Hi, I was asked to post this here. I'm leaving the original content of the post as it is without modifications, even though it may be irrelevant to this specific subreddit.
Hey everyone,
After a long journey with IreneBot, I’ve made the decision to officially end Irene’s development and support. Irene has been around in the KPOP community for a while, but I have not had the motivation or passion to continue the project. I attempted half a year ago to make some major improvements but had just stopped in the middle and questioned whether it was worth it.
I honestly didn't expect the number of active users to be so high after all of these years. I thought the project was basically dead, yet was still receiving hundreds of thousands of requests every single month despite no updates being made in well over 2 years...
What’s Changing?
- All KPOP specific features will be removed.
- Irene will remain online with basic utility and moderation features only (on a smaller host).
- The CDN and API will remain online (on a smaller host).
- No further development will occur with Irene.
Archive Release
As a parting gift and a thank you, I’ll be publicizing several terabytes of KPOP images, group, and idol archives that I’ve collected over the years. Unfortunately I stopped collecting images and information around 2022, so a lot of the newer groups are not available, however this is a good archive for the older groups, which at the time I was struggling to find. A lot of the images were obtained through self-made scrapers, bots, or private discord servers that were willing to give permission to collect data at the time (ty). Please do note that there also may be some images from public discord servers, so there may be a few images out of place. If anything sensitive is found, please let me know and I will remove it.
ALL of the data collection was directly done by me. It was a massive undertaking, and while it was a passion project at first, I think many of you will understand why I eventually burned out after a few years. The datasets below are available for anyone looking to parse or repurpose information from Irene's archives. This kind of data usually isn’t cheap, so parsing it well can go a long way.
Image Archive
The image archive can be found here. MAKE SURE TO BE LOGGED INTO A GOOGLE ACCOUNT TO VIEW IT PROPERLY. If you are not logged in, not all of the data will load. Please look at the below information that will make these photos useful. The photos in this Google Drive folder originate from many different formats, but were always converted to webp or webm for consistency and optimization. This several TB archive will be available on Google Drive for at least 2 years. The domain will be active for at least a decade, so I'll just leave the services running until it eventually goes down(?)
Why Google Drive?
Simply put, it's because it's all I needed. I had several TB of available storage on Irene's host, so I'd only ever need to fetch the image from Google's API once and then convert to webp/webm if it was not found on the system. This allowed me to swap servers or use several in parallel with no interruptions. The archive is organized by groups → idols → numbered folders (each with up to 1,000 images), to avoid needing to paginate massive folders for each idol. If you pay attention, this parent folder actually has other folders called 'KPOP 10-29-2022' and 'KPOP-3-20-2021' which also follows the same structure. In addition, Solo artists can be found under the folders named 'SOLO'. There are also duplicates of some group folders that will both contain media.
Idol Info
Information regarding idols from Irene's database can be found here. I've only dumped official aliases, not custom ones established in discord servers. The avatars and banners are only available through the CDN, I'm not going to upload the files since they aren't perfect images.
Group Info
Information regarding groups from Irene's database can be found here.
Media Info
Information regarding the media found in the image archive can be found here. This dump is nearly 2 GB, so you would need to go through it programmatically. I doubt Excel or Sheets would be able to handle this file.
In the past, I’ve been asked why the bot included an NSFW argument. The NSFW flag existed because a small number of idols (such as Aini from Pink Fantasy) have done NSFW modeling. This flag was intended to help the bot comply with Discord’s ToS by properly handling sensitive content.
However, the implementation wasn't very accurate, as the flag applied to all images from an idol regardless of context. For this reason, I’ve removed the NSFW column in this dump to avoid confusion and mislabeling. (This message is not only on Reddit, so it is important to address that official NSFW media may be in the dump)
Affiliation Info
The links between groups and idols. The dump can be found here. This dump originally had the position of the idols in their group (Leader, Dancer, Vocalist), but it seems like I nuked that data at some point during a data migration(?).
Company Info
Information regarding companies. The dump can be found here. I also nuked some data here.
Thank You
Thank you for using Irene over the years, whether for fun, utility, or convenience. This project was a great passion project to me and I hope it brought some joy to your servers when it was being actively maintained. Thank you especially to the patrons that made funding the project a lot smoother. I've closed the official patreon page associated with the project and also cancelled all active patrons.
