Thanks, this is great feedback. I completely appreciate the issues you raise about timeliness and the barrier to creating posts.

As I have been getting more feedback, both in this thread and in PMs, I have been really torn on the issue of separating threads to a separate community. I think that the two solutions I am kicking around right now are to either:

1. Separate discussions back to a separate community and be either bot or user created. Not sure yet the details here, but it would let people that don't want to see discussion threads to stay subbed to this community without clogging up their feed with seasonal threads.
2. Keep discussions in this community, but only allow discussion threads to be posted by a single bot account. This lets users just block that user or all bots and they don't see the threads. Meanwhile, people that are interested in the discussion threads will see them.

A key part of this is that I have an upgraded version of shinobu that I have been working on and is pretty much ready to implement (it's been working well on a test instance I host). I am planning on letting this season run as-is, but plan to put the upgraded bot into use by next season in some form. Some key features I have tried to improve on over the current shinobu:

• It uses the AniList api to know exactly when a show airs. So, it will be much more reliable and prompt when it comes to timing of discussion thread posts (no more shows that just can't be found or are found days/weeks later randomly).
• It can keep track of the engagement with previous episodes. So, if a show isn't generating user engagement (upvotes/comments), it can stop posting threads for the show. I need to think of a process by which a show can be re-enabled, but this should help dramatically cut down the number of threads that languish with 0 comments.
• (Not fully implemented yet) A summary post that can be pinned to the community that has all the most recent discussion threads that have been made. This lets users go to one post and scan the list of shows and pick out the one they are looking for.

Another idea I had recently after this round of feedback was having a bot that parses any newly user-created threads to match it to a show/episode # to create a comment in that thread with the show information and past discussion links. That takes the burden off the post creator to keep track of all that. They would just need to follow some simple post title/body formatting so that the bot can parse it. It would basically be that the post title needs to have Episode # and then the AniList link to the show would need to be in the post body. That's it. The bot would make a comment that has all the past comment threads for the show as well as things like relevant links, alternative names, etc.