Suggestion - Create a backend to inject reviews back into crunchyroll

[hstr0100]

Hello,

I am a backend developer and I couldn't help but notice this extension could benefit a lot from integrating more than just a comment section back into the website. I have an idea on how to integrate reviews back into Crunchyroll, and I'm hoping sharing it could aid the efforts in restoring that functionality as I don't have time to work on it myself.

So, the way I have in mind, would be to create a database linking particular shows on Crunchyroll to their equivalent MAL entries (or a similar website, MAL is an option). for example:
https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/G9VHN9P43/horimiya -> https://myanimelist.net/anime/42897/Horimiya
This is, in my opinion, the most complicated part as there are a lot of shows on crunchyroll.

Next, since there is no API to deal with reviews on MAL, we would instead write a simple web crawling bot to fetch, parse and weight each review from MAL's review page for that show and store it into a database, this could easily be done using Java's htmlunit, and be set to run once or twice a day for every show on the server side (just make sure to keep track of usernames for updates, each person can only post one review per show, so, that can be used as a filter).
this method would avoid having CORS issues that would arise from using iframes instead.

Then, we would create a public-facing REST API on AWS or similar service, exposing the reviews to the client extensions.
You could use the archived version of Crunchyroll to copy the layout used for reviews, and read from the API to inject it back into the website via the extension.

Now, instead of having a text box where users can write their own reviews, you'd include a link to where to post one in the MAL website. the user will have their review visible to the extension after it goes through moderation and the crawler fetches it.

I'm not sure whether it breaks MAL's tos to follow this method, but it's an effective way to restore such convenient functionality.
And if it does break tos, I'm assuming you could at least fetch archived reviews from Web Archive and serve those instead, or display both.

Also, although far more complicated when it comes to linking each episode to a 3rd party discussion page, if you can think of a way of automating that part, you could probably also use a similar method to deal with comments in addition of integrating DISQUS. that way it won't have to start from a blank slate.

And that's about it. I'm sure such functionality would be a great addition to this extension if you can pull it off.
Cheers

[NeonGamerBot-QK]

It would be pretty hard to do this since you would have to add something that says it’s scraped and not user made from the extension