Skip to main content

February 2024 Update

· 2 min read
Brian Pepple
Brian Pepple
Founder of the Metron Project / Code Monkey

Monthly statistics

During February the Metron Project had a total of 5,635 issues added to its database during February bring the total number of issues to 112,135. We also had 65 new users join.

ComicTagger

Recently comictagger released the metron_talker plugin, but unfortunately it's got a few design flaws that is generating 2-4 times the number of API calls compared to other clients, and it's also downloading the cover for each issue, instead of using the issue's cover_hash exposed by the Metron API. The developers are working on addressing these issues, but if you are planning to tag a large number of comics we would appreciate it if you waited for a new release or use Metron-Tagger in the interim.

Server News

With the server load increase due to the comictagger bug, I've gone ahead and increased the CPU and RAM for the server and with any luck users shouldn't see a decrease in server quality of service.

Metron-Tagger

AJ Slater recently released a new library (comicfn2dict) for parsing comic filenames, and since the code for handling that in darkseid was fairly old and crusty it seemed like a good time to do a little work on Metron-Tagger. Some of the changes are as follows:

  • comicfn2dict

    So, I switched over to using comicfn2dict for filename parsing, and did some testing on around 1,000 or so comics. Overall, it's performed as well as the old code and has the added benefit of being used by multiple projects.

  • Improved Matching

    Spent some time improving comic matching by implementing the following changes:

    • Only use the series name and issue number when querying Metron. By doing this we are likely to get a result from Metron. Also, we are striping out any special characters (like ,, -, or &) from the series name.
    • Use the cover hash from Metron to verify the issue is correct, otherwise we'll ask the user for help.
    • Use existing ComicInfo.xml for matching. If a comic has already been tagged by comictagger (or Metron-Tagger) and has information to help identify the issue (like the Comic Vine ID), we'll use that before using the filename.

Miscellaneous

Right now, I'm thinking about making some changes to the API (like adding versioning), and if I do I'll ask the community for any suggestions of changes they'd like to see.