Addressing recent issues with the website and API

admin

Why are you not updating the countries?
As many of you are aware we have not been updating our countries as often as usual. This is due to new anti-scraping tools put in place by Netflix which basically ban our accounts if we are too aggressive when pulling data. In addition, we have had to rewrite our entire back end in order to get around additional measures Netflix have put in place.

What does this mean for the service moving forward?
We have now had to reduced the number of countries we are pulling information for from 36 down to 18 (see below). Although this number may increase in the future, after some trial and error its the amount we can pull and keep thing updated ~ every 24 hours. Moving forward we will continue to try and find ways to add new countries but at the moment this is all we can manage.

Where are we now?
We have what we believe is a stable tool which can pull information but we are keeping an eye on it and fixing bugs as they become apparent. We are trying to run the tool at least once every 24 hours but this may or may not be enough time to cover all countries, so please be patient.

We apologise for any issues this causes you!

Kind Regards,
-Admin

mshiels

I was just going to post on this since I looked and I swore last night there was 36, and now 1/2, I can imagine the nightmares involved. I was about to post a bunch of questions on Belgium and others, since the data seemed very stale,, everyhting i tried to search for was not there once I looked. Good luck!!

bummer :(
I'm sure you selected the remaining supported countries by their usage statistics,
but i am surprised Iceland (population 300k) was more used than Lithuania (whos data was accurate also for Estonia & i guess Latvia - 6million all together)

Oren

Can you distribute the scraping between many machines to make it less easy to detect? I think you could get help from users to do this. I'd be happy to volunteer to run a unogs client to scrape Israeli Netflix, and I'm sure many others would too.

admin

@Oren its a good idea and something I have been thinking about... the real issue is trust... by allowing other folks to run the tools they will basically have write access to the database meaning a bad actor could torpedo the entire endeavour

I believe you are already scraping using "many machines," if you use virtual private servers already. The only benefit in that would be to distribute the scraping between many users - and not machines. The biggest downside with that would be sharing the code between the users. They could then start their competing services using your codebase.

admin

Yeah the challenge is that right now scraping 2 different countries at the same time with the same ID causes them to block that account for 2 days...

As I'm in the UK it is difficult for me to get more than a couple of accounts outside the EU which we need to accurately pull data from inside Europe.

I guess what we could do is open source the script and then have people submit the output for processing, just difficult to know the right approach...

Couldn't you register more accounts using a VPN? Netflix only blocks watching content, not accessing their site. What I'm afraid is that open-sourcing the script would allow Netflix to inspect its internals and build stronger barriers.

Does anybody know an alternative way of keeping up to date with Netflix? I'm Polish and checked this website a few times a week, but it seems I'm SOL now.

admin

we are adding Poland back in the next couple days...
Poland
Lithuania
and Russia

Noooo! You were my source of information for Mexico.
Hope it can come back soon

admin

we need to see how the pulls go... we will add countries as and when we can

I appreciate that you are having issues and I hope you get them resolved soon. I do wonder though ... Canada is on the list of supported countries, and there are 6 new videos added this week under Canada, however there are NO expiring videos for Canada. While I am sure this is possible, it does seem very unlikely. Which makes me think something's gone amuck with the Canada database. Possibly others? Hopefully you can have a look and get it fixed quick. Thanks!

admin

If you run across a title in Canada that should be expiring and we are not showing it, please let us know so we can hunt down why its not showing up.

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Thanks for considering adding Lithuania to the list!

admin

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that why its not belgium, hope will resolve soon, dont forget us ^^