MAL Sync

[DakuTree]

This would be nice, but is kind of a massive job which I can't do alone. We would need to manually link every single series with it's MAL-equivalent. I could see this happening if we moved to a system similar to novelupdates, where we have a centralized series page. All we'd have to do then is link the site series to it. Need more research on this.

[DakuTree]

So I've been thinking about how to go about doing this. It's a tricky issue.

The first thing to consider is how do we actually successfully parse all kinds of chapter info. Thankfully in most cases, we have a volume & chapter number, but usually it's better to just track chapter numbers on MAL instead of both. This sadly will cause issues where the chapter numbers which are used are by volume, and not incrementing across all volumes. There is also the case of decimal chapters which we can't number properly.

The second problem is how to do we associate MAL IDs with the titles we're tracking. In a perfect world we'd do that all automatically, but I thought at least to begin with this could be done on the user side. They could add a mal:#ID# tag, and use that when they update. It would require an overhaul of how tagging works however.

Blah. I want to implement this but it's a bunch of work.

[DakuTree]

Looking at getting a basic version of this out somewhat soon.
Trying to consider the best method of syncing though.

MAL has two ways to update a series from outside the site.

• 1: Using the internal API (/ownlist/manga/edit.json) This is what my old MU Better Lists userscript used, but it's a bit tricky to do with this. The internal API requires a CSRF token which we can't easily grab. If we used a userscript we can just use GM_xmlhttpRequest, but I'd rather not have to use the userscript if possible here.
  This also requires the user to be logged in on MAL for it to work.
• 2: Using the actual API This would be the preferred method, but it would require us to store the users MAL username and password in plaintext somewhere, which I'd rather avoid if possible.

Probably going to go with 1 using the userscript.

[DakuTree]

Managed to implement option 1 as of 2797f3ab3062cd89fb9cf36a7619b3f0cd4a709a.

It's not perfect, but it works. Would like to implement option 2 at some point as an alternative as well. Going to have a look at implementing some way to store the MAL id on the backend too, so the user doesn't need to set themselves.

[DakuTree]

Got around to moving the MAL ID away from tags, and also made it so we can now set the MAL id for everyone following a series (via tracker_titles).
All existing MAL tags have been converted over to the new system. Seems to have worked well.

Going to remove this from the 2.0 milestone since it's pretty much done. The API option I can do at a later date, isn't really that needed right now.