— — — —— — —
×
— —— —
— — — —— — —
×
— —— —
— — — —— — —
×
— —— —
← darkroom
What is Anilist lacking for you to never look back?
I'm one of many who have turned to alternatives due to the unacceptable issues MAL has had over the past month.
Anilist is so far the best website I have stumbled upon, and it has many features I prefer over MAL, however it also lacks some features that would truly make me not want to look back.
One such example is the Recommendations feature, which I've seen suggested a few times, however I have seen no admin respond or provide any form of ETA. The lack of such feature forces me to go back to MAL when I want to see recommendations.
Are the admins of Anilist sufficiently capitalizing on MAL's situation?
What is Anilist lacking for you personally?
What would make Anilist the best Anime website so that more and more people can come over?
ModEdit: We now have an AniList Roadmap with planned features that you can check out here
Almost everything on this website is read, even if it isn't replied to every single time. Probably every post in this topic will be read.
Recommendations are one of the next features to come after the submissions rework ongoing presently, has been mentioned in quite a few places the past few weeks. User curated recommendations will be the first stage due to the higher accuracy and relevance, with machine learning coming at a second stage in the future.
A road map of previously-confirmed future features will also go live soon, as well.
It's good to know that feedback is noted.
Anilist has the unique opportunity (largely thanks to MAL's ineptitude) to grab a sizable portion of the Anime community.
I can only hope that the admins of Anilist are truly hearing all the feedback gathered here, and working their hardest to make Anilist as people want it to be. I gather that a lot of people are on the fence, with only few features missing, before they can consider Anilist their new home and submit content for the community.
So many have dedicated years to MAL that moving over requires much convincing. This convincing period might well be limited in time depending on what happens with MAL. I truly see the utmost potential for Anilist, but people tend to stay in their comfort zone unless all stars align. Them moving depends on you admins. I hope you work efficiently. Fast and smart! With grit!
I prefer MAL, but the way the team behind MAL works is just unacceptable... They are so slow and never get something done. cough API cough
I like Anilist in terms of design. It's modern and nice, but that's also a problem. I liked the condensed style of MAL way more. I especially dislike the forum here... I love the old-school forum style. Way more readable and compact. The profile is also a bit boring. I personally liked the way MAL handled it which gave me a huge space to put pictures and self-made designs in it.
All in all Anilist ist way more professional and good looking... but I still miss MAL...
What is Anilist missing? Honestly, just all of the time I've invested into MAL. I miss the great conversations about anime that were abruptly cut short. I miss the back & forth correspondence that I've built with many friends for months (& even years) at a time. For now, I just really want what made MAL so special to me and it's becoming depressing to wait any longer.
That's kinda your problem, not Anilist's. Sounds like, you make Anilist responsible for the shit that's going on with MAL.
Fella, you read way too far into my comment. I wasn't literally placing the blame on Anilist. I was lamenting the current state of MAL. Maybe you don't really get the situation, but all forms of social interaction on that site have been cut off for an entire month. When you're a regular on a site, that actually can hurt.
I actually made an account on MAL months after I made one on Anilist. There's no way, I'd make MAL my main site. I just use it for back up, comparing scores with Anilist and if I need to add stuff that's not already on Anilist.
The things I miss are folders for anime/manga lists and magazine pages for manga, like anime has studio pages.
You can do custom anime/manga lists on here if that's what you mean?
Ergonomics and options.
Anilist is like the latest Apple iPad. It's pretty and chic. But I'd still very much prefer a PC (MAL).
MAL still has the much bigger and more comprehensive database under a much better and more intuitive format. I jump into an anime's page and it has all the relevant data and pages pertaining to it that you can access from just one page, from reviews, stats, specific discussion forum. The forums are neatly categorized and organized too.
I don't have to rely on the list editor for almost everything and I have immediate and easy access to the search bar without necessarily logging in (what is up with that?).
Editing my favorites list is easier and smoother, I just have to go to settings to change/order them easily.
Adding an anime to my anime list is also smoother and faster, without having to chase the specific anime's page. I could just straight up open my anime list and add it there. Fast and easy. Less of my time wasted.
And the weebsite presents a wider range of options from writing reviews to articles to blogs to recommendations, and forming clubs, etc.
I do love several features on Anilist though that I wish were in MAL.
The option to like a comment reminds me of the spacebattles forum and I think it could smoothen things up in MAL's forums. Too many times, we have to rephrase a logical and thought out answer someone already gave to reinforce that answer or bump up that comment by quoting and commenting "This". Simply hitting a like on it would straight up be in support of it and show that this much people agree/expresses that opinion. Hell no on the dislike option though (thankfully, this doesn't have one). Screw reddit's system.
The "days behind/days til this anime ends airing" one too is informative and helpful. Although, it could have the negative effect of further gamification of anime watching habits, as everyone rushes not to be behind because there's a much more pronounced reminder of how behind they are.
tl;dr people are interested in MAL because it's like the "myspace of anime", it has more database (Which only one MAL fan brought up, so I don't think the majority even know what that affects) AND the fact that on MAL, all of the artist get credited, whilst AL kinda... like, doesn't have all of them most of the time.
But we all know AL will beat MAL, they just need to work on AL a bit more.Oh, the database size aspect is brought up very often. AL just needs more users who actually submit data, like MAL has. Now that we have more people, maybe...
I still don't understand why people don't separate those sites, like MAL is a social site (From telling you which person has a taste like yours in anime/manga to groups and stuff like that), and AL is just there, to track progress and stuff like that.
I think AL is just as social as MAL, but in different ways since we have a feed. For example, I personally don't see episode discussions on the forums here working as well as they do on MAL. Here we can simply make a status about it and those following us or looking at global can comment on it and share their thoughts with us directly.
People have to accept that AL may need some improvements but it doesn't need to be a copy of MAL [having every single feature MAL has or working the same as MAL]
As Taiga probably won't continue supporting MAL I'm not going back anyway, but things I liked/appreciated about MAL that aren't on AniList.
- Incomplete voice actor information etc of anime.
- Lack of reviews. Reading a scathing review of a highly rated show you also didn't like or a glowing review of a lowly rated show you did was something I enjoyed.
- Inability to turn of images and just have a plain text; scrolling through my profile gives me 8 lines for one line of information I want to see. The profile page's recently watched anime looks much better to me than the home page one.
- Character voice acting roles aren't in alphabetical order.
- Hardy any episode discussions; especially with older, barely watched shows reading other peoples insight enhanced the experience.
- Relations of anime aren't divided by type.
- MALgraph, but that is a third party site.
- Would like the Planning/Completed etc. also be on the profile page instead of just under stats.
[Removed]
I understand why some anime info is incomplete -> lack of people submitting the data. And lack reviews -> lack of users, but that doesn't change the fact that it makes it easier to go back to MAL if they ever get their site functioning again.
Discussing episodes in feeds doesn't appear to be a good way to get a discussion going to me.
Clubs!
All AL is missing is a club feature. If we get a club feature in AL I'll bid adieu to MAL and never return since AL has everything else I need.
It just needs that club feature for me to stay permanently
People may ask why a club feature is important. Many clubs have specific themes so people have a variety to choose from which can't be given in the OG forums. Clubs are arguably the most effective way to encourage community building since it brings people of similar interest together in a mini-community of their own especially since chances are that it curtails to a person's specific interest, further making it seem lucrative to possible customers or in this case possible AL users.
A few people I've talked to say Discord is a viable alternative but I disagree since there's a lot more you can do in AL than with Discord, especially since people don't have to leave the site just for a discussion or club activity obviously related to something on the site. It's not that AL has less users so clubs aren't a good idea, it's that clubs will promote more users to jump ship and boost user counts. Either way, a club feature is the only thing I want at the moment from AL since it's the only thing holding me and many other active club feature users in MAL from leaving MAL for good and invest completely on AL.
CSS for lists.
Groups/clubs.
Private messaging maybe.
Choose what notifications you want enabled/be able to disable them.
This isn't really AniList's fault but whenever I Google search an anime, MAL is the first one to pop up. It just makes it super convenient to have the first search result be the site you store your anime on. If there was an extension that prioritizes AniList over MAL in terms of anime, than that would solve the problem.
Also it would be nice to have the score of the anime be listed right under the thumbnail for the anime instead of having it on the sidebar. It just makes it easier for me to see what the score is without having to look at the sidebar.
I wonder if the road map includes features such as exporting data? It's not hard to write a script that scrapes your profile to back up data but it would be better if this feature is supported natively, then users don't need to bring up another program just to backup the data, Linux users could just use cron to schedule the daily backup but others might not be as technically knowing. I mean the worse case scenario is probably either someone accidentally deletes production database and can't recover the data or just anilist developer becomes disinterested in their platform and shut it down without any notice. I'm not saying that it will happen but I think it is best to be cautious. I will be extremely sad if I spent a few years on the platform and lose my data without backups.
My top recommandation is pretty much this
-A seperate/special thread section to discuss latest episodes of the show/manga/novel etc.
AKA, Maybe an overall topic adjustment. So that when a good topic won't go to oblivion, lost
I'm okay with other features but -while not prior like this one- Private Messages and Recommendation System check would be nice.
I wish they had an option to revert back to the old viewing page for new manga for someone like me who barely uses this stuff it was really simple for me to use now I’m just confused as hell and I felt the old system was really simple so I hope a feature that allows us to change modes is put in but it’s minor
AniList needs to allow short reviews. I once wrote a review and padded it out because of a stupid length requirement. I then got a rude comment from someone about how I shouldn't write a review if I can't write a handful of words about it. Since then, I haven't bothered writing any official reviews. I just use the notes feature to write very terse reviews. I think this is the main reason there are very few reviews on this site. They are expecting very in-depth reviews like a seasoned review columnist for a newspaper might write, but most people are not going to write reviews like that, and if they're not allowed to write short reviews, they won't bother to write any.
For real. Sometimes you just want to give a nice summary of your viewing experience, going into some detail without having to write an entire College essay on the show
Since the major "issues" are already mentioned I will talk about the little things!
Things that I will say now will mostly be suggestions and not "problems".
Things like having more overview of your and others profiles. Like seeing how many followers you actually have or how many you follow. The number of posts or "statuses" you made. Little things like that.I'm an avid Taiga user and with Taiga guy erengy warning that he's considering dropping support of MAL, it felt like a good reason to either check out those MAL alternatives. Or drop Taiga, unfortunately.
I want a tight looking number that keeps it simple and is a good and proper database first, second, third and fourth. And if it needs a social aspect i.e. a community, it should be easily ignored (or possibly even disabled). I don't want to see faux facebook status updates ever when I login. I also greatly prefer the condensed style of MAL way more than Anilist and Kitsu's "modern" style. This might end up being the biggest deal breaker for me, actually. I don't like the design at all.
If you don't wish to see other status's you can simply set it to only display following and just not follow anyone.
I'm still stuck with the sight of a pointless activity flow when I login, only now it's either just lots and lots of empty wasted space or filled with pointless information about my own lists. It's less annoying but just as useless. Is there a way to be gently escorted directly to my profile without ever setting my foot on the "homepage" when I login?
What I am missing from before, is the possibility to theme with CSS. I understand it is something that was way too complex for most. I do miss it, so I hope on an alternative theme solution that goes in depth, and the possibility for a background image. So I can make my profile unique again. As I maintain both MAL and AniList, if someone ask for what I have watched, I would be giving the link of the list with the most customization and unique layout, which would me MAL, after they fixed their ****
I just need a list to manage anime I watched/am watching with less API problems. Anilist does that well.
I'd love the ability to filter anime by localization. I usually watch sub, but when I wanna have something on the side when I'm gaming or working it'd be great to easily filter my planning list to only show anime with English dubs.
I thought about rolling my own, but after looking through the API reference it doesn't look like the data is there :(
