let me know if you encounter any issues (particularly with the new edit follows, since its kludgier than I’d hoped…)

\o/

- Taiga

Update: I was hoping to have the new follows system in (supporting 10bit/8bit) by tonight… Unfortunately the problem is proving far far more troublesome that I’d ever feared =(

I do have a solution, its just gonna take a little longer still.

I haven’t got a lot done the last few months… But enough to warrant a new post now.

We’ve recently had a massive influx of users (yay), however they’ve all happened at the same time and none of them support javascript or have any follows… that means they’re bots (boo).

What this means is I’ll be deleting any users who haven’t changed any settings or added any follows (or downloaded any files etc etc). Essentially any user who doesn’t have a database presence (aside from having registered). To ensure you won’t be deleted in our cull, you just need to make sure you’ve done something on the website such as download something or follow something (or even visit the RSS page will do it). Of course this means only users who have no information to lose will be deleted ;)

And now, the changes:

• Added most followed shows this season to the stats page.
• Automatically calculate and update the current Season (for the Season page and the stats page) - Seasons start January, April, July, October (for the sake of accuracy with regards to the actual anime seasons) rather than following the actual season dates.
• Fixed some miscellaneous admin views.
• Added “Mark All Read” button to the follows page.
• Added expand/collapse all button to all list pages.
• Fixed a backend issue causing new follows to sometimes not retro-actively matching all volume releases.

Thats all for now. I’m looking forward to the new season! Are you?!