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tl;dr - A more complete set of rules has been posted to the wiki and a link included in the sidebar.

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Hi everybody! Despite my tendency to write too much, this will be a quick post, I promise. 🤞

I had been slowly working in the background on writing up a more verbose and complete version of rules for the community on the wiki. After the most recent discussion about an edge case in the rules in which the community gave some great feedback, I thought it worthwhile to make this page go live and call it out in the sidebar.

The most notable parts of the full rules that are not present in the shortened version present in the sidebar would be:

• Some clarifications on relevant content
• A longer discussion of NSFW content and some edge cases
• Rules for posts linking to legally available full episodes
• Rules/guidelines for [Clip] posts
• Rules pertaining to self-promotion

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That's it! If you have any questions, feel free to ask here or reach out to me separately. Alternatively, if you want to go over my head, you can ask @[email protected] directly since they can nuke my mod-dom from orbit should they so choose.

Finally, thanks to @[email protected] for the recent discussion and for motivating me to finish up this rules page.

With the start of the new season and the growth of this community, I thought it worthwhile to create a guide for how episode discussion posts work. The short version is as follows:

• All episode discussion posts must be created by the community bot, @[email protected].
• To request a post be made for a recently aired episode, you can private message the bot following these instructions.
• To browse older shows' discussion threads, you can check out the wiki where they are all indexed.

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Now, if you are curious, I have tried to answer questions about the bot and episode post process I have gotten in the past as well as areas that I thought might be either interesting or provide more clarity to users.

Why restrict episode discussions to bot-made posts?

In past surveys of this community, there is a sizeable portion of the community that is not interested in episode discussion threads and felt that it cluttered up the community. By consolidating all the episode discussion threads to a single bot user, it allows these users to simply block that bot and proceed to use the community in a much more suitable way for them.

Why didn't rikka make a post about XYZ episode?

I have tried to explain the process by which rikka makes episode discussion posts over on the wiki. The short version is that I manually mark shows as having discussions enabled by asking the community what they are planning on watching. Then, as the season goes on, if people stop commenting in the threads for a show, then rikka will stop making posts for that show. At any time, users can request a thread for a disabled show by private messaging the bot. I went and made a hopefully helpful flowchart (full resolution):

!bot workflow

An episode aired, but rikka won't let me request it!

If you watch an episode of something immediately as it airs/releases, then it is possible that you simply beat rikka. She has a 60 minute delay from the airtime before she is allowed to create a post for an episode. This is to allow for members of the community to have some time to watch the episode before a post is made. This delay was not present in earlier versions of rikka, and it would often cause confusion from users as an episode might show up on different streaming services at slightly different times, leading to non-relevant discussions about whether something was out yet or not.

If you are past the 60 minute delay, then it is possible that rikka is messed up for some reaon. Let me know! rikka should give some output in her message back to you. That would be useful to provide to me to help me figure out what the issue might be.

Technically speaking, how does rikka work?

rikka is written in python and you can peruse the source code here! She uses the AniList api to get all the info about episode airtimes, show information, related links, and artwork.

If you are wondering about the logistics of running rikka or the infrastructure, then it is all run from a VPS. I have a set of bash scripts that run different modules of rikka as well as handle things like updating the wiki when episode posts are made. These are then scheduled via cron. I am happy to answer more questions in the comments or by message if you have them. I also wrote more info in the github README here.

Can rikka make a post about a movie?

Yes! Though, this use case is probably not going to come up very often. Movies typically come out in Japan first and then take quite a while before they make their way around to a global release. rikka currently only makes posts about things as they air or that have aired in the recent past. So, movies are unlikely to reach most users of this community in a timely enough fashion for rikka to still be monitoring them.

If this is something desired by the community, I can manually make posts for movies later, when the global release happens or for some other reason. This is something I have thought about doing before, like a community movie night or something. Let me know if you have ideas!

Can rikka make posts for a community rewatch of an older show?

Not yet. I have thought about this use case for rikka and have an idea of how to implement it. However, I think automating a rewatch kind of defeats the purpose a bit. Even on the /r/anime subreddit, rewatch threads are created by the user that is hosting the rewatch instead of the subreddit's bot. If this community wants this, then it is possible, but I would want to see a demand or need for it before devoting time to implementing the functionality.

Who/what is a rikka and why is that the name of the bot?

There is a bit of a tradition in the anime post-making bot space of naming the bot after one of your favorite characters. Previous bots have been named after Holo (Spice and Wolf) and Shinobu (Monogatari). So, I chose Rikka Takanashi from Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions.

I have a question that you haven't addressed

Let me know! You can reach me in a number of different ways:

• Post a comment in this thread
• Send me a message on lemmy
• Reach out to me on matrix (link in my lemmy profile if you are logged in)
• Reach out to me on the [email protected] discord (linked in their sidebar)

Thanks everybody and I hope you have fun discussing this coming season of shows!

tl;dr

• Use this thread to ask for any shows that you would like to see discussion threads for next season.
• Wiki article for additional bot information.

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Previous Thread | Next Thread

In place of the normal weekly general thread this week, I wanted to provide an update about a siginificant change to the community that will be taking place soon. Namely, that episode discussion threads for Spring shows and onward will be bot-created rather than user-created as is currently the case for most Winter shows.

The Dawn of the Age of Machines

To that effect, everybody please welcome the newest member of the moderation team, [email protected], the bot that will take over discussion thread posting duties going forward. If you would like to see what the new discussion threads will look like, you can see one that she already posted here. If you would like more information about how the bot will work and how you can interact with the bot, check out the wiki article I wrote here. If you have any questions or comments, please use this thread to ask me.

Request Spring Show Threads Here

This thread will serve as your initial opportunity to ask for discussion threads to be made for Spring shows. You can see a full list of the Spring season's shows here. Please make a comment in this thread if there are any shows that you plan on watching and would like a discussion thread to be made.

Exception to the Rules

There is currently only one show that I plan on handling in a way different than what is standard operating procedure for rikka, namely, Delicious in Dungeon. Currently, there have been quite active discussion threads for each episode over in [email protected] and I don't want to negatively impact a growing, active community on the fediverse. So, I will defer this show's discussion threads to that community rather than having the bot create separate threads in this community. I will try to make sure that these threads are discoverable from this community though (will be in a pinned discussion index thread similar to the Winter Discussions post currently pinned).

In the future, if there is a series-specific community that is active and wants to run their own discussion threads in a similar way, I am amenable to giving that series a similar treatment. If you currently, or want to moderate a series-specific community for a series that is airing, feel free to reach out to me. I would like to see series-specific communities grow and don't want to contribute to stifling their growth by sucking all the discussion-oxygen out of the proverbial room.

The New Normal

Going forward, expect a thread similar to this each season in which you can make the initial requests for show discussion threads (1-2 weeks prior to season start). The first show that is categorized as a Spring show premieres on March 20th (Sand Land: The Series). So, user-made threads will not be allowed for that series, or any other series categorized as a Spring show (per AniList). User-made threads will be allowed to continue for currently airing Winter shows as the season draws to a close. After the Winter shows have ended, so has the age of user-created episode discussion threads.

Acknowledgements

I just wanted to add a blurb here at the end to recognize the contributions that both shinobu and chaorace (shinobu's maintainer) have made to the anime community within the lemmy-verse. It was chaorace's work on the lemmy fork of the holo project that provided the starting point for the codebase that eventually became rikka. Also, it was the episode discussion threads created by shinobu that served as an entry point for me to get more involved in the greater anime community on lemmy. It is quite plausible that without shinobu/chaorace, anime on lemmy would still be a splintered and disperse community instead of having a critical concentration of active users gathered here. So, I will raise a glass tonight for shinobu and will always remember her fondly.

Also, as always, thanks to hitagi for both being the lead moderator in this community as well as the admin of the instance. They have always been helpful and responsive to my questions and have yet to put a check on my absolute power give me any reason to regret all the time, energy, and donations I have put into the communities and this instance.

tl;dr - Please don't bring personal attacks from the recent lemmy.ml drama into this community including badmouthing instance admins. Let's just look forward and build something positive here. I plan on taking moderator action within the comments of this post if I see things that cross the (admittedly subjective) line into being too negative. Thank you everybody for your cooperation!

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I had been trying to avoid bringing this topic up at all in this community as I want to just focus on building a community here centered around a mutual love and respect for a form of entertainment. However, humans being humans, when you get enough together in one space, there are going to be tensions. Over the past couple days, those tensions have come to a head over on the /c/anime community of lemmy.ml. So, I wanted to try to get in front of things in this community and do two things:

1. Clearly try to set expectations about what is or is not acceptable in the ensuing discussion
2. Provide a single place (this thread) in which people can talk about it.

Summary of recent events

For those out of the loop, there is a bit of history between lemmy.ml instance admins and the ani.social instance, even spreading onto github. Recently, on the lemmy.ml /c/anime community, there has been a series of post/comment removals that were being performed by instance admins rather than community moderators, in which mention of or linking out to the ani.social instance was getting that content removed. The following discussion heated up and resulted in the admins asking for new moderators of the community and banning at least one of the existing mods from the instance. The community for the time being has been set to only allow posts by moderators. It has since been reopened.

Expectations going forward and in this thread

Going forward, in this community, I would like to see these events discussed in a way that is not overly negative. I want to be clear that I am not trying to stifle discussion about this topic if people want to discuss the events that have happened, but please avoid things like personal attacks or namecalling of other humans/communities/instances. I am going to try to keep a close eye on discussions about this topic and will perhaps be a little more liberal with moderator action than I have been in the past. What I don't want to have happen is that this community becomes bitter refugees from a falling out that happened on another instance.

So, with all of that said, I hope that we can work together to build a community in which we can all share in the love that we have for our favorite shows, or the ire that we have for our least favorite shows. Arguments about what the end of Evangelion really meant are way more fun anyway.

I am pinning this thread for now for visibility and will be removing other threads people make about this topic for the time being. Please remember to be civil.

Edit: I have unpinned this thread. However, future discussions about this topic are still subject to these civility rules. Thanks all!

tl;dr Rules are temporarily relaxed to allow episode discussion posts about winter shows until shinobu starts posting them again.

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You may have noticed that the Winter 2024 season has started, but the discussion threads over on [email protected] have not been posted for any of the new shows. There is good and bad news to share with you all.

The good news is that discussion threads are likely to start up again quite soon. The pull request has been merged into the github project that shinobu is forked from. So, it is a matter of our friendly shinobu maintainer to get them merged and update shinobu's database with the new show info. I have confirmed that the new commits are working with a test instance, so please be a bit patient while that is being taken care of.

The bad news is that when that occurs, shinobu will likely blast all the discussion threads at once into the community. This will make it hard to find discussions for the shows that people actually want to talk about. So, I have decided to allow for episode discussion posts to be created for missing winter shows in this community until shinobu is back on their feet.

I will make a follow-up post when this situation changes. Hope everybody is finding something they like in the new season!