It’s pretty incredible how much change a single person can bring in such a short time…
The last couple of weeks were packed with action. Quick recap:
September 9: I start publishing drop notifications on X. They are limited to New and Awakened at the time.
September 11: I announce Solar Marine to the community (from my main account on X, in Facebook groups, etc.). Over the next few days, we quickly reach around 80 followers on X.
September 17: Mr. Choo starts the bogus products campaign to confuse the bot. It will continue until around Sep 26. Fortunately, a new version of the bot was ready, so I deployed it immediately to deal with it. Not only it’s great at filtering out fake products, but it also provides notifications about all changes, not just New and Awakened.
September 18 and 19: Mr. Choo posts polls about stealth drops vs. announcements.
September 25: Solar Marine starts sending sold-out notifications as well.
September 25: After around 10 days of trying to fight back, Mr. Choo finally stops the bogus item madness and starts the smear campaign instead. We’ve made the first change, though: official drop announcements are back, and stealth drops are no more!
October 2: Solar Marine becomes available on Telegram.
October 4: Inventory Tracker goes live.
October 6: Mr. Choo decides to “take things a step further by sharing […] online store data in JSON format. This allows developers to build applications using our product data without relying on website scraping.”
You can read the entire post from Mr. Choo on X. It’s very long and, unfortunately, quite dishonest and bordering on disinformation, which I feel I need to address again.
Making store data available for the benefit of community members
First of all, talking about store data available in JSON now feels like an obvious knee-jerk reaction to the Inventory Tracker and the fact that stock levels became readily available for everyone anyway, two days earlier. In my opinion, Mr. Choo’s announcement has little to do with making things easier for community members (like me). It’s just an attempt to redirect attention from what I’ve been doing for the community towards what he and others with his “approval” are doing. Just like official drop announcements came back, despite poll results and despite having perfectly fine announcements by Solar Marine…
Use of JSON data vs scraping the store page
The data has always been publicly available—you just needed to know where to look 😉
Correct, data has always been there; and Solar Marine has been using JSON (the now officially sanctioned method of getting the stored data) anyway. Therefore, regarding scraping, “DDoS” and similar things:
Solar Marine has not been scraping product pages and causing unnecessary traffic to the store. Here’s one of the first commits to my GitHub repository. Please note that the code is older than two weeks (it was just added to the repo two weeks ago).
I guess it means that we’ve been using the store data responsibly all this timeaccording to Mr. Choo’s own criteria. Thanks, Captain!
On a side note, scammers will be scraping the whole site anyway, because they need to make an exact copy (including descriptions, images, layout, style etc) of the webpage for their scammy business.
Shopify does not expose inventory levels by default, at least not the current version. My gut tells me that if Mr. Choo could hide inventory levels, he would. It probably turned out too problematic so he just went with ‘we keep this data public because we’re nice’. Just like when he started drop announcements again when attempts at shutting Solar Marine notifications proved futile. Can’t fight them, join them!
Reliability of inventory numbers
It’s a lot of words to try to say that numbers are not real numbers but end up saying that actually they are very real.
Yes, there may be more items somewhere in the pipeline; maybe it will be restocked, maybe not; maybe it’s only 30 because the team doesn’t want to deal with more than 30 orders per day despite the 14-day shipping policy. Who cares.
Numbers reflect how many units of any product can be ordered at any given time. PERIOD. If it goes down to zero, you can’t buy it anymore, and that’s what matters.
Smear campaign continues
“Phishing links posted by automated accounts” is such an obvious jab at Solar Marine, it’s not even funny anymore. Solar Marine has its posts marked as Automatedby me because I stick to X Developer API rules of bots self-identification. Despite sometimes posting manually, the Solar Marine account is generally considered automated, so it needs the label. No malicious or misleading bot will ever self-identify as bot, I guarantee that. I see them daily on X.
Inventory data directly on product pages
Here, we’re one step ahead, as always. You’re welcome.
I made this companion userscript together with Inventory Tracker but I didn’t want to publish it unless the source of data is acknowledged by Mr. Choo.
It shows stock quantity directly on each product’s page without manually sifting through JSON data.
You can download it directly from Greasyfork.org scripts repository. Please leave comments, feedback directly on the script’s page. Thank you!
I’m happy to see that Solar Marine notifications and the Inventory Tracker made such a tremendous impact on transparency from Smart Doll side in such a short time. The announcement that store data is available for community creators/developers will hopefully encourage others to build services similar to ours.
That’s awesome for three main reasons:
There will be more cool stuff available for the community, and in case any of the projects get dropped, there will be alternatives.
As similar services become available, they will become the norm. Hopefully, the wider community will get used to this level of transparency, and it will be more difficult for Mr. Choo to push back on this.
It serves as excellent proof that a single person can significantly impact what Culture Japan is doing. Which means we/you don’t need to suck it all up, actually!
