We created the discord server to hopefully encourage collaboration between all our members, and the initial reaction is encouraging, we have already had over 100 people join the server (though not necessarily stick around for long). People may have seen that the activity section is currently disabled, that is because the database is struggling to cope at the moment.  The good news is there is a dedicated activity channel on the discord server.  It has image uploads, approvals and denials. The big change is that denial reasons are publicly visible, we have had questions about this so I’ll try to …
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As some of you might know, trakt.tv is set to remove images from their API results at the end of October. This is intended to reduce their bandwidth by around 850TB/mo. As a result of this change, fanart.tv’s bandwidth is set to massively increase as some developers start using us to provide images instead. This has already started, and in just the last 5 days our bandwidth has doubled. We are currently at about 60-70% capacity, which means it’s likely we are going to need to upgrade some of our infrastructure. If you are in a position to help us …
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We have been having issues with people receiving emails recently.  It hasn’t affected everyone, but enough people that we have changed how emails are sent. If you have signed up for an account recently but never received your confirmation email, choosing “Forgot Password” should now allow you to reset your password. New signups should work fine.

When looking for the best Usenet provider I soon realised it was harder than it sounded.  In this post I detail what I think is the perfect Usenet setup, certainly for my needs and I hope yours as well.  I spent a lot of time researching different providers to come up with what I think is the best value option. Some Background I was a Giganews Diamond customer for years, and while I was generally fairly happy with it, I decided to look into whether it was possible to have a more robust setup, for less money, and boy, was …
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We were recently contacted by Cloudflare and told we were on the wrong package for the amount of bandwidth we were using (and the type of content we were caching, mainly images from the API assets) and that we should move to the enterprise plan for $2000/mo. Of course, this is more than a couple of years of donations so wasn’t remotely feasible, which prompted me to set up a varnish server to handle the asset requests. This was deployed nearly 2 weeks ago and has mostly been working perfectly, however there were a couple of teething problems and some continuing …
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With AlbumArtExchange’s policy of blocking entire countries from using its database, fanart.tv has been touted by some as a viable alternative to AlbumArtExchange for album covers. We have some very different goals from AlbumArtExchange though, they allow the same image at different resolutions, whereas we believe this is wasteful and only allow high quality images at a single high resolution of 1000 x 1000px. As well as a single image size, all our images go through a moderation process to ensure only the highest quality images are available, so while we might not have the sheer quantity, we believe we …
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About 5 months ago we added a Contributor statistics section, but other than a brief mention in a newsletter at the time we haven’t really explained what it is, how it’s used, and how to earn points. Firstly, don’t take it too seriously, we added it to create some friendly rivalry, and hopefully encourage people to become more involved in the site as well as giving people identifiable objectives to achieve. Submitting images The first and probably most important way to earn points is by contributing artwork.  The key on the contributor statistics page shows how many points are awarded …
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With the launch of v3 of the API we also introduced the concept of personal API keys, but it seems we never really posted anywhere why we added them or the benefits of using a personal API key. There were a couple of reasons for adding personal API keys, the first was to try and help with our problem of obscurity, last year our API was used nearly 2 billion times, but 99.9% of end users using our service will never have heard of us. Some well meaning developers make their end users get their own API key to use, …
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Here is a round up of where the top 10 API requests came from in 2014 CouchPotato – 644,082,434 requests Artwork Downloader (XBMC plugin) – 209,834,813 requests XBMC – 206,617,136 requests MusicBee – 165,351,915 requests Media Browser – 135,124,989 requests MovingPictures (MediaPortal plugin) – 60,223,256 requests Bandtrace – 52,950,673 requests Media Center Master – 24,659,996 requests AlbumArtDownloader – 19,843,007 requests Mediaportal – 17,100,273 requests Just missing out on the top 10 were drimpal and Artist Slideshow with 13,449,252 and 10,704,100 requests respectively. Overall we had 1,720,436,424 requests in 2014. You can compare these results to last years list here. If you are inspired to create your …
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We know adverts are annoying, but for websites offering free services and without a sponsor, they are a very important part of keeping that service running. On the other hand a lot of our users already help us in other ways, so to thank them we will be giving users the ability to turn off ads if they match one of the following conditions. VIP Anyone with an active VIP membership should not see ads. Moderators Moderators do a hard and thankless job, this is just a small thing we can do to say thank you. Contributors Anyone who has …
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