News- Followmy.tv

Over the last 2 months we've been working on some behind-the-scenes improvements to our site. These are not visible changes but wanted to share them with the community.

Scraper bot and spam protection

Last month there was an attack on our website where a bad actor was sending thousands of requests per minute to scrape the site. This caused some slowness and occasionally outages. i spend. good amount of time building a system that detects and blocks these kind of attacks.

Javascript migration project

A big part of the front-end improvements is to migrate off the Mootools JS framework into a more modern stack. This project is underway and is about half-way done. Hoping to ship this out by end of August.

Signups still closed

I started the research on how to do bot prevention during signup without relying on Google's expensive cloud tooling. Once a new system is implemented I will re-open the signups.

Backend rewrite

The backend rewrite is still underway, and this will take at least 6 more months before everything is running on the new GraphQL API. This is a precursor to start development of the mobile apps.

Cost of service and Patreon

We are incredibly grateful for your continued support and enthusiasm for followmy.tv. Your engagement and passion make this community truly special. Currently, it costs about $600 per month to keep the site running, and we have chosen to keep it ad-free to enhance your experience. However, our Patreon is only generating about $50 per month, covering less than 10% of our server costs.

Despite this, I am committed to funding this site out-of-pocket because I love this community and it is my absolute favorite project to work on. If you enjoy using followmy.tv and would like to help us sustain and grow, please consider subscribing to our Patreon with a monthly donation.

Your support means the world to us and will help ensure that followmy.tv remains a vibrant and ad-free space for all.

Thank you for being a part of our community!

Subscribe on Patreon with a monthly donation

Hey folks! It's been since 6 years since our last blog post, WOW! I owe you all an update!

Personal life

Shortly after that last blog post, in mid-2019, I started a new job in San Francisco. I value their work-life balance a ton, and it has allowed me to slowly work more and more on followmy.tv.

About two years ago, I moved back to Southern California; My job allows me to work remotely, so I moved back to where I love living the most! And about a year ago, I finally was able to buy my own home!

A lot of life-changing events have happened, but followmy.tv remained constant throughout that time! I spend most of my weekends working on the site.

Migration to the cloud

I wanted followmy.tv to be much more stable with the ability to use modern new technologies like Kubernetes. In 2019, I finalized the transition of our entire website from a server in Germany to the Kubernetes platform of Google Cloud. This allowed me to develop very rapidly on the backend services of followmy.tv Deployments became automated and observability became much more straightforward.

This whole project took about 6 months to finish. It tripled our server costs but it was totally worth it for the gained flexibility!

A new data importer

At the very beginning, followmy.tv depended on TVRage. Around 2016, their API broke. As a result, much of our data started to become stale or just incorrect. We switched to a different provider, and our data has improved a lot since then. I never wanted to be dependent on a single API anymore.

The biggest project I've been working on behind the scenes is our new importer. It's built with Python running as a completely independent system that detects and imports all TV Show metadata and stores it in a graph database.

I'm about 80% done with the initial prototype and will soon be integrating this into followmy.tv. It contains a richer dataset of not just TV Shows but also the characters, storylines, and actors of these shows. It's not done yet, but it's close!

I also want to give out a massive shoutout to ForgotMyLines and Fish for being super fantastic content moderators! I can't thank you enough for all those hours of data reviews you've done. Thank you!!

A new internal GraphQL API

The second big project is the new internal GraphQL API that is replacing all the business logic currently written in PHP. As well as all the new features I want to implement in the future. It's written in Typescript and is running in the same Kubernetes cluster as our main application.

This has already been deployed to production and several pages of followmy.tv is already using this new API. Its not a user-visible feature but it allows me to develop new features much faster!

I'm constantly migrating more pages to this new API.

A new search engine

Our search was bad. It struggled with shows that have a very common short name like "Silo". Last month I completely rebuilt this search engine from the ground up. It uses ElasticSearch under the hood. I'm excited to announce that this is now fully available to all users!

My plans for 2024

My main priority is to finish the integration project of the new importer and move all of the existing features to the new API in the next 3 months. Once that is completed I will be shifting focus to revamp our UI. I want the theme of 2024 to be a year full of wonderful new features for you the user!

Some features and ideas I have:

• Build an initial version of our iOS and Android apps
• Allow users to create shareable lists like "Top TV shows with strong female lead characters"
• Add actor information to our show pages
• Ability to track rewatches, being able to track progress without losing all your history
• An AI-powered recommendation engine
• More intelligent notifications when new shows are airing

The community, you!

Followmy.tv is over 10 years old now! I'm eternally grateful for how wonderful this community has been. I checked our database and there are a handful of users who visited followmy.tv literally every day for the last 10 years. That blows my mind!

I promise to you that I will post at least one blog post per month to keep you up to date with the progress I'm making!

Hi Awesome Community,

We are stoked to announce that we've released our first version of the new contribute section. You will now be able to report shows that are missing in our database. This brand new section can be found on followmy.tv/contribute. We are looking forward to adding all those missing TV shows to fuel everyone's couch potato lifestyle! :D

This is our first step towards moving followmy.tv to a more community driven database. We believe that having our own data in the future is the way forward to prevent data loss.

Small update: There is a bug with oreign language shows and shows without airdates that prevents them from being imported. We are working on a fix for these. In the meantime, those shows are kept in pending review until the bug is fixed. Our apologies for this inconvenience!

to @all: I'm still thinking about all of this. I get a flood of 50+ messages each week with comments like "show x is not up to date". If I would fix all of those every day, I would not have time to actually code a fix for the rest.

I started work on the contribution system where our user base can self moderate the data. Including adding new shows / episodes. TheTVDB was a temporary fix for a bigger problem, its not a permanent fix and was never intended to be. It is an intermediate to get at least the most popular shows back up to date with episode numbers and titles.

Currently I'm swamped in a project at work that require me to work late nights for the last couple of weeks. Once we are passed the deadline I will be able to get back on track with fmtv development.

FMTV at the moment

Followmy.tv has been around since January 2010, created out of love for Television and desperately in need of a decent agenda to keep track of our favourite episodes. Our main goal was to create a platform to get people to follow, share and talk about their favorite TV Shows. Fast forward 5 years later: we've created a community of 52 342 members, over 6000 of them using followmy.tv on a daily base. We could not have dreamed a greater gift. Thank you!

People who've been around since our start already know we hardly make any statements about followmy.tv. In fact: we only make statements if we feel we need to. This is because our platform is very powerful: It can survive without any moderation. That's all because a lot of people have the same feeling as we do; A lot of people love their TV shows and have a need for a platform to keep track of them, talk about them and to introduce them to friends. This is also the reason why we’re creating this blog; because we still believe in this. Even more: We’re taking the Followmy.tv experience to the next level.

New Updates

The site was originally built on top of the CakePHP 1.3 framework. We started moving to the 2.x version of that framework a couple of years ago. Recently 3.0 came out and we ended up deciding to rebuild the entire site from the ground up. With that in mind, we do have several new features planned and here are a couple of them:

• OAuth2 API: A fully open API that developers can use to create cool things
• Native mobile apps: Planning on ios and android
• Lists: A cool new way to discover tv shows in a unique way
• Groups: Form groups to discuss and share your favorite tv shows with your closest friends.
• Discussions: A better way to communicate with fans.

The entire new website will use its own OAuth2 API to communicate with the back-end. Which means that you as a developer will have full creative freedom and making cool things to integrate with followmy.tv!

Our goal is to get all of this done by the end of the year.

Kenny

Since the early beginning we have received tons of mails, tweets, Facebook messages,.. so we decided to introduce Kenny Leys (SilentAlarm) on board of our team to manage our social media platforms. He'll be responsible for keeping our instagram, facebook and twitter up-to-date with the latest news, throwbacks, behind the scene footage and much more. Make sure to follow every single one of them!

Jasper

Jasper and I founded followmy.tv almost 5 years ago. We had this grand idea and we made it reality. Everything you see on your screen was designed by Jasper and he did an amazing job. Due to other work & life responsibilities, Jasper is stepping down from the team. Thanks you for all your hard work Jasper, you will be missed!

UI Designer

At the moment we’re back a 2-man operation but we’re hoping to expand soon! If you are a software developer with plenty experience in CakePHP (or PHP in general) or if you are an awesome UI designer, please drop us an email on info@followmy.tv.

Thanks

We've said it before; Followmy.tv will keep going on as long as we’re existing. All of this thanks to every awesome user out there. We’d like to end this post with a special thanks to all of the users that have donated, without you guys/girls Followmy.tv would not be have been possible to maintain.

Keep track of our social media, we’ll be back soon.