Hiya MAL users!
We have a bit sad news today.
If you came here from the link in the header, you probably know what this post will be about. So, I won't be beating around the bush too much, but I feel there should be an introduction first.
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Introduction
A few years ago there was a nice page that showed you rating distribution. After it shut down, I decided to make my own version - but being a PHP newbie, I had to ask rr- for help. Within a day we had a working prototype, which was nice enough to be published. MALgraph quickly became somehow popular; maybe it's because it called you a retard if you had given too many 10/10 scores.
Then there were multiple code rewrites, mostly by rr-, while I managed the community and parts of the design. Versions 2, 3 and 4 introduced multiple nice features, and the number of users who checked their stats reached 200 000.
At this point it's really hard to maintain a stable database, especially if you have to keep it freshly downloaded from a remote source - in our case, MyAnimeList. We have been banned a few times (too many connections per second), our server load went through the roof hundreds of times, and the update scripts just kept crashing.
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The main dish
There are times when you know something has to go, even though you don't really want to part.
MALgraph will shut down in about 45 days.
It became too much to maintain for a team of two people busy with their lives. The recent database corruption simply confirmed the fact that MALgraph has become too large for us to keep it alive.
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The near future
Starting today, a header text will be shown on all pages, notifying of the incoming closure. The page will work just as it did, but we won't be fixing any database malfunctions.
On May 1st, the queue will be stopped. This means users won't be able to refresh their profiles, nor any media data will update.
The page will be in read-only mode for a month, and will cease functioning completely on June 1st.
If you're using any images directly from mal.oko.im (e.g. exported rating stats or achievement badges), these will expire as well. Please re-host the images somewhere if you don't want to lose them.
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Afterword
The above only concerns the official version, available at mal.oko.im. MALgraph's
code on GitHub will stay open source, under the GPL license. This means you can derive off its code, but it has to be open source as well, with the same license. We love open software.
We'd like to thank all of you, especially those who contributed to the project - be it suggestions, bug reports, or pull requests, it was all great. MALgraph wouldn't exist without you! Also, big thanks to MAL staff for letting us feed off their database for so long. MALgraph wouldn't exist without you either!
Maybe some day MAL will make its own stats gallery, or one of you will host their awesome fork of the code, with more achievements and features? If you're interested, head here to read how to do it:
https://github.com/rr-/malgraph4/wiki/Hosting-your-own-MALgraph . Read the bottom of this post for a list of known forks.
Thank you!
rr- and
fri
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Known public forks
http://graph.anime.sc/ (maintained by
Deividas)
