If Ken were to come to you, and say that he would implement 3 changes (and only 3 changes)to the program in the next release, AND it was up to you to decide what those changes were,

What would they be?


Charlie

I'll try to stay in the realm of the reasonable, and ask for three things I think can be fairly easily implemented and would do a world of good immediately:

- Have the contribution system ignore parsing differences;

- Have the contribution system ignore capitalization differences;

- For TV sets, move the season/disc indicators out of the title field(s), leaving those free for just the show's actual title, which would allow the CLT to count those credits properly.


If, however, we're talking really wishful thinking here (thus: highly unlikely major overhaul), then I'd have to go for storing only one set of cast and crew for every film in the database, instead of dozens of them, spread over the various regions and localities. As it is today, the wheel has to be invented over and over again for each of the, say, 46 different profiles for a given title. Every time one of these profiles is updated with a common name shift, with a newfound and much-needed birth year, or an (uncredited) cast entry is documented, that's wonderful, but then there are still 45 profiles left that also need that change. It's just not going to happen. But if those 46 profiles shared the same cast and crew data, that wouldn't be a problem. And it would clear up the CLT numbers immensely: no more thousands of ill-maintained, IMDb-mined profiles in smaller localities messing up the CLT numbers: there'd be only one "master"-set of cast and crew that needs to be fixed, not 46 copies of it.

If Ken's question is about changes that are easy to implement :
1/ a tick box to represent correctly asian and stage names.
2/ a tool to browse headshots
3/ three fields for CoO
Not a change, just an update : complete the Master Translation Source File.

If Ken is ready for a complete rewriting :
1/ Fix linking system for names
2/ as synnerman suggested, complete customization : The ability to create fields (text or graphic), checkboxes, dropboxes, etc. so you can locally track any data you want.

Quoting Danae Cassandra:

Quote:

Also love, love, love T!M's big wish idea.

As for me, I see no improvement in that proposal. Linking problems  are for the same actors in different movies, not different representation of the same actor in different region/localities. Though it can happen, I think generally people have not many movies they own in different locations/editions.

Making a big change just to save our God CLT without any improvement on linking is a waste of time. We need a new common name concept, not a system that, as present, promotes creating spelling mistakes, the main source of broken links.

My top priorities would be:
1) a different name linking system, based on a single ID (other than birth year) for each actor or crew member;
2) an extra identifier (on top of UPC and Disc ID) in order to be able to profile multiple movies on a single disc side;
3) multiple cover images per profile.

And like Danae Cassandra, I really like T!M's wishful thinking!

Too lazy today to write myself so here's copy-pasted  :

1) T!M's wishful thinking, except it should go all the way through to separate movie and disc data. Not just Cast & Crew (CoO, Studios, Production Year etc.)
2) a different name linking system, based on a single ID (other than birth year) for each actor or crew member
3) an extra identifier (on top of UPC and Disc ID) in order to be able to profile multiple movies on a single disc side

Quoting T!M:

Quote:



If, however, we're talking really wishful thinking here (thus: highly unlikely major overhaul), then I'd have to go for storing only one set of cast and crew for every film in the database, instead of dozens of them, spread over the various regions and localities. As it is today, the wheel has to be invented over and over again for each of the, say, 46 different profiles for a given title. Every time one of these profiles is updated with a common name shift, with a newfound and much-needed birth year, or an (uncredited) cast entry is documented, that's wonderful, but then there are still 45 profiles left that also need that change. It's just not going to happen. But if those 46 profiles shared the same cast and crew data, that wouldn't be a problem. And it would clear up the CLT numbers immensely: no more thousands of ill-maintained, IMDb-mined profiles in smaller localities messing up the CLT numbers: there'd be only one "master"-set of cast and crew that needs to be fixed, not 46 copies of it.

I could get behind this, as long as there is a way of overriding and saving in online db, any variances that may occur.

Charlie

Nothing major for me

1) Attach the watched history on a profile using something simple like this


2) Use a single field for the cast/crew name in place of the actual three
3) a way to profile 2 movies on a dvd without creating a manual profile or using the seperator.

Contrary to some I've no problem with the linking system, it's easy to make it workable with very few adjustements in the personal database.