Animatsiya.net - main page search works again, better subtitle comparisons, WIP Vietnamese site, etc
Since the last update in March, 244 films have been added to Animatsiya.net, 168 of them with with new English subtitles and the remaining ones needing no translation.
I've also been busy on the coding side. Some notable recent changes are:
Searching films from the main page works again.
Actually, it never stopped working if you typed into the text box in the films page or any other place films are listed, e.g. a studio, a decade, etc., but now it works from the main page again (although it's kinda slow, since it does that by opening the main "films" page and searching that. I'll try to improve that at some point)
Subtitle comparison is now much more useful
So, if you click on any subtitle, you can see the history of changes that have been made to it. Previously, they were compared as just two strings of text, but now they're compared as two .srt subtitle files, line by line, and the site looks at which lines/timings have been changed and which haven't. This leads to much more useful results, as you can see in this comparison:
Before:
After:
It often got confused after the very first difference in the text (such as the subtitle timing being different), and would mark everything after that as being changed. But now, you can see which timings or texts were actually changed:
Work-in-progress Vietnamese site
Cynir, who's contributed well over 100 subtitles to the site, has also begun to translate it through the Site Translation and Add Multiple pages (described in the March update). Currently, it's at 412/497 translated, and 59% of the text overall. It's already live at animatsiya.net/vi, though not yet linked on the main page. What still remains to be done is the translation of a few remaining short texts, some of the longer texts, more of the titles of the wordless films, and perhaps a few bugs caused by the structure of the English and Vietnamese languages being so very different... (seriously, the Google Translate between them is one of the worst I've seen!)
Bulgarian site improvements
Zhukorop/Жукороп has continued to improve the Bulgarian version of the site. Now at 480/497 of text lines, 81% of text, and almost ALL of the 545 film titles accessible to Bulgarian-speakers.
Other changes
You can now click on individual years again to see all films from that year (e.g. see all films from 1948, an especially good year).
The list of films now displays properly again, when adding or editing film series.
Fixed broken SEO, so site pages display in Google search results again (this might be kind of a big deal. There are still things I need to do better here, though, which is on the TODO list)
Fixed a bug in which a film page would show incorrect history if more than one subtitle in a row was added through the "Add Subtitles" page (actually, this was by far the most difficult job and required a big refactoring of the website's code)
Fixed a bug in which the list of studios page would sometimes show fewer films than a studio actually made (it showed only the # of films released under the studio's current default name, rather than under ANY name).
Last but not least, the list of directors now lists the "Year of Birth", and it's possible to sort by it. This was inspired by a recent article by Russian animation historian Georgiy Borodin (george-smf) which talked about the generations of directors in Russian animation and what they had in common.
It goes without saying, but: it is possible that some new bugs were introduced as a result of all these changes. If you notice something, please contact me, either here or through private message on Animatsiya.net!
Addendum: RIP Eus347's Russian/Soviet animation channel (2021-2023)
At the end of August, 2023, a wonderful resource/library maintained by Eus347, his YouTube channel @eus347russianexussranimati2, got deleted as a result of 5 strikes in one day by the Estonian Film Institute. At the time, it had 766 videos (here's a full list of the titles), about 20 of which were from the EFI.
A similar thing had earlier happened in January 2021 ( which I wrote about), at the time because of copyright strikes from Soyuzmultfilm LLC. Because of that, Eus avoided uploading Soyuzmultfilm titles to his new channel, and his translations for those could be instead seen on Animatsiya.net where they appeared together with videos from Soyuzmultfilm's official channels.
The just-deleted channel had many videos from other Soviet animation studios, as well as those that were outside the scope of Animatsiya.net. If you've seen any missing videos on the site recently, that could be why (though I've found replacements for most). There were also some subtitles on there that hadn't yet been added to Animatsiya.net, though I think I've saved most of them.
Eus is currently considering starting again, but this time with multiple channels grouped around a studio/set of studios/set of countries, so that a complaint from just one organization won't bring everything down. This makes sense to me, as many copyright owners on YouTube seem to be fine with their old films being uploaded if they get the revenue (as YouTube's system allows). I wish him all the best!
I've also been busy on the coding side. Some notable recent changes are:
Searching films from the main page works again.
Actually, it never stopped working if you typed into the text box in the films page or any other place films are listed, e.g. a studio, a decade, etc., but now it works from the main page again (although it's kinda slow, since it does that by opening the main "films" page and searching that. I'll try to improve that at some point)
Subtitle comparison is now much more useful
So, if you click on any subtitle, you can see the history of changes that have been made to it. Previously, they were compared as just two strings of text, but now they're compared as two .srt subtitle files, line by line, and the site looks at which lines/timings have been changed and which haven't. This leads to much more useful results, as you can see in this comparison:
Before:
After:
It often got confused after the very first difference in the text (such as the subtitle timing being different), and would mark everything after that as being changed. But now, you can see which timings or texts were actually changed:
Work-in-progress Vietnamese site
Cynir, who's contributed well over 100 subtitles to the site, has also begun to translate it through the Site Translation and Add Multiple pages (described in the March update). Currently, it's at 412/497 translated, and 59% of the text overall. It's already live at animatsiya.net/vi, though not yet linked on the main page. What still remains to be done is the translation of a few remaining short texts, some of the longer texts, more of the titles of the wordless films, and perhaps a few bugs caused by the structure of the English and Vietnamese languages being so very different... (seriously, the Google Translate between them is one of the worst I've seen!)
Bulgarian site improvements
Zhukorop/Жукороп has continued to improve the Bulgarian version of the site. Now at 480/497 of text lines, 81% of text, and almost ALL of the 545 film titles accessible to Bulgarian-speakers.
Other changes
You can now click on individual years again to see all films from that year (e.g. see all films from 1948, an especially good year).
The list of films now displays properly again, when adding or editing film series.
Fixed broken SEO, so site pages display in Google search results again (this might be kind of a big deal. There are still things I need to do better here, though, which is on the TODO list)
Fixed a bug in which a film page would show incorrect history if more than one subtitle in a row was added through the "Add Subtitles" page (actually, this was by far the most difficult job and required a big refactoring of the website's code)
Fixed a bug in which the list of studios page would sometimes show fewer films than a studio actually made (it showed only the # of films released under the studio's current default name, rather than under ANY name).
Last but not least, the list of directors now lists the "Year of Birth", and it's possible to sort by it. This was inspired by a recent article by Russian animation historian Georgiy Borodin (george-smf) which talked about the generations of directors in Russian animation and what they had in common.
It goes without saying, but: it is possible that some new bugs were introduced as a result of all these changes. If you notice something, please contact me, either here or through private message on Animatsiya.net!
Addendum: RIP Eus347's Russian/Soviet animation channel (2021-2023)
At the end of August, 2023, a wonderful resource/library maintained by Eus347, his YouTube channel @eus347russianexussranimati2, got deleted as a result of 5 strikes in one day by the Estonian Film Institute. At the time, it had 766 videos (here's a full list of the titles), about 20 of which were from the EFI.
A similar thing had earlier happened in January 2021 ( which I wrote about), at the time because of copyright strikes from Soyuzmultfilm LLC. Because of that, Eus avoided uploading Soyuzmultfilm titles to his new channel, and his translations for those could be instead seen on Animatsiya.net where they appeared together with videos from Soyuzmultfilm's official channels.
The just-deleted channel had many videos from other Soviet animation studios, as well as those that were outside the scope of Animatsiya.net. If you've seen any missing videos on the site recently, that could be why (though I've found replacements for most). There were also some subtitles on there that hadn't yet been added to Animatsiya.net, though I think I've saved most of them.
Eus is currently considering starting again, but this time with multiple channels grouped around a studio/set of studios/set of countries, so that a complaint from just one organization won't bring everything down. This makes sense to me, as many copyright owners on YouTube seem to be fine with their old films being uploaded if they get the revenue (as YouTube's system allows). I wish him all the best!