Changed position of Submit button

It looks like if something in the form triggers a warning, clicking Submit still doesn't submit but returns the form with warnings. Only once warnings have been acknowledged does submitting actually work.

As Phil says below it may be useful to look through the form after everything is green, but I can accept that it is not always necessary.

Peter,

The problem for me is that if everything is green but I need to add a new writer or something, I'm going to increase the number of writers and then hit submit which will submit everything else and I will have to go back and submit a second edit.

Thanks Peter, it's good to know that it won't actually submit (I wasn't going to intentionally try to submit bad data to test that!). But playing a guessing game with a button that may or may not work while it cheerfully contradicts the form's claim that it's not ready to submit yet.... that's just bad design.

And although there may be cases where a final check with everything green isn't needed, is there any case where it was actually a problem?

Peter & Phil,

That is the way that the submit button has always worked. It will submit if no errors/warnings but will do a recheck, basically, if there are. 

Phil, I can't see that it is an actual problem unless IMDb is trying to cut down on traffic to the site by unnecessary roundtrips. I can't imagine for an Amazon company this is an actual issue, but I'm not privy to their cost, traffic loading, etc.

Yes, but the submit button is now present on pages where it wasn't before.

I suppose it varies from one contributor to the next, but if traffic is actually an issue, for me the biggest gain would be to automatically show the 'explain' field for every item: that would save numerous re-checks (and much button-ticking) per submission rather than just one at the end.

I actually posted it as a bug because I kept getting a screen that looked like the update screen but with no edit boxes. There was no indication that I had actually hit "submit" instead of "re-check" because it doesn't take you to the normal submit screen (since there was nothing to submit).

I did that too. It took me a while to realize what I did wrong even though I had already read this thread.

I was hoping that it was an unintended side-effect of something else, and not a deliberate design decision. An announcement and consultation with contributors before doing this would have been helpful.

If the tech team insist that change is necessary (and I'm not convinced it is), I'd suggest making it a much more radical change to help defeat our habits. Perhaps move the buttons to the right-hand-side of the page to help overcome muscle-memory, and/or make the submit button a different colour so we notice it more. But only if reverting to the old design is not an option for some reason.

In my opinion, the submit button absolutely must be disabled (and either removed or visually indicate that it's disabled) as it used to be, whenever the submission is invalid (either due to warnings/errors or nothing changed, etc). That final check through the form after everything is green is hugely valuable, please do not allow skipping that step.

I also very much hope that the fact that this thread is marked 'answered' does not have its usual meaning of 'any further discussion here will be ignored'.

This is an atrocious change.  It greatly contributes to possible mistakes.  Apparently, the decision was made to expedite the speed of accepting submissions, without acknowledging that it also greatly encourages acceptance of misinformation.  

Sadly, expediency has once again won a misbegotten victory over accuracy.

This is an ill-thought-out decision that needs to be reversed. I had hope that IMDb would be more thoughtful.  Please, return the buttons to their previous position.

The previous and much superior stationing of the buttons was definitely NOT "a round trip," but a check for accuracy.  Isn't accuracy a goal?

There are so many other issues that need addressing that I am surprised IMDb would do something that contributes to destroying its integrity.

I'm not even sure what the goal is here. I use the recheck so I can get rid of warnings as I go instead of having 20-50 boxes to check at one time.

Phil G says

"I was hoping that it was an unintended side-effect of something else, and not a deliberate design decision. An announcement and consultation with contributors before doing this would have been helpful."

I have given up hoping that IMDB staff will consult its army of contributors before embarking on its hare-brained changes. It makes changes unilaterally and then acts all surprised when people complain. I feel very sorry for the official spokespeople who are put in the position of trying to defend the indefensible.

I'd like to see IMDB consult far more with its contributors before it rolls out changes that affect everyone. Perhaps this could be done by having an alternative URL (eg beta.imdb.com) which applies a proposed change that is invisible to the normal www.imdb.com site and to which contributors (who subscribe to a mailing list) are alerted: "We've got this great idea for an improvement. These are what we think are the benefits, but go to the beta site and give it a try, and let us have constructive comments. We'll bear them in mind and maybe take them into account before going live on the general release version of the site."

I have got used to IMDB making changes which it is not willing to reverse, despite "hey, I was using that" comments. One that I still feel very bitter about is the removal of the "Episode Cast" list for a TV series which listed all episodes and the cast of each one on a single page, and which therefore made it very easy to check for changes in that page at a glance (by saving an older version of the page and running WinDiff against a current version of it). I've caught a number of cases where an actor's credits have disappeared altogether (I remember it happened to Jim Norton (I)) and seeing lots of changes to episodes that were broadcast long ago and which are probably unlikely to change frequently, is a good indication that "something nasty has happened". But this important checking tool disappeared.


Looking at this specific change. I can't actually see what the benefit is. If you have any outstanding warnings or errors, you get presented with a page that has no data at all (as if you had done a "Re-check" without selecting "Correct" for any of the drop-down fields) which is a lot less informative than presenting a page with all the data in various colours according to whether it passes or fails validation. As far as I can see, it doesn't let you submit the data any sooner - it just gives you less feedback about what is wrong. :-(  In that sense it is worse than the previous system.

Quite apart from whether the Submit button is always present and enabled, the position of the buttons should not have been altered - for two reasons:

• we are used to the way it was, and instinctive muscle-memory takes a lot of unlearning when something like this is changed
  
  
• the previous order was a logical left-to-right in increasing order of "force", starting with applying validation on the submission so far, then going on to saving the data in case of power cuts etc, and then finally submitting the data when you are happy that it has passed all validation

The new order is neither in ascending nor descending order of force (it would have been better to put them in the right-to-left order submit, save, check). I suppose it has about as much sense as the American order of dates MM/DD/YY, rather than the UK DD/MM/YY (ascending order of significance) or the European/ISO YY/MM/DD (descending order of significance).


As with other wacky off-the-wall changes that IMDB have forced on us, it makes life more difficult, for no good reason, and will make life harder for contributors. I hope IMDB are geared up for a much larger number of submissions, where people have accidentally submitted a half-completed set of updates which will then require a second submission to complete all the things that were not entered onto the form because it was submitted prematurely.

Where it becomes particularly annoying is when a brand new title is being created, because once you have submitted it in its part-completed form, you cannot submit the rest of the data that you were about to until the title has been created, which might take a few hours or even a few days.

If IMDB insist on making the Submit button the left-most, then it should be a different colour and separated more widely than other buttons (save, check) are. Anything to make it as obvious as possible that despite many years of experience to the contrary, this is the submit button in its new location.

Incidentally, I don't agree with right-justifying the buttons. I tend to use IMDB in a window that fills half the width of my screen, with the other half running a listings web site or a VLC video-player window - source window and destination window. And even on a 1920x1080 screen, a half-width IMDB window omits some of the controls on the right hand side - such as the Previous (episode) and Next (episode) controls, so it is necessary to scroll the page sideways and the scroll it back afterwards. I'd like to see all action and navigation controls towards the left hand side of the page so avoid the need to scroll sideways.


I hope people will agree that, while disagreeing with what IMDB have done, I'm trying to make my criticism as constructive as possible.

I wanted to highlight 2 of the best points Martin made:

If IMDB insist on making the Submit button the left-most, then it should be a different colour and separated more widely than other buttons (save, check) are. 

Since the buttons are still on the left, I'm not sure why he made this point, but I definitely agree:

Incidentally, I don't agree with right-justifying the buttons. I tend to use IMDB in a window that fills half the width of my screen, with the other half running a ... source window ... a half-width IMDB window omits some of the controls on the right hand side ... so it is necessary to scroll the page sideways and the scroll it back afterwards. I'd like to see all action and navigation controls towards the left hand side of the page so avoid the need to scroll sideways.

bderoes, I half-heartedly suggested moving the buttons to the right, that's probably what Martin was responding to. I don't particularly want the buttons to move, I was just trying to find some way for it to shout out "this has changed" to help us avoid clicking the wrong button based on remembered position (because let's be honest, how often does anyone really read the text on the buttons?)

I can definitely agree with everyone on this one. "Round trips" are a very much necessary part of re-checking the submission before making it. So far I'm pretty sure that only increased a number of incomplete and unchecked submissions. 

This feature should have been at least tested before being implemented, in my humble opinion. If someone complained about "round trips" these people probably spend less time on their submissions resulting in their submission lacking quality.

Martin:

If you have any outstanding warnings or errors, you get presented with a page that has no data at all

I don't see this. I tried with yellow warnings and red rejections, and clicking submit just returns the same page again. But if you experience it, it might help IMDb to have a specific example.

I saw the page without data boxes when I accidentally hit submit before having entered any edits, as Adrian noted above.

When I say "no data" I meant "no data boxes" - just lots of explanatory text.

So if you press Submit instead of Check by accident, you see a "blank" (no data boxes) page and then have to press Check to see what's wrong. How is having to press two buttons better than just requiring you to press the Check button as you would when you were gradually fixing the yellow/red warnings?

I don't actually see the benefit. Are there any situations where pressing Submit will allow you to submit anything any sooner than if you press Check: you still have to fix the warnings before the Submit button will actually send the submission.

It would be better if the Submit button had the same effect as the Check button if there are any warnings - ie that it produced a full list of the submission, showing any outstanding warnings. That would actually be doing something useful.


If the developers are looking for things to change and enhance, I've got a suggestion for something which would be far more useful: when you are submitting new cast and correcting/adding credit orders for exsiting cast, it would be very useful if there was a way of generating a list of cast, sorted by credit order (new or changed), so you could see at a glance whether there are any gaps or duplicates in the numbering. That would allow you to answer truthfully the statement "I have verified that there are no unnecessary double numbers in the order sequence" when issuing a cast-complete attribute for a title.

I've raised this as a separate suggestion so it is more visible and can be discussed on its own: https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/suggested-enhancement-to-form-validation-list-of-cast-in-cre...

I understood what you said, but it is still not the experience I had while testing the form.

Are there any situations where pressing Submit will allow you to submit anything any sooner than if you press Check: you still have to fix the warnings before the Submit button will actually send the submission.

Yes there were, if there were no warning or rejection messages. For instance, I opened the form to add keywords, entered keywords in boxes and then clicked submit.

I did not submit anything while the new behaviour was in place but the descriptions I have read here suggest that if check would have given you all green items then submit would submit them immediately thus saving a round trip if that was all you intended to do.

This time last year I was submitting a lot of crew credits to episodes, usually where someone had already submitted the cast. I preferred to go through the whole of the on screen credits before submitting but would check at least whenever I added a name directly rather than using the list of credits from previous episodes. It would have been very irritating to accidentally submit especially when all I really wanted to do was increase the number of items I could add to a section.

On that topic, being able to add more items without having to change the add n items dropdown and go round the check would have been a much more useful way to reduce the number of cycles. Also being able to select both correct and add in one step so that I could see any existing credits when adding more.

I can see the attraction of the change for those submitting a single item but it becomes less attractive for larger submissions. Unfortunately this conflicts with my desire to incrementally increase the number of items rather than having to give a size up front.

Yes I tend to go round the loop several/many times when adding a lot of different cast and crew to a title. Sometimes I use "Check" but often nowadays I use "Save" which makes sure that I have commited the changes so they can always be recovered a) if I have a power cut (with a lot of building work going on at home over the past few weeks, that's been all too common, and our village has had more than its fair share of brief power interruptions due to "high voltage feed problems"), b) if I accidentally hit the "Close" (X) button on the browser instead of the Minimise/Maximise (_) button (BTDTGTT!)

When I think I've added everything to the submission, I do one final Check to make sure I haven't caused any new errors since the last time I did a Check, got a "green light", and therefore enabled the Submit button.

I tend to group together items which will all be published at about the same time, so I can "cross off" those submissions in one go when I do my "has this submission be published yet" check which triggers me to move the email from the "pending" to the "published" email folder. For example, if I'm updating lots of "quick" details about a person (eg marriage, trivia) I tend to keep those in a separate submission to the one which adds/corrects date of birth/death, since those take longer to be published, and I prefer them not to delay me being able to move trivia/marriage into the "published" folder. In the old days I printed all the emails and crossed-out parts as I found that they had been published.

I'm probably a bit obsessive, but I keep all the submission emails going back several years, in case I need to refer to them. If I spot an odd-looking character name for a title that I submitted several years ago, I can go back to it and see what I submitted at the time: if someone else has recently made a change and I know that I certified "cast complete" then I start to get suspicious and try to check whether it was my long-ago submission or the recent one which was wrong.

Perhaps we should start another thread where we describe our workflows, and see who is the most thorough - or borderline OCD!