CodeshareCataloguing anime is harder than it looks
One title has four names, three release orders and a film that is also episodes 12 to 14. Why the data behind a tracker is most of the work.
A tracker looks like a list of titles with progress against each. The list is the easy part. Deciding what counts as a title, and what counts as an episode of it, is where the work is.
Names
A single series routinely has an original title, a romanised title, an official English title and a completely different title in the region where it was licensed. Somebody searching will use whichever one they know, and all of them have to find the same entry.
Boundaries
Is a second season a separate entry or part of the first? Is a recap film a title, or is it episodes 12 to 14 in compressed form? Is a spin-off a sequel, a side story, or unrelated?
There is no correct answer, only a consistent one. The cost of inconsistency is that somebody's progress stops making sense — they finished a season and the tracker thinks they are 40% through something.
Order
Broadcast order, chronological order and recommended viewing order can all differ for the same show, and for some series the argument about which is correct is older than the site.
We store the relationships rather than pick a winner: this comes after that, this is a side story of that, this film covers these episodes. A viewing order becomes something derived rather than something hard-coded, and different opinions can coexist.
It never finishes
New seasons air, titles get renamed on licensing, entries are merged and split. The catalogue is not a dataset you build; it is one you keep.
In a tracker, the features are small and the data is the product.