It has been over a month since the last update, and quite a bit has happened, so I thought I should write something.
/r/anime
Yesterday I posted about this site on reddit. To be honest, I was expecting relatively lukewarm interest, 50 new users at most, especially considering how in a few months (with basically no publicity, granted) the site had accumulated a grand total of 7 users. (Don't worry, you 7 are still my favorite users!)
What happened was slightly different than what I expected, though. In less than a day I had over 3000 page views, and the number of users went up more than 40-fold to 289. I don't really know what to say, I'm happy so many people seem to find this site useful.
I'd like to remind all newcomers that the site's contact e-mail is 
. If you have any problems with the site, questions or suggestions, feel free to contact me! Right now, the blog doesn't allow comments, so that e-mail is probably the best way to contact me. Adding blog comments is top priority right now, though, most likely the very next major thing I will work on.
MAL Sync queue
The MAL APIs are very sensitive and can very easily start blocking any requests without warning, unless the server is white-listed. Problem is, MAL hasn't been answering their white-listing forms for a few months, so to stay on the API's good side, I've been enforcing a really long interval of 30 minutes between any request.
Effectively, this means that after an unusual user influx of over 250 people over a single day, all trying to sync their accounts, the queue waiting time is approaching 3 days. I wish I could shorten it, but MAL leaves me no alternative, so please bear with me.
Bug fixes
Due to an AniDB API change I hadn't noticed before, a lot of shows were showing wrong last episodes. While the algorithm to detect last episodes is relatively complex and will likely never be perfect, so some false positives are to be expected, literally every show with unknown second cour dates was showing as ending at the end of this month.
I have applied a bug fix for this, and queued a full update for all airing anime that were affected by the bug. In the next day or so I expect most if not all the false positives to disappear.
Status update
In slightly different news, I played around with the style-sheets a bit, with the goal of adding an optional darker skin for the website in the near future (as suggested by someone on reddit). There's very little left to do right now, mostly down to choosing the actual colors for the style.
Still, I made a small mistake while uploading my changes (Rails sometimes is annoying), so if any of you visited the site a few hours ago and noticed everything was broken, that's why. This is my first "large" project, so screw ups like that are sort of expected - back when the site was undergoing closed testing with a couple of friends, I actually managed to drop the users table without any backup by accidentally running the test suite on the production system. A very embarrassing experience, as you probably can imagine! (And yes, I have since then set up daily backups and added checks to stop the test suite from running in production, so don't worry).
So, back to things that actually matter. As I stated in the previous post and on reddit, I won't be working on major updates for a month or two. I'll probably finish the alternative dark style quite soon (it's a good way to procrastinate, I guess, and not much work), but I don't consider that a "major update", and other than that don't expect anything for a while, sorry.
Anyways, that's all for now, happy anime watching!