Anime List: Available sort columns

[ConnorKrammer]

Right now there's a nice selection of columns to sort by, but there are several that are conspicuously missing: start date, end date, and tags.

End date can be roughly approximated using the last updated column, but this falls short when the show has been rewatched since its completion. Start date is fairly self-explanatory, and doesn't have a close substitute currently.

Tag sorting requires a bit of thought, because there are several ways to go about it when there are multiple tags on a show:

• Tag order could be left as-is, and sorted on the assumption that the first tags on an item are the most important.
• Tags could be ordered alphabetically within their peers (by this I mean all tags on a single show) and this could then be compared to tags on other shows to get the overall sorting order.
• A hybrid approach, which I feel is reasonable, is to treat the first tag as primary and the others as secondary. Sorting in this manner would mean either sorting only on the first tag, or ordering the secondary tags alphabetically (preserving the position of the first tag) and then sorting on all of them.

Even if tags don't have a fancy sort implementation, it's nice to be able to see them without going into the show's information page.

[erengy]

Thanks for the detailed explanations! Here's what I think:

• Start date: I can't think of a viable use case at the moment. Doesn't seem it'd be as useful as the others.
• End date: Quite useful due to the fact that Last updated column is unreliable—its value is changed if you update the score, tags, anything.
• Tags: I've been planning to add this for a while now. I think that sorting them as regular strings (case-insensitive lexicographical ordering, as in Anime title column) would be the most intuitive approach here. No need to be too smart about it.

A couple of things worth mentioning:

• I'm leaning towards displaying absolute dates, but should we display relative ones instead? Now that we're going to have multiple date columns, it might be a good idea to add a Display relative date and time option to Settings → Application → Anime list for this (no option for individual columns).
• What should we use as the column text? Start date, for instance, is ambiguous because it could refer to the airing date as well. We need the text to be concise.
• All three columns are useless for Hummingbird users, as the service doesn't store these values in its database.

[ConnorKrammer]

Start date is useful for people like me who watch multiple shows at once, often at a fairly slow pace. This means the start order is often different than the completed order of a list of shows, as the time spans overlap each other. I agree that "start date" is somewhat ambiguous. Switching it around to "Date Started" is better, as the verb implies that the user is the one doing the starting. This would also have a nice parallel to "Date Completed" ("End Date" has the same ambiguity that "start date" does, unfortunately).

As for absolute/relative dates, I've added some of my thoughts to issue #149.

For Hummingbird users, what's your opinion on storing these dates in Taiga's database? That would give them the feature for now, and if Hummingbird ever adds support you could set the appropriate values then. I've often thought that Taiga has a great deal of potential to expand upon existing services, using them as a backend but not being limited to just their features. If this was abstracted nicely enough, integration with the various online services could be added as they support the respective features. It'd essentially be the same as writing browser polyfills, but for anime services.

[ConnorKrammer]

@erengy Another sort-by column that would be useful is a "last watched" column. This avoids some problems that exist when sorting by the Last Updated column—namely, that adding a score or accidentally changing a show's information will move that show to the top of the list. At least when I use the Last Updated column for sorting, I do so in order to see my shows in the order that I last watched them. I imagine that's not uncommon for other people.

[erengy]

Back when I first made the Anime List columns customizable, my intention was to have a Last Watched column rather than a Last Updated one. Even now, I would replace this column, if I could. But I can't, because:

• MyAnimeList provides a my_last_updated value for each anime in user's list, but there isn't a my_last_watched counterpart.
• The fact that Taiga's own history is not synchronizable makes it unreliable for this purpose (i.e. it'd only work well for a small set of users).

[ConnorKrammer]

Ah, I see the problem now. Even a possible workaround, detecting when an episode change coincides with an update to the my_last_updated value, would also fail if Taiga isn't opened frequently enough (though it would provide a reasonable approximation).

I might have to implement the column in a new fork just for myself then (I basically never use MyAnimeList directly, and prefer to do everything through Taiga). I wish MyAnimeList would provide a more robust API for these things.