News- Followmy.tv

Hi Everyone,

I'm so amazed at this insane loyal userbase. It's so heartwarming to have built something that others continue to enjoy for years and years!

I would like to give everyone an update on the future of followmy.tv. In short, it's not going away, ever. This is my passion product and I will continue to keep it up in the air to the best of my capabilities.

As everyone knows by now, the current UI is very outdated and there haven't been any new features added in over 5 years. With the exception of the contribution system. The reason is that I have been working for the last 5 years on a new version. but due to the sheer size of this website and it's complex social business logic, it's a very big task to do as a single engineer.

To give you some history:

• The current live production version is running the CakePHP 1.3 framework.
• CakePHP 2.x was released and Jasper and I started an effort to migrate the website to 2.x.
• Jasper also started working on a brand new front-end UI which was going to be amazing.
• Then life happened, I started an immigration process to the United States and both Jasper and I kinda lost interest in TV Shows and generally building apps in our free time.
• We both were working full time and eventually CakePHP 3.x came around. Again a new version we had to migrate this huge application to. sigh..
• I finalized my move to the US and Jasper officially left the team. The core team went from 2 to 1.
• Several years went on where I started focussing on personal health and other life events that were more important.

During all these years when I had some downtime to work on followmy.tv, it was mostly dedicated to maintaining data request, fixing issues. There was no time left in building the new version and the efforts kinda fizzled out. The whole tvrage.com outage was a disaster that almost destroyed followmy.tv.

As for the future, the good news is that I started moving the entire codebase again to a more modern language with a better database engine. I've also started work on a brand new front-end that uses React.JS. I'm also developing the API side-by-side the web app.

In a new effort to get the new version out. I decided to from now on, to no longer add new features to the current live followmy.tv version. I will also be more strict in moderating the new show addition request, only tv shows that are from the major networks will be considered.

I'm doing this so I will have more free time to actually build a better version of the website you all love so much. I want this to be a success, I want to build new cool features for all of you, I want to have the API in place so we can finally move into the mobile app space.

I work full time, so the only thing I ask from this community is to have patience :-). I'm working on a new version. I don't know yet when it will be launched, but when it does, it will be fantastic!

This is the best thing I've built in my life. And I'm especially thankful to all the members that consistently provide feedback, submit show suggestions, and contribute to all the show, episode pages. Followmy.tv wouldn't be what it is today without all of you!

Best, Sarah (Lemon)

We are happy to announce that we deployed our latest big update to our importer. We've rewritten the worker from the ground up and made it faster & much smarter. Resulting in more consistent airdates and less duplicate episodes.

During our scheduled maintenance downtime, we've run the full importer up-front. During this initial import, 189.772 episodes for a total of 5.782 tv shows were updated, including fixes to airdates, episode titles or even complete new episodes that where missing.

What is next?

We will continue improving the new importer and monitor its performance very closely during the next days/weeks. Next up, we will start going through the shows that were put in review by our importer. These are shows that have conflicting data and are in need for a manual review.

The importer is not yet fully migrated to the thetvdb.com data service. For example, new TV Shows are still not detected, this is currently a slow manual process. There is a work in progress version of a community driven contribution system which we hope to be releasing before the summer.

Final words

Lastly, I want to thank all you for sticking with us during this major transition phase to another data service! Without our loyal user base, followmy.tv wouldn't be here today.

Dear Amazing Loyal Users,

I'm happy to announce that we just deployed an update to the website. We've deployed our new data importer which is using thetvdb.com as a datasource instead of the dead tvrage.com. This is a limited implementation and we did not move the full importer feature set to thetvdb because their API has some limitations.

Going forward, we realized that we no longer want to rely on an external API source for our data. We always thought "We are going to do our own data once our community is big enough", and I believe we are close to that minimum community size.

With that in mind, we are shifting our effort in for the new version towards community tools for open sourcing the entire data set of followmy.tv. In the future we will combine the awesomeness that is our users, and develop our own data without an external API.

As usual, since we just deployed experimental code to production, feel free to email us if you encounter any strange data related bugs.

As you may have noticed both our hard drives in our pirmary server broke down (what are the odds?) and we were forced to move the entire project to a new (but better) server.

This meant restoring backups from a point where the drives did not fully corrupt our database. This was somewhere early friday morning. Everything after that is sadly corrupted and not restorable.

One issue that you should check is your settings. Make sure these are still correct (things like dashboard day counts, ..) because that table was damaged the most and a big part had to be restored to default values.

There is one upside, the server is much more powerfull now and should result in a faster and better user experience!

First of all, thank you for all the users that still use followmy.tv up to today! I love how active the users are in our community. Followmy.tv would never existed without our awesome users. And a special thanks to all of the users that donated, without you guys/girls followmy.tv would not be possible to maintain. And I'm grateful for having built a website that is used by 10s of thousands users worldwide daily.

Second, and the most important thing, we as the staff of followmy.tv have to say 3 important words to our users "We are sorry". We are sorry for being inactive this long, we are sorry for features that were promised but never came, we are sorry for not answering support tickets in time.

Now that those are out of the way, lets explain what is going on with followmy.tv, what the future holds and what the reality is.

Followmy.tv was founded 3 years ago as a side project by Jasper and me, we had big dreams, dreams like "We will have 1 million users", "I hope we can work for followmy.tv full time", "I hope followmy.tv becomes profitable enough for us to hire additional staff". None of these dreams came true so far, but I still dream of at least making one of those dreams reality.

Currently the state of followmy.tv is that we are in a hibernation state, the website is working stable, we are still growing daily with an average of 30 signups / day with over 30% active users. We have awesome crew members that moderate and add content daily. But all of this is overshadowed by the fact that our core developers are not developing any new features or are very slow in answering support tickets. Ofcourse this is unacceptable and I hope we can change this in the future.

Of course we do not do this by choice but the sad fact is, we just don't have enough free time to assign to followmy.tv to handle all of the feature requests and/or support tickets. We both have full time day jobs, we both have relationships, we both have a lot of other responsibilities that are more important that followmy.tv. Followmy.tv started as a side project and is still a side project.

The last update to followmy.tv was almost 2 years ago, but we have been doing a lot of development since then. Currently followmy.tv runs on an older version of the CakePHP framework, the moment CakePHP 2.x came out we started re building followmy.tv from the ground up resulting in a much more stable and faster website. This development project has been going on for over a year now and we are close but not close enough to release it to production. This is the reason why there are no features being released to the live website because we would have to build them twice, for the old site and the new site.

One of the biggest requests is the API and the mobile application. I have been working on the API for over a year now and it is complete for about 75%. But due to lacking free time to work on it, it has been delayed immensely. We were also working on a complete new redesign of the website which we scrapped for now because that was going to take too much time to complete now. All in all, the new version of followmy.tv is very close to be finished but not yet. Its the last push and testing phase that is taking a lot of time, and currently we both have almost zero time to commit to followmy.tv.

Financially followmy.tv is costing us a considerate amount monthly to keep it in the air, the combination of ads and donations is just not bringing enough cash in to cover all the costs, let alone hiring software developers to develop for us.

How does the future of followmy.tv look like?

This is unclear, one thing I'm completely 100% sure off though, followmy.tv will keep existing as long as I'm existing. Its my biggest software passion and will always be my biggest passion. Some things have to change though, our crew has to be more active. I personally vouch that once I'm settled in in my new home (I'm in the middle of moving to a different country) I will make more free time to work on followmy.tv.

We will also start looking for extra developers / designer within our community that share our passion and want to help out and want the opportunity to make followmy.tv better.

If you are a software developer with a lot of experience in CakePHP (or PHP in general) or if you are an awesome UI designer, please drop us an email on info@followmy.tv.

I hope you (the awesome user) accept my apology, and I hope you will keep using our website and have the patience. We really appreciate every one of you that use our website daily, weekly or just once.

Cheers, Jelle