Is it me or MyAnimeList made more unnecessary changes, like messing with the lists? Found this tweet made by @Yumeka36
Does anyone like the fact that MAL took away the “Show All” feature for lists? XP http://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=218454
From http://twitter.com/yumeka36/status/16005991374
At Melative, we will never pull shit like this*… So if you can’t stand the changes the owner of MyAnimeList force on you, do yourself a favor and switch to Melative or AnimePlanet. That will make him listen or not.
Notes: To clarify, RyanA will never change anything that major without notifying the users. In this case, the owner of MAL failed to notify all the users that he is changing the functionality of the site. This is why he is getting a lot of complaints from many users.
Did the Melative site owner specifically say this, “At Melative, we will never pull shit like this…?” I understand they did what they did to save bandwidth/server costs. Now I don’t argue that the default non-showing of lists is an asinine way to do things, but you use Melative for free, so at some point, the Melative owner might need to save money and do the same type of thing. Are you going to call him an asshole and his site shit then?
Personally, I don’t really give a shit what they do, because I don’t give them any money, and I don’t view their ads due to ad-blocking. So in essence, he can turn off my account if he sees fit as I contribute nothing to his site.
I’ve been getting a lot of use out of this phrase lately: notto disu shitto agen.
Showing the whole list is inefficient when we get to big lists, but then again, people complain about anything these days like there is no tomorrow.
The main problem I see is that the users were given no warning about the change or given the option to allow the viewing of the whole list, but not have the feature turn on by default. If they kept the option, but not have it turned on by default, I think the complaints wouldn’t turn out in large numbers.
I suggest reading RyanA’s take on it… I think pagination is completely unnecessary for this, although showing a list by a specific status is all right. It should just view list by status since pagination is more of an inconvenience than a plus. It wouldn’t be as bad if people were able to type in the title they are searching for and filter all those titles out from the list..
I think the MAL team is not interested in optimization. It’s fairly clear that they’re not really thinking about usability, nor actual fixes that will work in the long run. Ryan has good ideas, and many are in use on Melative, but to be fair, I also think Ryan thinks things through fairly well. Not to mention, his sounding boards in the channel who help out. Not to toot our horns, but we think things through, and collaborate.
I can’t speak for MAL’s dev culture, but from the external side of it, the state of its API, and now this un-User Friendly “feature”, I’m thinking they’re not very good. It seems like typical business decisions, instead of thought and reason.
MAL serves two purposes for me: 1. The use of MAL updater (i know you hate it). It’s auto sensing of new episodes, helps me and my disorganized filing system. The rest of the client is just…meh, but it lists, and tells me what’s new. 2. It’s a place to keep my list.
If you work on the Melative app for Windows and make it do 1, I’m out, because 2 works great on Melative in the new UI. So let’s get crackin’ on the app, unless I missed the functionality that does what I’m looking for.
There is already a Windows Melative app… it’s the same exact one I have been working for months since its cross platform. It’s not ready for prime time yet since the timeline is a bit shaky and there is a few bugs, but I’m working on it.
I’m still thinking about mplayer/media player classic detection in Melative Library for anime since its pretty doable, but music is out of the question. Also, I will be adding a timer so the media titles would scrobble automatically, which shouldn’t be hard to implement in Visual Basic…
Okay, I pretty much added the timer scrobbling to the Windows Scrobbler. Although it doesn’t keep a history on what was scrobbled, it’s a start.
More over at the Melative Library dev log: http://chikorita157.notcliche.com/melativelibrary/2010/06/13/melscrobble-for-windows-update-timer-scrobbling-now-in-the-works/