Looking for feedback

[Vanargand0002]

Hello everyone
I am looking for feedback and ideas for an desktop app I have written for F95. It's entirely based on the public undocumented API behind the Latest Updates page. I decided to make this post since I plan to release a beta in the coming time (not sure when tho, real life is unpredictable) and wanted to get the general vibe for such a thing and maybe some inspiration for the future at the same time I want to share the current state and whats planned till first release and what I have planned for after that at the moment.

The current design can be seen in the attachments.

Current State

• Home page with recently updated as well as best rated and most liked games display
• Search for Games, Comics, Animations and Assets
  • Automatic update of database entries if the database is enabled in settings as well as adding to watched games to watch list.
• Watchlist for Games
• Basic Library
• Basic Settings
  • Automatic adding of watched games to the watchlist if the token/cookie is specified in settings when you update the database.

Planned Till 1st Release

• Adding prefix filtering/search support
• Better prefix support for the game cards
• Extend tag support for assets
• Watchlist search and filter support
• Watchlist clear functionality
• Better database progress log in settings
• Editing games in Library
• (Maybe) Sort Functionalities for all results
• Designing an actually usable icon

Planned Afterwards

• Adding games to library from game card (for now planned without actually downloading the game)
• Rework Library and Watchlist partly (For support of assets, animations,...)
• (Maybe) Rework of search bar in search
• Different themes + if possible custom themes
• (Maybe) In App "Notification" for updated games in watchlist

Thank you for reading till this point, I hope that this information with the attached screenshots is enough to give some feedback and maybe some ideas what else might be cool to add. To answer a common question/suggestion on these kind of threads, for the time being I don't plan to go open source with this, but its not something I dont want to do, but at the moment I don't think most people would like to work on the kind of codebase I have written for this.

Some Additional Information:
This application is based on tauri and uses rust in the backend and svelte (so HTML, JS, CSS) in the frontend. It doesn't do any connection to the internet except for the F95Zone Search API mentioned at the start of this post. The token in the settings page is the cookie you send as header in the request to the API, if I release this I will add an tutorial how to get this cookie, but this code is never shared and only used in the requests to the Search API.

Good luck have fun and thanks for reading and (hopefully) the feedback you can give me

 

[osanaiko]

Looks cool. There have been a few of these created over the time I've been a f95 user. At least one was banned as it was placing excessive load on the servers. I'm not involved as a site admin, but from memory I think its only allowed to do this if you access via a logged in f95 user account, so the admins can monitor and block if needed.

 

[Vanargand0002]

Looks cool. There have been a few of these created over the time I've been a f95 user. At least one was banned as it was placing excessive load on the servers. I'm not involved as a site admin, but from memory I think its only allowed to do this if you access via a logged in f95 user account, so the admins can monitor and block if needed.

Well thank you for your reply The thing with the excessive server load can definitely be a problem and I have already thought about it before and also asked on the F95 discord if something like this might be okay, sadly without any answer on the topic. So I already implemented multiple things so I don't have to put so much strain on the server, including caching for results that likely won't update often (Popular by rating and likes has a cache file that will only update after 280.000 seconds (a little more than 3 days)). And the watchlist only works fully when you have updated the database, which is a big strain on the F95 API once (since we basically clone the API information into a local database) and afterwards shouldn't have to be fully updated since it updates the local database while searching the live API, but this could be fixed by having a single database that you just fetch, for security reasons I decided against it for the time being tho.

I haven't looked into authenticating the actual account in any way other than there cookie till now (the cookie should tell the API server exactly which user it is tho, and also auto bans you from the API for a certain time after sending too many requests). Found it personally quite weird that I was able to search as anonymous user using the API (when no cookie was specified) but not the Latest Updates page. If an artificial block is needed that is actually not a big problem, since I can force that the cookie/token has to be added on startup and would only need to find a way to check if its valid. But if it needs an artificial blockage this also means that Open Source wont ever be possible in the future since ofc every artificial block I make in code could be changed and removed then.

If by any chance you can lead me in the right direction to contacting someone that can tell me how much strain is fine/what else I might need to take into account to not get problems with the admins the help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[osanaiko]

If you need to talk to a mod/admin about it I would make a post in like the
"https://f95zone.to/forums/features-request.13/" subforum or similar and maybe Report it so the mods address it.

I recall a discussion about the reason that the latest updates is blocked for non-logged in users: there were some parasite websites republishing the info to promote their own paid game downloads.

 

[Vanargand0002]

If you need to talk to a mod/admin about it I would make a post in like the
"https://f95zone.to/forums/features-request.13/" subforum or similar and maybe Report it so the mods address it.

I recall a discussion about the reason that the latest updates is blocked for non-logged in users: there were some parasite websites republishing the info to promote their own paid game downloads.

Thet makes a lot of sense. I will try to reach one of the mods/admins in the coming days I guess, thanks for the information for now

 

[spamblah]

How is this going? I was looking into making something similar but with python. I have only just started though.

Is there a f95 api?

 

[osanaiko]

How is this going? I was looking into making something similar but with python. I have only just started though.

Is there a f95 api?

There is no official public api. The website frontend does use "api" web requests to get info for stuff like latest releases, and it is my understanding that these various "apps" basically reverse engineer those calls to get the data.

Unless you are keen just to challenge the dev task for it's own sake, before you jump into making "yet another tool", check out this one: https://f95zone.to/threads/f95checker-willyjl.44173/

 

[spamblah]

There is no official public api. The website frontend does use "api" web requests to get info for stuff like latest releases, and it is my understanding that these various "apps" basically reverse engineer those calls to get the data.

Unless you are keen just to challenge the dev task for it's own sake, before you jump into making "yet another tool", check out this one: https://f95zone.to/threads/f95checker-willyjl.44173/

Wow, nice. That looks great! Mine was gonna be different™, but this looks very well put together. Plus its python built for linux also, which is very nice. My plan was to reverse engineer as well, lol. But I was planning to cache all files and parse them on my system, then feed the curated data to a cloud server, then have the app download the data from that site to minimize traffic increase on this site where possible.

But basically I wanted mine to do pretty much what this does. Offer the game info/screenshots/download links/etc, and then manage the install of games, versions, mods, etc. Keep track of games I played to completion, etc.

But that all seems like too much work given this exists.

Thank you for the link!