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← darkroom
Best way to fill out anime list (when you can't remember everything)
I'm fairly new to this site and have been working through trying to add all my completed anime series to my list. My issue is that since I've been watching anime for a while, it's hard for me to remember everything I've watched, especially from years ago. My general strategy has been to browse the list of all anime and sort by title name (in romaji, if that makes any difference) with anime displayed in the small tiles view, and scroll through adding things to my list.
However, when doing this the page takes longer and longer to load as I scroll through all titles, and even if I power through and wait the minute+ it takes for me to hover of the "+" and click the "completed" checkmark eventually the page just won't load at all anymore (for me somewhere near the end of titles starting with 'K').
I'm hoping there is some easier way to go through all anime alphabetically and add the ones I remember to my list. At this point in time I've been tempted to go through and add all my watched anime to MAL and port the list over (which just seems kind of silly) or use another site to scroll through all anime and search for and add what I've watched one at a time (just feels way more time intensive than it should be).
Whether there is some convenient or easy option I'm missing, or if anybody has any helpful suggestions that I haven't thought of, I'd be happy to hear them.
Wouldn’t it be easier to find stuff you’ve watched sorting by most popular?
Unless you’re a fan of really obscure works, doing it alphabetically would be time consuming… considering we have 17,772 anime entries. Search isn’t optimized for showing every entry at once and so would need to cache which takes loading time and lots of used RAM (iirc).
How would doing the same thing on MAL or another site make it easier? If it’s the same way…
I have thought of trying it sorted by popularity, but there's just that underlying thought of "what if I've watched something that was largely unpopular but I'd still want to track that". I suppose that might be the compromise I have to make though, it's just my perfectionist side of me that admittedly I could do to ignore in most cases.
On other sites (I haven't used MAL and just pulled it up to see, so I could be misunderstanding) you can search anime only starting with a certain letter of the alphabet, say all "A" anime, etc. Even then it also looks like these search results are broken up by pages, which takes care of the extremely large cache and loading issues.
I was thinking of making a "Site Suggestion" post to suggest having the list of all anime or search results in general broken up into pages for this very reason, but figured I'd ask first just to make sure there wasn't something obvious I was missing.
Thanks for the reply and suggestion! Sorting by popularity is likely what I'll end up doing.
another suggestion would just be filtering year by year and when you get higher can go by season
or filter by formatsI understand that having a letter filter would be great and probably simple to implement (relative to other things being worked on, not a dev don't quote :d) but I don't think it would be used much often as such specific granularity, when we have other filters for browsing.
Yeah I just saw someone else mention going by year too, I feel like that's also a pretty good play.
Also, just putting it out there, I do very much like all the filters available already! Like the ability filter by source material and streaming service?! huge. It was just for my specific use case that there wasn't an option.
welcome anilist!
I think the best thing is that you add what you saw most recently and what you remember, and when you adapt more to anilist, you search in popular or by the genres that are most seen and over time you will add everything ^^
Thanks for the welcome!
And thank you for the reply as well! Truthfully speaking I also like to go through the entire list of anime alphabetically to remind myself of anime I want to watch, so I can add it to my Planning list, but that's a secondary concern I suppose. I could accomplish a similar objective if I were to search by genre as well.
I'm thinking it's as you say, it'll just take me some time to remember everything or going through the list of anime that is most popular first.
In addition to that, you'll probably find yourself stumbling into more obscure anime that you remember watching (or wanting to watch) as you browse the site. There's no need to have everything at the beginning; I probably find an old show or movie that I watched 10+ years ago on a bimonthly basis still, and I've been using the site for a bit over a year now.
What is the difference from https://anilist.co/search/anime?sort=TITLE_ROMAJI ?
That is precisely how I have been trying to find and add anime to my completed list so far. On that page, after scrolling (admittedly for almost an hour or more) the page won't load for me.
uhhhh you can look through my list if you want
Ha, honestly I just might do that, I already see that we share quite a lot of favorites (some that I haven't gotten to in my searching yet)!
If you don't mind my asking, how did you fill out your list of all completed series, was it just through memory (if so kudos!) or by going through the lists of anime by popularity/genres?
haha actually i've been tracking my anime pretty much since i started
Man, see, that's what I wish I had done! D:
you could add the popular things first and then if you find them by idk looking at others’ accs the less popular ones i guess
Yeah, that's sounds like the play for sure.
don't stress yourself to find everything. even i still very rarely stumble upon anime i watched and never tracked and i've been using anime tracking sites for over a year.
how i personally filled my list was honestly mainly by memory at first and then just whatever i came across online. like i'd see someone talk about x anime and then i'd add it to my list if i remembered it.
what i meant to say is that you just shouldn't stress yourself too much to fill your listHa, yeah def calling me out there, I am impatient to have it all tracked, mostly because I've never used a tracker before and part of me is just morbidly curious to know how much I've watched...
I'll be patient, appreciate the advice :)
ooo when i made my account i went through the earliest year section (so 1940) and went up from there to 2020 ! did it take me 5 hours ?? yes but it worked
Yeah, honestly this seems like a pretty good way to do it.
I've already spent more than 5 hours doing it my long and painful alphabetic way...
I know it's not really relevant but I only started listing stuff over 2 years after I started watching anime, meaning that there's a high probability that there's something I've been missing for over 8 years and will probably for the rest of my time watching anime.
So I'd recommend just not thinking much about everything and eventually stumbling across them through, for example recommendations in a certain show. Or maybe you see like a youtube thumbnail of something you recognize.
Yeah for sure, I think I'll just have to come to terms with that, which is fine, ha. Just gotta loosen up a bit. Honestly.. if I don't remember I've watched it I won't care if I've tracked it or not until I do remember. That's what I get for being new to tracking sites like this.
You could also try adjusting the year range, or the anime format to reduce the number of results. If you click the "advanced genres & tag filters" option then you can also filter the results to either show genres and tags that you know you've watched, or to filter out stuff that you haven't.
For sure, I'd been toying with that idea but since I had already started alphabetically it just kind of made sense to keep doing it that way. This for sure the play though.
