The feed is coming back soon - more info, including upcoming downtime

sothis

Forum Moderator
Anime-Planet Founder
Developer
Many of you have been wondering when the feed is coming back - we really wanted to get it back much sooner, but developer availability and other high priority tasks (like rushing the new forum launch) have gotten in the way. Plus, it took us awhile to come up with a new solution.

Back when the feed went down for maintenance, there was an issue that led to a total loss of the feed data.
My original goal is that we'd have a prototype for new feed code (that doesn't rely on Mongo, the old feed system, that we wanted to replace for awhile anyways) and I'd do the announcement then about the data loss + future plans. That was awhile ago, and I apologize for how long of a delay this has been.

But, I have good news, and a lot of it, moving forward.

THE FEED IS COMING BACK SOON!

OLD DATA

Our #1 goal was to figure out how we could "save" as much of the old feed as possible. We've come up with a way to reconstruct the following old actions:

  • All reviews (date added)

  • All recommendations (date added)

  • All profile comments (date added)

  • The most recent one update for anime and manga updates. So, if the last time you updated the Naruto anime was marking it "watched", that's what will be in the feed. If the last update was setting eps from 6 to 7, that's what will be in the feed.

NEW FEATURES

We've rebuilt the feed code from the ground up - it's MUCH faster and more performant, which means the friend feed will finally return to the profile homepage, and we're figuring out other places we can put it as well (for example, maybe on the root anime-planet.com page, etc). This has been the only 'glass half full' of the feed going down - we finally could rebuild it in a way that is much better and more more usable/visible.

We plan to roll out the following big upgrades, with more upgrades being added iteratively:

  • New design - instead of one text row, there will be an image, info about the anime/manga, and (in theory) a way to interact with it (such as the "anime list" widget showing up in anime rows)

  • Ability to "love" feed updates - handy for showing your approval that your friend started watching Popee the Performer

  • Ability to comment on feed updates

  • A way to filter by feed type (anime updates, reviews, recs, etc)

  • Better feed locations (back on the profile! other homepages, etc)

  • New types of data in the feed - for example, other kinds of comments

  • "Profile posts" - this is being discussed, not sure if it'll happen or not. Something that's been surprisingly popular in the new forum is the profile posts feature. As part of our efforts to single source the accounts on the site/forum, we're debating allowing you to post these on your profile (and are shared in both places). We might merge the comments functionality into the "feed" (and have it just be your "profile", rather than a "feed", lots of things are being discussed.

Not sure yet which features we'll have on launch, as the goal has always been to get the feed back up as soon as humanly possible. But we're thinking we'll have the new design and filter for sure, and maybe the 'love' functionality if things go well.


NEXT STEPS

If all goes well, sometime this weekend, the site will have scheduled downtime of about an hour. This is because we need to run the regeneration script that will recreate the feed database, and it takes a long time to run on the site data. I'll try to give as early of a heads up as I can, but the server down message will also explicitly say why the site is down.

After the script finishes, you still won't be able to see your feed, but the feed will be working in the background, collecting info on anything new you do.

The development team will then continue running thorough tests to make sure it's performing well and that everything is working as expected. We'll also work on the front end components to give you shiny new features/designs. Hopefully within a few weeks from that day, we'll have a V1 new feed for you to check out.

I don't have any more information to share than the above on background/timing/etc, and we ask that you please continue to be patient as we work through this process (aka please don't reply every few days asking for an update - we'll give updates as we have them)

Thanks as always for your support of Anime-Planet!
 
Awesome, thanks! I was already missing the feed, and I'm definitely looking forward to this =D
 
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We realized those were missing a few days ago and did backport the data, so it will be available (and filterable)
 
If things go well the downtime will occur today (in theory within a few hours). We anticipate roughly 3 hours of downtime to run the feed regeneration script, based on tests on our development site. Please make sure to check our social media channels (facebook, twitter) for updates while the downtime is happening
 
We weren't able to get all of the blockers taken care of today so it's looking like tomorrow now
 
Site is now down for scheduled maintenance, estimated downtime is 3 hours. We've removed the site skin from the forum so that the forum can stay live during that time.
 
Site is now down for scheduled maintenance, estimated downtime is 3 hours. We've removed the site skin from the forum so that the forum can stay live during that time.
Took me for surprise that is for sure.
Wonder how many people will find this post in the next three hours.
 
Any of us who have the forum directly bookmarked.
At first I thought the site had been hijacked or something when I saw the weird looking forum, then I realized the site was down & was surprised that (for a massive change) the forum remained up.

I must say, the usability of the forum shot up dramatically without the site skinning. Having it crammed into that narrow little space (only about 1/3 of my screen width) really sucked, whereas having it able to fill the screen is a billion times better.
 
Any of us who have the forum directly bookmarked.
At first I thought the site had been hijacked or something when I saw the weird looking forum, then I realized the site was down & was surprised that (for a massive change) the forum remained up.

I must say, the usability of the forum shot up dramatically without the site skinning. Having it crammed into that narrow little space (only about 1/3 of my screen width) really sucked, whereas having it able to fill the screen is a billion times better.
Its like that because of ads space, I wish we could keep it this wide to :(
 
Nah, if you go to the main site, there's the "under maintenance" banner, but there's also a link to this announcement.
So, if they try to access the main site, they get directed here... those of us that just go direct to the forum might miss it though...

But whoo! Feed is coming back!
 
No, it's like that for style choice and/or compatability with small screens. The actual site/forum content is only 1,000px wide, leaving 460px of nothingness on either side of my screen (my initial estimate of 1/3 was off, when I measured it's almost precisely 1/2, 1,000 vs 920) all the ads on the site get squeezed into the 1,000px width along with the actual content.
 
No, it's like that for style choice and/or compatability with small screens.

Wrong, it's like that for the ad skins on the left and right (@StarsMine was correct). Sorry, that isn't changing (unless I become a billionaire and can run the site by myself without the need for ads :) )
 
I only know that cause I asked you to widen it before.
You could always bring back the donation thing. that we had back in 2011-2013 I think it was. Though that probably was less income then the ads.

Compatibility with small screens is relatively easy today, there are many tools out there to help with scaling onto mobile. I am pretty sure XenForo already does the work for you anyways, if I pull it up on my phone, I dont have to do any scaling.
 
And we're back! The script ran fine, so the old data mentioned in the linked forum thread is now regenerated. You won't be able to see your feed yet, but it's busy gathering activity data in the background :) once we relaunch, any old data mentioned here + anything you do from this point forward will be in there.

In the meantime, our dev team will continue bug testing and coming up with the new design/shiny new features for launch. We hope to be done within a few weeks if all goes well.

Thanks as always for your patience and support of Anime-Planet!
 
re site width: I talked to you about it once a long time ago (during the previous version of the site IIRC) and at that point you said something to the effect of playing to the common denominator due to monitor sizes, your response was something along the lines of "not everyone has monitors as big as yours" and/or "not everyone has their browsers run full screen". (I don't recall precisely since it's been so long.)

Regardless of the reasons for it, I knew before the sunject came up here that it wasn't going to change (my initial comment about it here was just an observation of the difference), and I do appologize for somewhat derailing the discussion.
 
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