What do you want to see out of an anime community site?

[Kyuusai]

Now, while I'm soliciting opinions here, I'm NOT talking about a forum or tracker system like our beloved AS. I'm referring to the very broad category of anime community sites as a whole.

Recently being inspired by some technical things, I pondered on building some sort of information-aggregation-meets-community-input site for the Japanese-pop-culture community. A site where information on a show or comic could be researched and immediately linked to related productions, products, or release calendars, and, of course, community interaction.

Then I remembered that there are several sites that already do that.

Their approach is different than what I'd like to do, though. Sites like, oh, animenewsnetwork.com are very top-down in their approach. It's very much a provider/consumer relationship. They have deals with not just advertisers but production companies. That can do a lot of good for the community. I used to be a developer, admin, and journalist for a video game review site years ago, so I can understand, respect and appreciate that sort of production.

However, I think that the recent advances of the Way Things Can Be Done on the internet means that there is room for similar sites, but ones that are more "bottom-up" community driven, that don't necessarily focus on content on the site itself but can give equal focus to content off the site, and ones that can spread their wings a bit more without entangling business relationships, since now more varied (and frequently less intrusive) revenue options to support the site are available.

I'm NOT making any site announcements in the here or now. Not only am I a long way from that point, I'm not even sure it would be appropriate to do on this forum.
What I am doing is asking "What do you want out of an anime-related community site?"
What do other sites do well, or what do other sites do poorly that you WISH they would do well? Is there some feature you've wished for on these sites that no one's ever provided?

I figure that even if my plans were to fail, it would make for interesting conversation, and any ideas could potentially benefit the community in the future outside the scope of my own ideas. What say you folk?

[sothis]

as someone who runs a large community-based anime site, i can tell you that there really are a LOT out there that do this sort of a thing. i'm not saying this due to my own site ownership, but imo you'd have far more success joining hands with one of the multitudes already out there, than recreating the wheel for a billionth time

personally, for my own site, the values i work towards the most (which i don't see in many other sites) are reliable and high quality content, and dynamic information that users can customize and work with.

[Furuno]

Well as a freelance web designer/programmer who enjoys anime very much, if i would build an anime site, features i'd like to include exxept tracker and forum would be something like this:

A comprehensive anime database
Comprehensive and detailed database of all anime ever been made in this world would be my first goal. Of course participant of all members all needed to complete this seem to be never ending list.

Rating system and reviews
This is a very good features that will help someone if they should or shouldn't watch some particular anime.

Multimedia content
Something like wallpaper, winamp skins, audio, video, etc... Pretty much self explanatory

Chat room
An active chat room would be interesting. I've pretty much seen empty chatrooms. This can be either on IRC or using chat applet.

Mobile access
Being able to access your favourite anime community via your mobile phone would be very interesting, i think. And i haven't see anime community with this (at least from what i've seen).

But of course all that things would probably ended up being need of HUGE server storage and MASSIVE bandwith...

[Kyuusai]

Originally Posted by sothis

as someone who runs a large community-based anime site, i can tell you that there really are a LOT out there that do this sort of a thing. i'm not saying this due to my own site ownership, but imo you'd have far more success joining hands with one of the multitudes already out there, than recreating the wheel for a billionth time

personally, for my own site, the values i work towards the most (which i don't see in many other sites) are reliable and high quality content, and dynamic information that users can customize and work with.

Trust me, I know what you mean.

The things I'm working on cover a bit more, though. You really hit on my vision when you said "dynamic information that users can customize and work with".

The particular things I want to focus on are exactly along those lines. While some sites sites already do some of these things, I have some different directions I want to go in that I'm fairly certain are unique and that would require a "ground up" approach. It's not that I want to duplicate the work of others, but in some cases I'd have to in order for what I'm building to be of any use.

Just a comment on your site: Your recommendation database is an excellent example of the concept in practice. The design helps it to work very well, too.

@furuno:

Most of those are things are actually things that other sites already do very, very well, so I'm not sure they should be my focus, but several will have to be part of the site, just because of the need for a base for other, more innovative things to be built upon. The database is an excellent example of that: AniDB has a great community database that needs no more imitators, but I can't do unique things with the data without actually having the data. I'm really hoping I can find some one to leech off of to populate the initial database of titles.

The mobile phone integration is something I hadn't considered. I've actually worked on plans for other projects to integrate mobile access and updates to mobile phones. I think browsers on mobile phones have just about caught up so that mobile access generally doesn't require much but a streamlined site. Updates are another matter, although most mobile providers have an email address associated with their phone, negating the need for any special integration with mobile providers.

While I'm not sure if mobile phone integration would really be any sort of in-demand feature... I *do* need to keep those sorts of updates in mind as I'm designing the site code, though. I'm glad you mentioned it.

[sothis]

100% understand, definitely. when i first built the anirec my goal was to JUST keep it with things that are unique: the recommendations. for example, i wanted to bunch related series together instead of splitting them up by season, etc. but demand dictated i start gathering more info. so yeah, 100% understand wanting to do something unique, as that's the main way a site can succeed

(and thank you for your kind words! ^_^)

only other thing i tackled that counts as that category is the vendors (aka anime stores) list, which is down while i re-code it. if you have unique ideas that haven't been done yet, definitely run with that and you'll succeed ^_^