Current state of things
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As everyone knows by now, the current UI is very outdated and there haven't been any new features added in over 5 years.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)
Comments
A lot of shows have been pending for over a month. When will new shows start getting accepted again? Thanks.
Ay give us better privacy controls, and especially don't have a recommender bot publicly posting about what we watch!
Thank you very much for your efforts and hard work! A huge endeavour like this will be time consuming and a complicated project to fully realise and complete. I’m very impressed that it hasn’t been abandoned. I’m a totally new user btw. Thanks again! Take care and be proud of your awesome site
Modern family also
Daredevil S3 needs an update
https://twitter.com/followmytv/status/1049478019931238400
Not sure on the look of the new layout but as long as it works properly that's the main thing..
And what do we do with the non-American shows that don't have an IMDB id?
@Lemon Ah! I see. Thank you for the update. Just wanted to check, incase you had switched to running from IMDb now.
Cheers.
@ForgotMyLines: We started auto-rejecting TheTVDB show profiles without an IMDB ID since we upgraded our importer to also leverage IMDB data.
IMDB URLs are currently not yet supported. But I'm working on that.
I just got some shows auto rejected because of IMDb IDs? Do we have to paste the IMDb link, rather than TVDb now? @lemon
<3
@eherberg thank you. How did I miss it?
Could you please run an update on http://followmy.tv/shows/39936/Moonbeam_City ? Thanks, keep up the good work!
@lemon 9 months later still zero updates.....
not sure where to post this question. It seems that a lot of the programming that i follow is no longer showing on my calendar. Just wondering if there is something i need to do to have everything repopulate in the calendar. For example SVU which premieres on 26 Sept 18 is not showing on my calendar. Can anyone help?
Is someone checking the contributions?
Please add https://www.thetvdb.com/series/veronica-inside
I checked followmy.tv when I saw the link posted on 9lives.be
Since then this website is my go-to to check what I missed and what I still need to see. I don't use this site that often, but when I do it's a great help to binge-download all I need.
Thanks!
Thank you! I don't know how else I would keep track of the shows I watch! I really appreciate the work that you do :)
update please