Custom Lists: Beta Testing

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"How tall is King Kong ?"
I'll make a special point to try to investigate this a bit more tomorrow and I'll ping you either way.
Don't prioritize it. I'm really checking it more on a week by week basis than a minute by minute one. I'm not very likely to put my mind back to it before next weekend...

You may think moderating an internet forum is tough work, but try mediating conflicts between your friends in the power vacuum left in an NGO by the departure of its founder...
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Get working on your custom lists, people !



Don't prioritize it. I'm really checking it more on a week by week basis than a minute by minute one. I'm not very likely to put my mind back to it before next weekend...
Cool, good to know. If I don't get "through" it tomorrow then and need a bit more time I won't panic. But I'm still gonna prioritize it a bit so I don't get distracted and let it drag a week.

You may think moderating an internet forum is tough work, but try mediating conflicts between your friends in the power vacuum left in an NGO by the departure of its founder...
Oof. Good luck with that.



Okay, progress: I've figured out why it says "25" instead of "100" (one script is pulling double duty for both functions but apparently is not properly differentiating between the two in at least one place), and I've significantly narrowed down the scope of the problem.

I do not get the duplicate problem when adding the Godzilla film in question, but I'm pretty sure that's because it only happens initially, when you add a film that we do not have a "copy" of saved locally. So the problem is with that overlay, adding from IMDB or TMDB, with a film that has not yet been added. It's still a bit of a thicket in there, but at least it's a thicket and not a whole forest now.

My thanks to both/all of you for your patience with this. Hopefully I'm getting close to isolating this. And once it's fixed I can turn my attention to new features and the like.



Another update:

I haven't found the problem yet (at first glance it doesn't seem like it should be possible, but obviously it is), but I have:

a) deleted all the duplicates
b) made it so it should be impossible to add any more duplicates

That second part may sound like a fix, but it's more of a band-aid because it'd be better to know how it's happening and stop it there. It also might just throw a database error the next time someone triggers this bug, but that, too, might help me make sense of it.

Just a heads-up.



So, I tried to find a few films I was highly confident were not already in the DB, and added them, but it still didn't cause any duplicates on my end. Maybe that means my new fix is working, maybe not? I'd still like to understand, but I also don't want that to get in the way of moving forward if things are going to function okay.

Has anyone had any issues with this since the post above a week ago?



"How tall is King Kong ?"
Has anyone had any issues with this since the post above a week ago?
Hm. I briefly had Zebraman (2004) appear twice in a list I'm making. I removed one (clicking x at the right), it erased both, I re-added it, it only appears once.

No, wait, it still appears once on "view list" mode, but twice in the "edit list" mode.

For now it's a seven items list :

Casino Royale (1967)
Buckaroo Banzai (1984)
Baxter (1989)
Zebraman (2004)
Zebraman (2004)
Love (2011)
Spectre (2015)

But I don't remember in which order I've entered them (as I always reorder my own lists' items by year as I go).



You can't make a rainbow without a little rain.
So, I tried to find a few films I was highly confident were not already in the DB, and added them, but it still didn't cause any duplicates on my end. Maybe that means my new fix is working, maybe not? I'd still like to understand, but I also don't want that to get in the way of moving forward if things are going to function okay.

Has anyone had any issues with this since the post above a week ago?

I added a few more movies to my list this week, and it seems to be working great with no duplicates.
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OPEN FLOOR.



Hm. I briefly had Zebraman (2004) appear twice in a list I'm making. I removed one (clicking x at the right), it erased both, I re-added it, it only appears once.

No, wait, it still appears once on "view list" mode, but twice in the "edit list" mode.

For now it's a seven items list :

Casino Royale (1967)
Buckaroo Banzai (1984)
Baxter (1989)
Zebraman (2004)
Zebraman (2004)
Love (2011)
Spectre (2015)

But I don't remember in which order I've entered them (as I always reorder my own lists' items by year as I go).
Which list is this? Sorry, you have a lot and it can take awhile for me to find these things without it narrowed down. List title is fine but if you can easily post the ID number from the URL, even better.



"How tall is King Kong ?"
Which list is this? Sorry, you have a lot and it can take awhile for me to find these things without it narrowed down. List title is fine but if you can easily post the ID number from the URL, even better.
Ah yeah, it's not a public list because it's a half-arsed work in progress, so, I wasn't really meaning to throw it out there. And wasn't sure you'd look at it specifically.

It's the last one, "What were they even meant to be ?" (it's about movies which intent baffle me a bit). Do you have access to it as an admin ?



Once the list reopens and I am not online on this forum, can someone add historical fiction Peaky Blinders under the TV series category. It is a British period crime drama created by Steven Knight, who is also the very same writer for the films Closed Circuit, Dirty Pretty Things, and Eastern Promises.



"How tall is King Kong ?"
Woah.

Starting a list of notable pirate movies (based on Gerard Jeager's study). The second film I entered (through an imdb link: "https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0011785/" - with the slash at the end, it case it impacted something) quadrupled the first entry.

Slowing down there. Leaving it open for dissection.

https://www.movieforums.com/lists/custom/359




Ugh. Bizarre. Okay, gonna try to take a closer look at this over the holidays. I thought my stopper on the database side might fix things, but maybe not.

We're definitely approaching the point where I basically rewrite the movie add functionality, though. Might take less time than debugging this.

Thank you again for your diligence. The final product will be much more stable and better for your help.



Okay, looking into this now, and some of the little breadcrumbs (programatically speaking) I left myself earlier are paying dividends. Narrowed some things down again. Stay tuned.



"How tall is King Kong ?"
Okay, looking into this now, and some of the little breadcrumbs (programatically speaking) I left myself earlier are paying dividends. Narrowed some things down again. Stay tuned.
Is it okay if I resume this list, or do you prefer me to wait for an explicit greenlight ?



Is it okay if I resume this list, or do you prefer me to wait for an explicit greenlight ?
Go for it, think I learned all I needed to from it.

Working on this this morning, still kinda tricky deciding which way to guard against it, at least one of the fixes is really tedious but I might just try it.



Okay, after some moderately annoying manual data normalization work, I've implemented unique keys across both movie tables (don't ask, the perils of building out an entire system before TMDB was a thing). This is similar to the solution I mentioned earlier, which involves not really fixing all the thorny logic but simply refusing to add new database entries with certain values if they exist already.

I think this should have the same effect, though, and I think I've plugged all the holes, but I guess we'll find out soon enough. Please let me know ASAP if you have a recurrence of the bug in question. If you do, it'll probably mean I sit down and rewrite that code entirely.



Bump! Two things:

First, any of the problems above repeated since? Hopefully not!

Second, just made a small tweak so people can't create lists without confirming their email address, just because I noticed some spammy ones (they'll be deleted, of course, and otherwise invisible anyway). Mentioning it just in case I messed up and some of you legitimate users can't do something now.



I'll take that as a good sign that nothing has recurred, huzzah.

Small feature update: under List Settings, you can now choose from preset list layouts. One where the top film gets a big banner (the default, at least for now), a plain text list, all posters, or just the top eight getting posters. The idea is to give you more control over how to display your lists, since shorter lists would probably work better with more artwork and longer ones are probably better with more text.

I plan to add more and/or tweak these (biggest question: should there be a text list below the images either way, or should the text list below just be the things that DIDN'T get represented via banner or posters?), and the dream scenario is to have an elaborate drag-and-drop, mix-and-match kind of system, but we'll see.

At minimum I should be able to add a few more variants to this general formula.



Also answers to Jabba
@Yoda one thing I have noticed is that when you click on a film in your list, although it is stricken out, it doesn't save your choice. This behavior is very different from the way the site handles non-custom lists. Is that by design?