Custom Lists: Beta Testing

When you check a list (be it custom or official) in someone's profile, you either see their watched movies as crossed out, or your own watched movies as crossed out (and to cross out).

It would be nice to be able to toggle between both infos. Which ones from that list have been seen by yourself, which ones from that list have been seen by the profile's owner.

I was wondering what kind of button could switch between both modes, and then I imagined that maybe both completion bars (yours and theirs) could be displayed imultaneously, and maybe used as buttons to switch the list mode (to not overload the interface with buttons).



In that example (I used Iroquois' handy profile because he did fill mofo lists but didn't create custom ones), he has seen American Psycho and I haven't. So, clicking on my completion bar would show American Psycho uncrossed (my crossable, read/write list), clicking on his completion bar would show it crossed (his display, read-only list).

Edit : Ah and the little white rectangle was meant to be the mouse pointer's pop-up help (the same kind that appears when you hover over a profile link), and not an additional button on the screen. Maybe that was confusing.

Got it, thanks. Yeah, tricky question, which people would be more interested in, so it's reasonable to find a way to display both. Doing it in a particularly elegant and intuitive way figures to be a real challenge.

I'll keep this in mind as I get closer to the more advanced stuff.

Yeah. I can't really contribute much for the coding behind the curtains, and it's hard to guess what addition would be technically convenient or feasible. But as users we can try to think a bit about what ergonomic solution would feel best, in the most concrete way possible. It's a part of the puzzle where we may help. If our faucets suggestions don't fall too far from the plumbing, that is.

Yep, always happy to take suggestions on board. And, even more valuable, feedback on whatever I end up implementing, since usually when we all finally use it day-to-day it almost always becomes really clear what is or isn't working.

This is an idea I had on another site. A potential genre system could be linked to customized or on-site lists that tags the genres of movies from the lists to their pages. For obvious reaaons, priority of genres would be given to the official top 100 lists. But to keep from too many genres appearing, a maximum of the three most popular genres could be put into play.


And to keep users from abusing troll privileges by putting on movies that don't fit the custom chart, such as putting Terms of Endearment in the thriller section, lists with an obvious joke would be marked and not count towards the genre rankings. That's how I view it at least.


This could also lead to the genre-based top 100 lists being able to rely on the votes of the community as opposed to relying on external sources like Rotten Tomatoes or Imdb.

Okay, let's ramp the weirdness up shall we (yes we shall).

Checking my list of lists, for instance on my profile (scroll down to Cinefix's 50 faves) :



And checking my edit page for this list, indeed :



But checking its regular reading/ticking public display, fortunately :

__________________
Get working on your custom lists, people !

@Flicker: anything unusual about the process while creating? Did they show up double while adding, or was it just when you came back to the page after adding them in some previous session?

I only noticed it (long) after making the list. I don't remember noticing anything strange except one short error message, that I hadn't had the time to fully read. Something about not being allowed to add more than a certain amount of titles ? The message vanished and the entries resumed as usual (I was halfway a 50 titles list, so, I shrugged it off). I'm not even 100% sure it happened during that list building, as I made a bunch in a row, but that's the closest thing I have to a clue.

(Right now I don't dare to manually correct it by moving around or erasing the extra entries in the edit mode, out of fear of corrupting the list and having to re-do it.)

Okay, thanks. This is probably an easy fix.

Best guess, the thing that checks for missing movie entries is not quite working so it thinks they need to be inserted, leading to duplicates, leading to the above. I'll take a closer look.

@Flicker, okay, how about now?

It looks like a bunch of films got added more than once. You mentioned adding them very fast, not sure if that has something to do with it. You should get an error telling you you've already added something to a list if you try to add it again (maybe that was the error you don't recall?).

I might need to add a second check for that, then, if it can be overwhelmed by enough rapid entries or double-clicks or what have you.

I still see the same double titles on my edit list, and double titles on my private list-of-lists.

My public list-of-list has become like this :



So, instead of 50 additional title, that's 35 less.

But the displayed list (the one where we tick the viewed ones) still shows the 50 correct ones.

I don't think so. It happens occasionally, when I come back to a list to add a film that had already entered, so I'm familiar with that message, and my eyes "recognize" it fast. I think that the message that passed in front of me was less familiar.

Also, I add them fast, but not that fast (I have to type the title each time, and, believe me, my typing speed isn't overwhelming anything). But sometimes I quickly hit Return to select the first default proposition that appears (I've entered the wrong Akira, the wrong Predator, the wrong 12 Angry Men that way). Maybe I've "double hit" or "long pressed" Return at some point without realizing it ?

Yeah, so we have two problems here: how the doubles get on there, and making sure they don't display as doubles when they do.

The tricky thing is that it's not clear I should stop them from displaying, because it's kind of just wallpapering over the problem. It should not be possible for you to double add, and I'm not sure it's realistic to expect you to convey the kind of granular detail needed to recreate how it happened in the first place.

So, absent that, I think it might be best for me to just delete the dupes manually (it's just that one list?), and basically ask you to be on alert for this issue when it recurs, at which point it'll be fresh in the mind and we can hopefully narrow things down enough to debug. And obviously, if at any point you find you can recreate the issue consistently with certain steps, we'll be in business, and a fix should (probably) be quite easy.

The thing is, the whole list appears as doubles, and my occasions for double tap have been much rarer. Could one accident cascade into a full duplicated list ?

And yes, it's the only list. But I'll try to be as clumsy as possible in the next one, to see if I can re-break something. Also, I intended to wait till tomorrow before trying to edit that list (swap titles around, delete some, and see how it affects display), I just wanted you to have a look at it first, and then to be sure I wasn't touching it while you were trying to solve the issue. But maybe you already know whether my further experimenting with this already bugged list can bring more hints or not.

I have no real opinion about the double nature of the problem (origin + discreet self-correction) but I assume that, with complex programs, there are redundant failsafe checks that correct issues even if the issues shouldn't be possible. It's a matter of coding perfectionism, I suppose : it can feel as an imperfection to rely on safety nets instead of ideal codes. But I don't know how realistic ideal coding is, in the real world, or if, in practice, all programs rely on safety nets beyond a certain critical mass of complexity.

Anyway, it seems to be extremely rare (first such bug on more than 300 lists?), and it doesn't even affect the most important display mode. So, really no urgency here. And I'll be more attentive to the error message if it ever reappears.

Yes, if the one accident is on the saving of the list itself, in total.

Excellent.

Noted. And thank you.

Yeah, the rarity makes me really tempted to say the server just suffered a poorly-timed hiccup and everything submitted twice, and that I should actually wait for it to happen again before digging into everything. I think I'll poke around some of the code a little this evening, delete the dupes now manually, and give it a day or two.

(Just a confirmation that it's completely fixed on all displays now.)

Yeah, I went in and deleted the dupes manually.

WEIRDNESS BUGS DYSFUNCTION FAILURE COLLAPSE CHAOS



(apart from that, the lists themselves are fine, both in edit and in display mode)

Actually, I suspect issues with the "list order" tool. Because rearranging them tends to break some lines, and also not particularly rearrange them (the order in which they show on my profile and on my edit page isn't the same, "hidden lists" aside).

I'll have a look at both.