Website Status Update and MAL Sync



Website Status Update

It's been about a month since the site was opened to the public, and I've been keeping it on the down-low on purpose. I was mainly waiting for us to be whitelisted on MAL, but I'm beginning to think we'll never get a reply from them.

Since the public release, other than a bug or two and updates to the HTTP API, I have not had to do anything to the database - every automated procedure seems to be working as intended, keeping the episodes database regularly updated.

I've still got a ton of extra features planned (for example, Blog comments), but right now I've been really busy with university, so I don't see myself finding time to do serious work on the website (other than any possible maintenance or bug fixing, if necessary) at least until August.

MAL Sync

As some of you may have noticed, the MAL Sync functionality of this site has been disabled since launch. The main reason is that we haven't been white-listed yet for the MAL API, which means that too frequent API requests are rejected by them. They seem to be ignoring all white-list applications for now, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that will change soon.

Therefore, I am going to try a slightly different approach, hopefully serving as a band-aid to the fact that we are not yet white-listed:

  • The minimum interval between synchronization attempts for a single user has been changed to 1 week
  • The minimum time between any MAL API request has been increased to 30 minutes
  • If you turn on automatic sync, you must visit the website at least once per week, or you will be dequeued.

I want to test whether these intervals are enough to keep the MAL API from rejecting API requests. If necessary, these intervals may need to be increased even further. I would love to have shorter synchronization intervals, but that's impossible until we get whitelisted... Still, I think it's better to have some form of MAL Sync than nothing at all.

I'd like to point out that MAL Sync is probably the least tested part of the website, so if you discover any problems with it (other than actual errors - I get e-mailed with those automatically), please report them to contact

Thanks!