New: Movie-Specific Topics

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Most of you have already noticed (and discussed) this, but I wanted a dedicated thread for this new feature. I'll quote (with some editing for clarity) myself just for context:

Here's the basic idea: you can create new topics directly from individual movie pages. When you do, the topic is "linked" to that movie. It goes in its own (mostly hidden) forum that holds all movie-specific topics, but it'll still show up in New Posts and various searches, and it'll have a prefix in front of it to indicate that it came from that movie's page.

The basic idea is that a lot of people probably find the site after watching a movie and want to talk about it, or ask a question about it, so it's more natural for them to find the movie and discuss it through there, rather than through general forum categories.

Side note, if there are no threads yet for a movie, the page will search for related topics as a placeholder, but these'll be replaced by the linked topic(s) as soon as someone creates one for the first time.

Example of a movie page with a topic "attached" to it:
Pulp Fiction.

Example of a movie page (for now, at least) with no topics attached that displays its best guess at related threads in the meantime: Taxi Driver.
Feedback is welcome, but please note that this is still very much a work in progress. I've taken too long to get new stuff up on the site, so I'm trying to get things up faster and then iterate on them publicly, as opposed to tweaking and planning forever. So if I seem at all curt or dismissive, it's probably just because I'm still working out the best way to do this stuff.

That said, I'm really pleased with the basic structure so far. I think this is going to work well.



I realize tweaking right now isn't a priority as you're working on bigger changes, but when you have the time in the future how about considering this idea: highlighting the movie page linked threads like the way I Photoshoped the thread title *Pulp Fiction* Vincent Vega is an idiot.


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Is the "Specific Movie Threads" supposed to show up somewhere? When I go to the options on the bottom I can find it but not on the actual home page.
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Is the "Specific Movie Threads" supposed to show up somewhere? When I go to the options on the bottom I can find it but not on the actual home page.
I believe it is tied to the movie page. So if you click on movies and type in Pulp Fiction. Click on that title and you'll be taken to the movie page with info on it, reviews from users and dedicated threads.
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Yeah, it's not really accessible otherwise, and it's not meant to be, since it's kinda of a mish-mash housing all sorts of otherwise unrelated threads. This might change, but there's a technical hurdle with the movie labels next to the thread title I haven't figured out yet, and without that it's mostly unusable.



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@Yoda,

One thing that I noticed is that if you access the thread from the "Now Playing" box on the main page, it doesn't tell you what movie it's connected to, either in the "Now Playing" box or on the thread's page, so you don't know what movie the thread is about if it's not clear in the title or the actual thread.

For example, I opened a thread called "Overlooked Scene" from the "Now Playing" box earlier, but it didn't say anywhere that it was about a specific movie. I thought it was going to be a generic thread about scenes that people thought were overlooked scenes.

But after reading a few posts, I finally figured out that it was specifically about the movie Zombieland.

I know that it would probably make the thread title too long to have the movie title in the "Now Playing" box, but you might want to add the movie title to the top of the thread's page.
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@Yoda,

One thing that I noticed is that if you access the thread from the "Now Playing" box on the main page, it doesn't tell you what movie it's connected to, either in the "Now Playing" box or on the thread's page, so you don't know what movie the thread is about if it's not clear in the title or the actual thread.

For example, I opened a thread called "Overlooked Scene" from the "Now Playing" box earlier, but it didn't say anywhere that it was about a specific movie. I thought it was going to be a generic thread about scenes that people thought were overlooked scenes.

But after reading a few posts, I finally figured out that it was specifically about the movie Zombieland.

I know that it would probably make the thread title too long to have the movie title in the "Now Playing" box, but you might want to add the movie title to the top of the thread's page.
It is on there, albeit subtle: it's right underneath the thread title, where the forum link would normally be. But I agree it should probably be more prominent in those cases, maybe actually in the Now Playing box itself. Good point: I'll think about the best way to do that.



You can't make a rainbow without a little rain.
@Yoda,

One thing that I noticed is that if you access the thread from the "Now Playing" box on the main page, it doesn't tell you what movie it's connected to, either in the "Now Playing" box or on the thread's page, so you don't know what movie the thread is about if it's not clear in the title or the actual thread.

For example, I opened a thread called "Overlooked Scene" from the "Now Playing" box earlier, but it didn't say anywhere that it was about a specific movie. I thought it was going to be a generic thread about scenes that people thought were overlooked scenes.

But after reading a few posts, I finally figured out that it was specifically about the movie Zombieland.

I know that it would probably make the thread title too long to have the movie title in the "Now Playing" box, but you might want to add the movie title to the top of the thread's page.
It is on there, albeit subtle: it's right underneath the thread title, where the forum link would normally be. But I agree it should probably be more prominent in those cases, maybe actually in the Now Playing box itself. Good point: I'll think about the best way to do that.

@Yoda,

I just checked, and I still don't see the title of the movie anywhere on the thread's page. Under the thread title, there's a link to the "Specific Movie Threads" subforum.

Also, on the "Specific Movie Threads" subforum page, the titles aren't listed, so unless it's in the name of the thread, there's no way to know what movie the thread is about without opening it. You might want to add the movie title to the thread titles on that page too.



@Yoda,

I just checked, and I still don't see the title of the movie anywhere on the thread's page. Under the thread title, there's a link to the "Specific Movie Threads" subforum.
This isn't on mobile, is it? On desktop, here's what it looks like to me:


Can you link me to an example of where you're seeing "Specific Movie Threads" instead?

Also, on the "Specific Movie Threads" subforum page, the titles aren't listed, so unless it's in the name of the thread, there's no way to know what movie the thread is about without opening it. You might want to add the movie title to the thread titles on that page too.
That's the plan, but it caused a major technical problem initially so I had to remove it. Not sure when that'll happen, just need to figure out how to do it without breaking things (it's easier on the search results). That said, long-term I'm not sure if I'll keep that forum accessible, since it only exists to house them.



You can't make a rainbow without a little rain.
@Yoda,

This isn't on mobile, is it? On desktop, here's what it looks like to me:


Can you link me to an example of where you're seeing "Specific Movie Threads" instead?


That's the plan, but it caused a major technical problem initially so I had to remove it. Not sure when that'll happen, just need to figure out how to do it without breaking things (it's easier on the search results). That said, long-term I'm not sure if I'll keep that forum accessible, since it only exists to house them.

This is on a desktop PC running Chrome and Windows 8. I also tried checking this out in Firefox, and I see the same thing. Where your screenshot shows "in Pulp Fiction", my system shows "in Specific Movie Threads".


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Oh wow, that's so weird. That means it must be server-side. Really narrows it down. I wonder if there's some weird setting quirk you have that I don't (like one of us is checking "Save" when logging in)? I can't imagine why that would change this, though. Odd. I'll see what I can find out.



I realize tweaking right now isn't a priority as you're working on bigger changes, but when you have the time in the future how about considering this idea: highlighting the movie page linked threads like the way I Photoshoped the thread title *Pulp Fiction* Vincent Vega is an idiot.
I changed my mind: after looking at the way it's done right now, I think it's perfect as it is. Especially after the white font became a light gray, it looks good! So....



Okay, slight change of plans: I'm tweaking this system so that threads I link to movie pages stay where they are, but show up on the movie pages as well.

I'm probably going to have threads created from the movie pages just get dumped into General Movie Discussion for now. That might be revisited if there end up being too many of them, but I think that'll be a good problem to have.

I've already made this change with a few threads, but hope to switch over all the other linked ones tomorrow. And because linking them won't "remove" them from the primary forums, I'm going to be a lot more liberal about linking them, and also see about letting people associate new threads with movies on their own, with an autocomplete just like the one you get when you add Favorites.