Custom Lists: Beta Testing

Okay, cool. I mean, that's bad, but good in the sense that it means nothing's awry on this end at least.

TMDB is actually Wiki-style (at least somewhat), so anyone can signup and submit that stuff. Sometimes it takes awhile to trickle over to the API we use, though.

Appreciate all these thoughts and suggestions, and the implied kick in the butt towards moving this along, since it's been a fairly long beta period. I've wanted to implement this feature for a long time so I'm being a little precious/perfectionist about some of it.

Hah. Yeah, it's a bit tedious. Looks like I have half a dozen classics to add to TMDB, some of them entirely absent from IMDB aswell. What have you be doing all these years, Internet ?

Also, the titles get recognized quite fast, once the film got added to TMDB, but the year doesn't get processed yet. A different lag for different fields ?

Anyway, the kick in the butt is accidental : I just arrived, as far as I'm concerned this feature has been in beta for two days.

As an update :

I've completed the release date of Veuve's "L'homme des casernes" (https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/690...e-des-casernes) but the year still does not appear here. The film already had an entry on TMDB, and a more complete one on IMDB (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361710/) where the release year was already stated.

I've also added a few other entries on TMDB (they're still absent from IMDB), with various results :

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/846...-indiens-morts : year not displayed
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/846...his-apprentice : year not displayed
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/846...the-rainforest : year instantly displayed
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/846...on-des-jivaros : year instantly displayed
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/846...-devenue-folle : year instantly displayed

When the link is pasted through the "get ID" window, the year already appears or doesn't appear in the proposed result. So, the issue is not at the list display level. But I don't find what it could be related to (I don't think I've entered the data differently where it doesn't work).

There can sometimes be discrepancies between what shows up in the API (which is what powers the autocomplete, for example) and what shows up via other means. I'll have to investigate further.

Little behavior update :

Now, when I erase from my list the three titles without release years, and re-add them through "add a movie here", they are found very easily (no need to go through the imdb/tmdb url window), and they appear as selectable with their release year (this is new). They then get added to the list, along with their release years (this is new aswell). This may be due to TMDB catching up with its own updates, dunno.

However, when I display the list differently ("view list") or reload the custom list in edit mode, these newly appeared years vanish again. Back to yesterday's display, with year zero in edit mode, and just a blank in view mode. (This is old.)

Not sure if it helps, but just in case, keeping you updated on these behavior details.

Okay, I added an additional check so that, even if we have some of the data on our end, if it doesn't find a release year it'll go and see if TMDB has added one since our last refresh. Hopefully that fixes all of these in one go. Lemme know.

Yeah, I alluded to this in the previous post, but the short answer is that we save a bunch of TMDB data on our end (so we don't have to ping them constantly for stuff, and to allow us to do lots of other things faster/easier), so there was a little dissonance between their updates and ours there.

Generally the only distinction is "do we have a copy of that? No? Okay, make one." But in this case we did have copies of data, but not the ones with the updated years you added. We refresh them from time to time, but since the year is a big deal here the new code checks again if it doesn't find one.

Ok. I had removed the three problematic ones ("The way of the dead indians", "The shaman and his apprentice", "L'homme des casernes"), in case it was some cache thing that had needed to wait for a refresh. As this is not it, I've re-added them now. The result is :

One of them has now its release year displayed ("The way of the dead indians"). The two others still display year 0 (in edit mode) or a blank (in view mode).

Sooo... one third there.

(I also like the "top few" view with poster images, the one above the list, or on the lists' list, but this is also incompletely displayed, even when TMDB shows some pictures. Probably the same issue. I was intending to add some images to the TMDB pages that lack any, but I'll probably do it once this is all solved, of if that "poster view" ever becomes a full viewing mode.)

I'm having trouble following all this, so I'd like to separate these out. Obviously from the user-end they all seem related (stuff with the year is wrong), but from the technical side it's pretty distinct. So, with that in mind: are all the years showing up while adding them to lists?

If so, and if there's an issue otherwise with the list while viewing (and not editing), can you link me to an example list?

Yeah, TMDB doesn't always have artwork, so at some point I'm gonna have to exclude films like that from any special displays. Still deciding. That said, my ultimate goal is to let people choose from one of a handful of different display options (show them all as posters, show just the first X as posters, show them all as big splash images, etc).

Anyway, if this is like the the thing with the year, same thing: fire a link my way and I'll have a look.

Thanks for expounding on all this.

I actually just went public with all my current thematic lists of favorites (and just started on new ones, weee, it's ridiculously addictive), so, you can see the issues on :

https://www.movieforums.com/lists/custom/268

It's the only one with issues, as it's niche scientific documentaries. My other lists only feature standard movies, with more popularity, more visibility, and thus more complete IMDB/TMDB entries.

So, on this list you'll see a series of films without images being displayed here, and some of these films actually have images on their TMDB page (such as Jean Rouch's "Mad Masters").

The missing posters and the missing release date are being displayed in the little search interface, when try to add them to the list. And the dates even appear (briefly) on the list once you've added the entry. They vanish if you refresh the page or switch viewing mode.

(It wasn't always the case. When I started making the list, some of these movies' dates weren't appearing even on that search interface (the film was found, but displayed as a broken image and with no date), and didn't appear at all on the list (not even before refresh or mode switch). But I haven't reproduced this issue. So maybe this was just for a short while after completing the TMDB page.)

I hope I'm not being too confusing ?

If you are, it's probably not your fault. This stuff's tough to explain over text sometimes.

I'll take a closer look tomorrow, thanks for your help.

Okay, years should be up now.

There's no great fix for this, other than just refreshing the data now and then. Technically I could do some complicated stuff to loop through and check via this form, too, but unlike the "can't find?" one it processes things in batch so it's a much trickier and more involved code change. Better solution is probably to just live with the occasional missing year (very rare in practice, thankfully) and refresh the data a little more frequently.

Ah yes. Just checked now (I hadn't noticed this thread had been updated) and all the dates are here. And I don't have any opinion on how these things should be managed (I don't even know exactly how much time a refresh takes, and how often it did and does now take place), but, indeed, I believe the need to be very rare. Jacqueline Veuve's documentaries are famous enough to be published in DVD box sets (albeit by the swiss cinematheque), but I'm not even sure the two other films that had date issues can be found outside obscure academic libraries. I really doubt such extreme cases will be met often. For instance, even very ancient experimental silent movies seem well documented on TMDB and well handled on this site. I think we're pretty safe for a while.

So, thanks for your efforts on this kinda weird and atypical list, and for having worked on issues that may be very very anecdotical.

(Pro Tip : don't try to use "&" in your list's name.)

(Oh. also : ". )

Thanks for the tip; I'll fiddle with that today.

Okay, this should be cool now. I hope.

Aaaah not yet not quite.

See, I go on my custom list page (the list of custom lists), and I see their full titles there. But when I click on one of these titles to open that custom list in the editor, the title doesn't appear fully in the title field.


but :


And so that part disappears if not re-completed before saving.

Hmm, odd that escaping the value would fix the ampersands but not the quotes. I'll have another look.

@Flicker Okay, how about now? Note: not retroactive, so you'll need to update it again.

I just now went to see my custom list that I made awhile back...and the titles to the list are gone...and there's no way to click on the list to see it.

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