Data Quality, API Changes (Patreon)

Hey Everyone!

Our next update is going to have some seriously big changes for the sake of the website. We have had a ton of trolls recently, and a lot of people uploading inappropriate content (not even standard inappropriate, we're talking like frame by frame spongebob episodes of Sandy Cheeks in a bikini). Additionally, it has been a long struggle of ours to make sure data is clean and consistent. 

To address this, we're going to require verification for all new submissions, and moderators will be taking control of the descriptions, weights, names, series, etc.

Also, Waifus are now going to support multiple series\seasons\media.

Changes that already happened!

• We can now ban users with a message - so if you mess up, you'll know why!
• Waifus, Series, and other entities now return proper data using twitter tags, og tags to discord, facebook, twitter for better linking
• Random SEO tidbits are strung about on the site now to help make indexing easier for bots

Changes In This Next Update

• New Waifu approval system
• Thumbnail quality site-wide has been bumped from 300px width to 600px width, thanks to Patreon users (you guys!) covering bandwidth costs for amazon S3. You can expect thumbnails to be reprocessed at some point with these new constraints, giving you sexier preview pics. For the full versions, they will still be available for the gallery in their original form.
• Alternative Name has been removed from Waifus in favor of original name (日本語), Romaji name
• Series are going to be split into distinct seasons now (attack on titan season 1, season 2, season 3, etc) 
• Waifu's will show series, seasons, games, etc as "Appears In" on their profile page
• Series now support episode count, airing start date, airing end date, and have a special field for the root series name for overarching series (e.g. Final Fantasy). There is some placeholder backend code for Studios as well, since I'd like to get to that point.
• Comments have been updated to support 5,000 characters

API Changes

• Series will now return additional data including episode count, airing start, airing end, etc (documentation will be updated this week)
• Waifus will have the first series appended to the default "series" object to not break any existing implementations, please update when possible to use "appearances" which will be an array of type series with the new attributes included
• Waifus will have additional fields added for the Romaji name
• Users will have their URL returned in the payload which will be modified based on if they have claimed their custom URL or not

Data Quality

Of course we wish this would be overnight, but it's likely going to be a massive cleanup effort that could take awhile. We have almost 19,000 Waifus in the system with nearly 3,400 series. While this is ongoing, we're going to be making a new role on the website that is capable of updating Waifus and Series to assist in our data cleanup effort. There will be a lot of restrictions into what it can do, but this is the best way forward.

I expect this update to go out this month, so stay tuned!