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How are you keeping track of anime?
There's a lot of anime and, from what I've experienced, people who are fans watch a lot of it. It's a daunting task to keep track of what you've seen, what you've thought of it, what to anticipate coming up, and discovering more that you might like.
What site, app, home-grown system are you using to organize your anime life?
I started out with Anime Planet. It had a friendly UI and included screenshots of the anime rather than just the title/promo shot (good for gauging style). At the time, I was most excited for the recommendation engine; in addition to the usual user recs, there was an algorithmically determined set of "if you liked this show, you might like" recommendations. For someone relatively new to anime, without too many friends who watched, that was extremely useful. After a while, I began to value algorithmic recs less and desire more information though. Add on the fact that I didn't know anyone else using AP and I decided to switch to...
Anidb. The UI is bit daunting, and the settings/customizations extensive, but it has everything you could want to know about anime. All of the info for a show, heavy and specific tagging, incredibly detailed relationship graphs (series, characters, etc.), and anything else you can think of. List management is similarly detailed, though it's easy enough to use it more simply. I was initially put off by the learning curve, but am very glad I stuck with it. I also have some friends on there, which is nice.
Sister sites AniList (for rating / logging, forums, reviews, listing favorites, discovery, etc.) and AniChart (for showing airing anime by season, airing times, etc.) are essentially what I rely on now. I use /r/anime and /a/ sometimes, but I find that both of those communities have gone downhill for what I care about as of late, so maybe ~anime will fill that spot.
For blogs, analysis, and journalism, I'm only really following AnimeFeminist nowadays (my other followed ones are mostly inactive), and not even that closely at the moment. The YouTube anime community used to be my main home for that kind of content, but I started having problems with several of the people who kept me there, and I still kinda have a void leftover from having dropped them.
I also run a Discord server for discussion of anime and such, but at the moment it's mostly just me posting screenshots from manga I'm reading, so not the most useful for keeping up with things.
I know it's been a month since you posted this - I switched to AniList when MAL went down and it's been a pleasure. I don't really mind which one I use, but AniList looks real nice and it telling you what anime you're not up to date on is quite useful. And it also works with Taiga and Tachiyomi, so I'm happy with my pick :-)
I use MyAnimeList, and on Android, the wonderful Anyme app, which integrates really well with MAL.
I track anime with Taiga, watch it with Plex and auto download from AnimeBytes (private tracker) with Deluge's YaRSS2 plugin.
Pretty comfy setup, everything is automated.
thanks, I hadn't heard of taiga. It looks like the radarr/sonarr for anime.
I just have a little "spreadsheet" in OneNote to keep track of the episodes watched and use Anichart to scout for new shows every season. Never got into any of the tracking websites or apps.
I never used anything to keep track, I tried re-entering all my watched anime on Animeplanet some time ago and I don't know know how much I did or didn't miss. For a long time my way of keeping track was simply leaving torrented episodes on an external hard disk, but eventually I started cleaning those out to make room for new episodes :P
I don't use something specific to anime but it helps with it; I use SeriesGuide, which can be found on f-droid on the IzzyOnDroid repo, and uses TheTVDB as its TV show info.
It lets me watch something and keep track of which shows/movies I'm watching or have been meaning to watch. Which is fantastic!
I started from MAL. Later I used Shikimori — it’s Muskovian alternative. But from a long time ago I am using AniDB. I didn’t have any big problem with changing, cause all mentioned sites have im/export.
I use Taiga to keep track of what I have watched/am watching/want to watch. It's a desktop app that syncs with a number of online profiles, and it can detect playing anime in your media player or streaming service of choice and automatically keep your list up to date for you.
I've fully switched over to AniList for everything. MAL shutting down so many services, and still not bringing them back has just made me loose any interest in them. I also use Taiga to update AniList automatically as I watch them using MPC-HC.