i am running into an unusual issue with the MyAnimeList.net agent. it is no longer selectable as an agent in my agents list. i went through stopping my plex, removing the bundle from my plugins, re-launching plex. then stopping it again and adding the latest version of the bundle folder back into my plugins and re-launching again. it does not come up as selectable or searchable from. however the TheTVDB agent seems to be working in the interim. i am wondering what i might be doing wrong and if i have to do a complete reinstall of plex for this to be resolved.
Hi, it does not work for me, the MAL agent does not appear in Plex. Several of my Animes are not appearing and some of them do not have an art or data. I installed BABS and switched to it but that made no difference at all.
Iâm having the same issue, is it only recently? Maybe I can try downgrading
Sorry for getting back to you that late, unfortunately, I didnât get a notification that someone wrote something in this threadâŠ
To your problems.
Plex needs to have access to the Agent to be able to load it. This seems to be a problem mainly on Linux systems but I also had reports that this happens on Windows. On Linux, this is fixed quickly by changing the owner and file permissions, on my system the file permission is 755. So check if the owner and the file permissions are set correctly. On windows machines I have not figured out why this is happening or how it could be fixed, personally, I run a Linux machine but even when I had plex running on windows this problem never came to the surface. Another thing is that those who reported the problem never got back to me on if and how they fixed it.
Check the plex logs to see if the Agent is being loaded at all.
To the âare not appearingâ problem. If you have Anime on your filesystem and are not listed in your library then this can be the cause of multiple reasons. The Scanner is responsible to add your media files on your file system into your library. If you are missing library entries then check the naming convention of those files because they could just be named incorrectly so that the scanner is not able to pick them up.
If they do get added but donât receive any metadata then this too can be the cause of multiple things. The agent relies on having a clear title to work with and that can be found on myanimelist, the closer this title is to the title on myanimelist the better. This means that if the scanner (and he does) removes or replaces characters from the title the chance to get a match will be lower.
With the latest version I implemented a different matching algorithm that creates a much more accurate matching but the more differences there are between the title and what you are actually looking for the matching score will be a lot lower than before. I implemented this to prevent miss matches like K-on!! being matched as K-on! and merging those two shows.
And this leads me to the next point, merged shows. If the Title of the show is getting changed by the scanner the agent could potentially find a prequel/sequel show and add them to this show but those should be outlier situations (if you follow the naming convention of plex and myanimelist) then even minor differences (like a few different characters) should already lead to a low matchscore below 80%
All those things are also mentioned in the FAQ https://github.com/Fribb/MyAnimeList.bundle/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Questions
All versions are listed on the same page from where you get the newest version as well. However, I switched to a different backed with the version 6.0.0 and cancelled the old backend used for 5.X which means that you wouldnât get any metadata at all.
And last but not least, I can do very little other than reiterate what others have asked already and I have listed and answered in the FAQ on the github wiki page (linked above) if you donât post log files. I donât know how your server is configured or what is going on, on your end. So if you submit a report, please, attach log files.
Hi, Iâve been using the agent pretty much since its beginning and I thank you for that. In the past I was using myanimelist for the tracking as well as the agent for the metadata and everything was good and fine. Fast forward a few years when Mal became a total mess because its API went down. People relying on it (dev and users) started to move away from it, to go to Anilist.co or kitsu.io which from what Iâve understood offer both usable and accessible API. I personally opted for anilist which I find way way slicker than mal for my tracking and I donât regret my migration at all. Now my question: why arenât you moving away from mal for the agent? Wouldnât it be much easier for you (and maybe for us)? Thanks again for your hard work 
I asked myself this question all the time.
I started this agent because I wanted to use it with myanimelist solely for my own use. Anilist was the biggest and IIRC the only real contender back then to MAL but it was just too much for me at that time. I shared the agent because I thought that someone might find it useful as well. I never expected that there were so many who used it.
And at the moment I think I keep it alive mainly because of you who still use it and because of the pride I have in it. I donât know but moving away from it wouldnât sit right with me and telling someone that this is not maintained anymore wouldnât let me sleep well.
Also it is not that I drown in things I would want to expand the agent with. Maybe adding collections and VAs to the metadata but I hadnât any requests in that direction yet. The capabilities of what MAL provides is really limited.
What is left to say. Thanks for using it and I will think about any request that you guys and girls might want to have.
And last but not least my whole library is based on MAL, moving to another service would mean I need to do some changes and Iâm really lazy in that regard 
Thatâs a bummer but I understand 
if someday you make the switch and come with an Anilist agent, let me know 
I have never heard of Anilist, and mainly used MAL because it also let me track my views. I have been secretly hoping you would add a sync that let us sync our last watch with MAL episode counts/ MAL tracker of number downloaded etc.
If you did move to Anilist, since you never incorporated the MAL personal tracking stuff, I wouldnât mind and I would move to Anilist with you. - I did just finish renaming my folders based off MAL, but I would do what I needed to.
If you are taking requests I would ask for:
- ability to better track sequels with their own MAL page as a collection or sync season 2 to the season descriptions
- Ability to sync a list of what anime I have/ have watched to MAL or similar tool.
- Ability to export a list/ csv that shows folder name, plex name and MAL match columns so I can verify that everything matched correctly and didnât double match season 2+ against wrong other seasons.
You shared previously that the MAL setup makes what I listed below difficult, so this is why at least my vote would be if you could do better, easier for you, with a different service, I would follow to that new service. (Not sure if there is a way for you to ask your user base to vote or anything like that if your big concern is leaving people unsupported)
Trying to say, I love your work. Thank you for the agent.
@Fribbtastic Thank you again for all your help and for maintaining this integration with MAL.
I wanted to ask if there are any issues with the API right now? I just went through and added a number of titles and renamed their directories to match MAL and they are matching but not downloading meta data.
I can share content examples or logs if that would help. Let me know.
It appears Natsume Yuujinchou series are all being merged into one entry by the match. Specific series are not being listed and instead it only lists âNatsumeâs Book of Friendsâ when it should instead list individual seasons:
Natsume Yuujinchou
Natsume Yuujinchou Go
Natsume Yuujinchou Roku
Natsume Yuujinchou San
Natsume Yuujinchou Shi
Syncing to MAL:
I have already plans for this, a Tautulli script that runs when you set the âwatchedâ status on an anime in your library. I have not tested the update function on my API yet explicitly but since the official API is down which I expect my API to rely on this will be a hard nut to crack if not being impossible to solve right now. Implementing this through an adapter for the UI would be a nightmare.
Mismatches and merged content:
What you can try first is to trigger a show search and see how the search results are listed. In this case, I think it is most likely that the Titles are too similar in which even my updated matcher isnât helping. Like the same problem with K-on! and K-on!!.
I just did a quick manual search on the API with Natsume Yuujinchou Go and it looks okay.
Link me to the logs so that I can take a look.
@Fribbtastic I was able to find the ones that had merged matches by filtering the library by episode and then duplicates. PITA but it worked. Then I was able to split the ones that were merged. So I think I have it fixed for now. Still a few that havenât downloaded any meta data, but I will rematch them, reboot, and see how that goes before I take your time with logs. At the moment my Anime TV library is looking good but meta data is for the most part not downloading for the movie library. I will post back here an update later.
Regarding the Tautulli script, I would be happy to help you test it once you are ready/ the API is working.
You could also try using different names for the media files like the alternative or the English titles available on MyAnimeList.
Iâm a little late to the party, but I would also like to express my utmost appreciation for the work youâve done here! Youâve saved me countless hours, no, DAYS, of manually entering information for my anime that doesnât appear on the TVDB. Keep it up, friend!
@Fribbtastic it appears as though the Movies library canât download any meta data when I use your agent. It is pairing correctly/ finding matches but never downloads meta data.
What logs can I upload to you or what steps can I do to further troubleshoot this? Changing the title names to English names or alt names doesnât seem to help.
the first thing I would do is to clear the cache of Plex and then try again. It could be that plex cached empty requests and then not refreshing them because the cache has not expired yet.
If that doesnât work then look in your plex Folder, Logs -> PMS Plugin Logs and then net.fribbtastic.coding.plex.myanimelist.log and upload it somewhere.
I attempted clearing the cache per instructions here:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202967376-clearing-plugin-channel-agent-http-caches/
Since I am running FreeNAS I cleared this directory:
/mnt/JailsVolume/iocage/jails/plex/root/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Caches/net.fribbtastic.coding.plex.myanimelist
I was still having issues with that library having titles matched to things that are not the folder names and still not pulling correct data so I deleted the library and re-scanned.
I will post back with an update later
also try to clean your bundles.
So I cleared the cache, recreated the library, cleaned the bundles, emptied the trash, rescanned the files, optimized the database and hit refresh metadata. Plex did the little spinning thing over each Anime Movie and then moved on to the next one without downloading any meta data or poster data.
The Library is set to /media/Anime Movies/
As an example * /media/Anime Movies/Byousoku 5 Centimeter/5_centimeters_per_second[1904x1072.h264.flac][niizk].mkv was matched by plex as â5 Centimeters Per Secondâ and downloaded no data.
similarly Colorful (Movie)/Colorful.mkv matched to Colorful but pulled no data.
Oddly everything seems to be working fine in my TV show Anime Library, and my non-anime libraries seem to be working fine.
I also tried manually matching movies and they match but again donât download any data.
I have zipped the logs you asked for and uploaded them to https://www.dropbox.com/s/nvorxhuidasa7f9/Logs.7z?dl=0
Are there any other things can I do to test this?
Are there any other things can I do to test this?
Nope, now itâs my turn
there was already a critical error at the end of the logs you uploaded so I have to dig through the agent and find out why.
Edit: and by the way, 5 centimeters per second is getting found but the Match Score is 53%. Plex will only select a match on its own when it is over 80%
