MoFo Lists

Aww poor Comrade Tatty

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

I diplomatically agree with both Tat and Thursday. The AFI/BFI lists (and perhaps the Sight & Sound list/lists) need to be given some kind of preference or emphasis above the others, because they simply have more weight behind them.

However, I do think it'd be a terrible waste not to include other lists in the system at all. The system itself is already built, and it's not usually terribly difficult to add new lists.

I think the best compromise, then, is to keep adding lists, but avoid the overly long ones, avoid the Entertainment Weekly-type ones, and make sure to give the more formal, expert-oriented lists most of the emphasis.

Also, I think it's a given that, at some point in the near future, we'll have to let users pick which lists they want to show up on their posts, too.

If there is to be one list based on Average Joe opposed to Captain Critic, surely IMDB's top 250 would be it? (Bottom could be quite interesting also) Obviously there's the inherent problem of it's constant change, however slight it is.

Trust that's not been mentioned.....

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Just because it's pretty easy to open my net curtains, it doesn't mean that I should flash at unsuspecting passers by...

Maybe I dreamed this. Maybe it was a temporary glitch. Maybe I'm just stupid, I dunno now - originally I'd only elected to fill out a few lists but found out after clicking the drop-down that the AFI lists I'd chosen not to complete were there, with pretty feeble percentages. I assumed that this was because the lists I had chosen to complete had been cross-referenced with the remaining ones, ie Film A had been ticked by me in the AFI 100 and, because it was also included in the AFI's 50 Greatest Groans, appeared as 'seen' in another list to save my clicking finger, even though I'd actively decided not to tick any boxes in that particular list.

Now, I don't want to appear to be poorly endowed so I dutifully filled out the remaining AFIs (if Holden is MoFo's John Holmes, I'd like to think I'm at least Ron Jeremy ) but, and my point is this (Hallelujah, you may say) : I didn't want to fill out the remaining lists...

If this was a glitch/my stupidity and poor memory then fair enough but if you're gonna add a load more lists, could you make sure that if they're not actively filled out then they won't appear in the drop down.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

This is me. I had the thrills list filled out, and once I had 2 more movies viewed, from the way it was worded, I assumed they were going to show up on all of my lists. I was doing these lists one at a time, because I do have more of them, and just haven't watched them yet. I can get why Holden wanted them done the other way, since he has viewed every movie, but he is done filling his out now, so who cares.

*Has only slept 2 1/2 hours, and sure hopes she didn't take all this the wrong way.*

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Please, Please, Please

Yesterday I bought Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid on Special Edition DVD for £2.99. I've got Sunset Boulevard recorded on my Sky+ box and ready to watch. I've also rented The Apartment which arrived in the mail this morning. And I even found a copy of the rare Chimes at Midnight for under £10 on eBay...


That's how easy it is for us kids. Today is a great time to be a film lover.

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TOP 100 | "Don't let the bastards grind you down!"

Yeah, that's almost a downside of the new system; because the movies are stored centrally now (with no duplicates if they appear on multiple lists), as a result films are inevitably going to be checked off of more than one list from time to time; even lists you've chosen not to fill out.

Obviously, there's no real way for the system to know which lists you've "actively" filled out. However, there are two ways in which I think we can deal with this:

First, we can allow people to choose which lists show up on their posts. This should happen regardless of the issues you're talking about, and I'll be looking into some elegant solutions for this shortly. This will probably be accompanied by a link to view all the users' lists. This will necessitate the creation of a sort of list homepage/snapshot for each user, which is probably a good idea, anyway.

Second, we can perhaps add a simple toggle on each list to make it private. A global list, with the same "Private" toggles will have to be constructed, of course, to make things easier as the number of lists increases.

Anyway, I think these would address all your concerns (and a few things more, besides!). I can't say precisely when they'll all be implemented, but I think I should be able to make steady progress on them over the next few weeks.

I love The Apartment. Billy Wilder's humor is so utterly timeless. Be sure to let us all know what you thought of it.

Well I loved Wilder's One, Two, Three. So if it's as good as that I'm sure I'll like it.


Oh, and I just placed an order for Welles' The Trial and Lean's Brief Encounter and Doctor Zhivago. All for just £12.

Ironically, I actually meant to write "the order in which lists show up on their posts." A toggle for whether or not a list shows up on a user's post is all well and good, but given the functionality involved, it would have to be in addition to the "Private" toggle, I believe. Concerns of toggle overload are growing in my mind, but I think I can come up with a reasonably simple way to make it work.

Well, a 'private toggle' would essentially be the same thing as what you originally mistyped, eh? You show the world as much or as little as you desire...

So: (slight return)

Incidentally, you'd pay a pretty penny for a private toggle in a number of 'establishments'. I sure had toggle overload that night...

At first, I thought so, too. But the thing is, we still want people to be able to access user lists that the user hasn't chosen to display on their posts. So, there'd presumably have to be a "View All Lists" link on the dropdown after the lists they've chosen.

And on that page, of course, you'd still have the same issue you mentioned before, with lists looking sparse because you didn't fill them out specifically (only indirectly, by checking films off from other lists). So if we want to let people hide those sorts of lists, but still let people view all user lists (and not just the ones they want on their posts), it would take two toggles: a "this goes on my posts" toggle, and a "I'm not really filling this one out, so hide it" toggle.

I realize there's a 50-50 chance I just made things more confusing with this clarification attempt, but I had to try.

Why?

OK, I've been meaning to do this since the lists went up, but there's now a discussion thread if you want to talk about the actual movies in the lists, not just how they're formatted on the site.

MoFo Lists Discussion Thread

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

It'd be necessary for anyone who wanted to fill out any significant number of lists, really. Even a dozen total (and we're more than halfway there already) is probably way too much to cram into the dropdown. And if we get above 20 or 30, anyone who fills out even half will have to pick and choose which ones go on their posts.

So we'll need some way for people to see all of a user's lists together, even if they're not on the posts. Hence, the need for a "View All" page, which in turn necessitates two toggles instead of one, etc...

I suppose this wouldn't apply if you were of the mindset that we can put an infinite number of lists into the dropdown, but I think that would start to look pretty awful after 10 or so.

So, if I choose not to bother filling out the next 10 film lists, they'll still show up in my drop down panel if any of the films are cross referenced?

Personally, I think the drop down looks pretty awful with the amount in it already.

No, just the opposite; I'm proposing these new options as a way of allowing you to prevent that. The idea is that you'd be able to mark any new lists as private/not filled out/whatever. But since some people will want to fill out every list (or most of them), we'll need that second toggle so people can still see lists that aren't on the dropdown, too. They'll be on an as-of-yet unconstructed page.

Yes, it's already pretty crowded. Hopefully the upcoming changes will fix that. I'm thinking of limiting it to 5 or 6, with a link to the others.

Heh, sorry. I'm in one of my 'hard of thinking' periods. I see that now.

Do carry on!

Not a problem; the whole thing is admittedly convoluted. Hopefully it's a lot simpler in practice.