February 2025 Update
Monthly Statistics
During February the Metron Project added the following to its database:
- Users: 51
- Issues: 2,674
- Creators: 526
- Characters: 879
Thanks to everyone that contributed!
Recent Work
One of my goals for 2025 was to make the project less dependent on me, and for most of this month I've been working on the tooling to allowing some users to use the POST API to add comics to the database. This will allow other folks to handle requests to add series to Metron. With luck, I should finish next month, and I'll start looking at what users to promote.
Comic Book Reading Lists
Recently, I've been looking at Comic Book Reading Lists since a bug report was opened to add support for generating them. Currently, users use CBL's that are imported into their comic server of choice (Kavita, Codex, etc.), which seems non-optimal primarily since, in essence, it's another database of information. Now, this makes sense, since for a long time the only source of usable data via an API was Comic Vine, which hasn't had a developer presence in years, and having a new feature added to their site is extremely unlikely.
I think a better solution would be for the other databases that offer an API (GCD & Metron) to have the option for users to create reading lists (similar to MovieDB) and have that data available either by generating a file or through an API call. Now, to do this we would need to work with the comic server developers to determine exactly what data they would need, though it would probably look similar to this:
{
"arc": {
"name": "Foo Bar Wars"
}
"issues": {
"issue": {
"id": {
"cv_id": 9999
"metron": 5678
"gcd": 9856
}
"index": 0
}
"issue": {
"id": {
"cv_id": 12345
"metron": 9999
"gcd": 123
}
"index": 1
}
}
}
The current standard (CBL) and the recent json-cbl-standard contains a look of information that I can't see a comic server needing, primarily all the series-level info which the comic servers should already have in their databases. Of course, I'd love to hear from any developer in this space to verify that.
Once the basic functionality was added, importing any existing CBL into GCD or Metron should be fairly trivial, since Metron links other sites issue id's (GCD would be able to use Metron's API to link since they don't track this information).
Anyway, those are some of my quick thoughts on what the future of Comic Book Reading Lists could look like, and if anyone has interest in working on this potential future project, contact me on GitHub or Matrix.
Rate Limiting
One thing I've been debating is whether to modify our Rate Limiting policy. The primary reason for this is there are a lot of user that hammer the API for 24+ hours straight for days on end, and I'm contemplating adding a total number of API hits per day (maybe something like 10,000) in addition to the 30/hour to ease the server load.
Now doing this will make it a bit harder implement to write software for the API since the developer will need to track the API rate between sessions, but there are libraries like pyrate-limiter which use a SQLite or Redis backend to make this easier to implement.
Anyway, this is something I'm just mulling over and if you want to weigh-in you can on Matrix or in a GitHub Discussion.
OpenCollective
We've recently set up an account at Open Collective if you wish to help defray the server costs and help with increasing future server capacity. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Anyway, that's all I got for this month. Take care!