Adv. Search - Release Year ->search multiple years [track

[Animal4890]

hello to AniDB and all of its staff. Thankyou all for making this wonderful website available.

While searching for my next anime to watch I ran across a problem in the Advanced Search section. I was unable to search multiple years in the Release Year textbox. I think this ability to be quite important with how lacking I found many of the 2004 anime to be. Therefore, I wanted to search a range of years instead of just exact strings.

what's available now:
As said on the Adv. Search page "(note: currently exact string match)".

my request:
Please allow users to be able to search through a range of years. Also, another nice addition would be to allow specific, seperate years.
Here are some example queries:
"1995-2001"
"1980,2002,2004"
"1979-1988,1998,2000-2001,2003"

There is the ambiguity of the "-" symbol. Pehraps a different symbol could be used to represent a range. Like this:
"1999:2001"
"1990:1992,1999,2000:2002,2004"

This would probably mean you could not include the anime that are released over many years as a range value. So, this might not work:
"1988:1990-1991"
but this would work:
"1988:1990,1990-1991"


final note: One way that might make this easier would be to adjust the anime table in the database. Instead of just a "Release Year" column, you could have a "Release Year" column in conjunction with a "Conclusion Year" column. This would remove all of those "2000-2002" entries that are creating this sorting problem.

[Rar]

Function in PetriW's client already, it's very useful. I'm collecting all mecha anime from 1975-1985 at the moment.

Rar