NicoNico Douga Charts at Sankaku Complex

Sankaku Complex now boasts a complete English language interface to the extensive rankings provided by NicoNico Douga, encompassing thousands of videos, all of which are freely viewable from within Sankaku Complex’s pages using the Nico player, certainly a unique development for an English language site.

Please feel free to explore the new NicoNico rankings here.

One of our aims in pursuing cooperation with the cultural nexus that is NicoNico Douga was to allow Sankaku Complex users full access to the wealth of content often featured on these pages, but without the difficulties of a Japanese language environment, which is understandably problematic for the majority.

Such problems should now largely be a thing of the past, for the full charts we provide are presented in an English language environment, without the need for logons or otherwise, and so should be much more accessible to all.

The usage of the charts themselves should be simple enough to apprehend; in addition to the default top 100 chart view (whether this will be daily or hourly is still in flux), the rankings can be organised to suit whatever interest you might hold.

You can view the videos ranked by order of playbacks, number of comments, or MyList additions (favourites).

The rankings can additionally be set to display data accumulated on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or all-time basis.

Finally, you can select from any of the diverse categories Nico offers, so you can quickly find all the cat videos you need in one discrete chart.

Additionally, three different sizes of player have been incorporated, which you can set persistently by using the links provided. These are still open to change; if you have any feedback on them, please do share it.

There is one additional feature which may be of use to some; if you access the Sankaku Complex player page, you will see that the vid= portion points to the video ID (eg. “sm5441777”) as used on Nico proper:

http://www.sankakucomplex.com/charts/niconico/player.php?vid=sm5441777

You can input the ID of any video you would like to play (found easily enough in the video URL) by replacing this portion. You are also welcome to link directly to this player page with an ID of your choosing from external pages.

It may be futile to explain given the rather obvious nature of the player, but as several have asked I should point out the basics of the player itself: the “play” button is the one with the triangular “play” symbol, surprisingly enough.

The other areas of the player screen are linked to Nico’s page for the video in question. If you wish to view the video on Nico, just click the player window.

Also, the tickered comments can be disabled by simply clicking the “speech bubble” icon in the lower right of the player window. To comment yourself, you will need to visit the Nico page whilst logged in to your Nico account.

As you can imagine, the Japanese nature of Nico naturally means there is only so far it can be rendered into an English environment; most notably, video titles and descriptions are still in Japanese, and likely to remain so.

For those of you inclined to either learn the language, or simply to avail yourself of a useful tool to decipher it, using a Japanese dictionary overlay such as Rikaichan may be of use; online translation tools may also be helpful.

You are also welcome to share your finds, or ask for help with them, on the forums. If anyone is interested in helping to create an instructive article on our wiki to serve as a guide (and be linked off the ranking pages as such), your assistance would be much appreciated.

Please consider this only a first iteration of the NicoNico Complex integration; there is surely still room for improvement. If you have any feedback, suggestions, or otherwise, please feel free to make it known here, on the forums, or by email.