IMDb Upgrades in Development

IMDb (originally posted Oct/Nov 2004)

Q: When will anticipated upgrade <X> be done?

A: The general answer, and the only one I’m going to give unless the answer is “it’s in testing and should be there any day now,” for any “when will” question is, “when it’s ready.” Sorry, but I can’t be more specific. (Well, there is another possibility: “never” or perhaps “not in the forseeable future.”)…. I think, for competitive reasons, I’m not allowed to talk too much about relative priorities for new features.

IMDb

As many of you know, we started IMDb 18 years ago with the goal of covering every movie & TV show from every country and every time period. Although in the beginning, most of the titles and names included were from English speaking countries. Over the years, we added information from other countries and have attracted a truly international audience. However, the IMDb site and most importantly, the IMDb data has always only really been available in the English language. Well, today we are excited to announce the launch of our first non-English language site, http://www.imdb.de/.

This project has been in the works for a long time and we are proud to finally be able to share it with you. The site specifically caters to the German audience and includes much of the information that is popular with our users – all in German. You will notice that not all of our English data is available today on the German site, but rest assured that we will be adding content as soon as we can. One of the great features of the new site is that it offers a link to IMDb.com on every name, title and character page so that you can easily access the English version for more information. Another great feature is the ability to search for a title in different languages – without having to do an additional search!

As usual, we would love to hear your feedback so please feel free to reply to this post or use our contact form at http://www.imdb.de/helpdesk/contact_form.

IMDb

Q: I long ago, after much railing, have accepted the fictional STATES RIGHTS INDEPENDENT EXCHANGES [US] on the premise it makes a useful site-holding pen until somebody, such as you or I, comes along and provides the actual distributor of said film

Q: The one problem with using it as a “holding pen”, though, is that it gives legitimacy to something that is quite subject to misuse. In fact, the genesis of this “company” was some jerk who actually deleted numerous legit national distributors, which used states rights exchanges, like Ambassador, Spectrum, Atlantic and others and SUBSTITUTING this made-up company name.

A: Many things have changed since the original debate and we are now looking at wider changes to the ways in which we record distribution information so the timing is good here. We’ll be discussing this over the next few weeks.

IMDb

Q: Couldn’t the correct character be somehow noted in the cast list itself, just as when the actor’s name is misspelled or is a different name than the actor usually used? Perhaps along these lines:

Fred Crane…Stuart Tarleton (credits in error - actually plays Brent Tarleton)

Or, maybe there’s a more elegant solution.

A: we have something in testing at the moment which will allow the cast lists to be stored as displayed in the credits yet allow further elaboration and detail on the character name to be stored and easily available on the site. We think this will provide a good middle ground between the “credits, the whole credits and nothing but the whole credits” position and the “two pages of free text explanatory notes attached to every piece of data” position.

IMDb

Q: I badly want the keywords alphabetized.

A: This is a good suggestion, thanks. It’s now logged as bug #5442 in our system. We can’t promise an implementation date yet, but we can see it has good support as an idea on this board so we will get to it. Keywords is an area where we hope to devote some extra attention in the coming months.

IMDb

you cannot add new events to the IMDb awards listing at the moment. This functionality is suspended.

We hope to reopen that soon though.

IMDb

Jon has been working with the team to change the wording to reflect the true nature of Complete (i.e. the Onscreen Credits are Complete). We’ll make an announcement when this is done.

IMDb

Q: Does the Help Desk rejection message contain the submission reference or just the title? As people do sometimes send in a few submissions in quick succession it could be good to include the submission reference (if it doesn’t already) so that they’ll know exactly which submission was rejected

A: At the moment it’s just the rejected title in the subject line of the message. It’s a good idea and something for the new submissions interface. In the current system there are too many issues because of the way the data is stored. For example, when more than one user updates the same new title there’s a risk we would include the wrong submission ID in the rejection email. We could code around that in the existing system but we’re trying to focus on building the new system rather than patching the old one (a classic software dilemma)

IMDb

Q: As an experiment, some time ago I entered the major credits for “Beglyanki” (”The Runaways”) (2007), and included English translations in parentheses along with the transliterations of the original on screen Russian character descriptions.

A: because the list manager doesn’t know Russian, he couldn’t tell whether what you were listing was Russian translations or proper names. Now that he knows, for example, that Voditel means Driver, he’s going to do some clean up. So: No translations, just “as it appears”, please. There are changes coming that will properly support translations. Until those are in place, please stick to the rules. Thanks for your patience.

Q: How soon will this planned support for translations be implemented?

A: I don’t do “when will” questions. But it is part of something (fairly large in scope) being actively worked on.

IMDb

Q: 602 titles already have soap-opera listed as a keyword. Why wouldn’t IMDb make it a genre?

A: We’ll consider it the next time we add new genres. And if I forget at that time, remind me.