External Review Title Rejected, Why?

I frequently add external reviews for films in IMDb.

I started recently a project called "0 Absents from Movie Nights" where I watch a movie every night, I review them, then add the link.

The title I've added is formatted in this way: 0 Absents From Movie Night: Movie Title (Movie Year) [Writer's Name]

What I got:

Declined

Reason: Badly Formatted.

Your contribution has been declined. Your contribution did not meet our formatting standards. Please review our submission guides.

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Since then, I've tried to shuffle words here and there, and it gets rejected every time. I even started to use the old formatting that I used for more than a year successfully, and it got rejected. I didn't find anything in the submission guide that speaks for this.

What's wrong with this format?

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Fran

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9 days ago

Hello argman,

Can you help us posting the 18-digits submission reference number for the contribution.

You can find the submission number in the Contribution History page.

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gromit82

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9 days ago

argman: I am not certain, but I see a couple of issues here.

If you look at an External Reviews page such as https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12042730/externalreviews/ you will see that the description is given as:

Website Name [Writer's Name]

and the title and year of the film are not included in the description.

Examples:

Always Good Movies [Filipe Freitas]
Amazing Cinema [Daniele Buzzurro]

The title and year of the film are already taken into account by the fact that you are submitting your review to the page for that particular film. No colon is needed in the description, either.

The other concern I have is that your project is titled as "0 Absents from Movie Nights". By beginning your description with a zero, some contributors might think that you are trying to push your reviews to appear at the top of each list of external reviews. (Digits precede the letter A on those lists.) If this really is the title of your website, I could accept that, but I would want to see the website to see if that is really true.

(edited)

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argman

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@gromit82 Thank you for the answer.

1- I always write the movie's name and its year, I have +100 reviews accepted with that format, why only now?

2- I write my articles in Medium, always have been, never once did I add "Medium" as a website, and they were always accepted. As you know, it is not necessary to have a certain "blog name" per say in Medium, it is just my own name, I can't write My Name [My Name] as a title, because it will look goofy.

3- What can I do to overcome that? If I was to do that I would have done it 100 reviews earlier, I knew about this but I never pushed it. I have many projects other than "0 Absents From Movie Night" like "I challenge you to give me a movie I never watched anything like" which I populated on a reddit threads and I plan to add it as well, will that be accepted just because it doesn't have a 0 at the start of it?

Leaving out the fact that there is no grounds for them to just "assume" my intent, do you think if I wrote the project name in the article's title it would get it approved? I don't want to do that because the title would be VERY long and it would hurt my article(s) and my blog, but if that's what it takes! if there is a better way to communicate with these contributors that'll be good.

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9 days ago

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gromit82

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@argman:

With regard to the issue about including the movie title in the description, that is specifically addressed in the submissions guide at https://help.imdb.com/article/contribution/titles/links-to-external-sites/G3FNEK9DW6TXW87J#COM:

Remember: Don't include the film's title in the description.

With regard to titling your reviews as "0 Absents from Movie Night", that may be legitimate and should be allowed if that is really the title that your reviews appear under. However, I have seen other people manipulate the titles of their movie review sites in the past to be listed higher alphabetically. I don't even know if the description of your site starting with "0" has anything to do with why your reviews were declined, so perhaps I shouldn't even have brought that issue up.

(edited)

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9 days ago

Michelle

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8 days ago

Hi @argman -

Following-up on the call-outs from gromit82 above, I can confirm there were formatting issues with your submission.

Specifically, you contributed the description:

0 Absents From Movie Night: Steel Magnolias (1989) [Loay Tattan]

However, the description should be:

https://medium.com/@argman [cielo]

You are welcome to resubmit with the appropriate formatting and our editors will take another look.

Cheers!

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argman

External Review Title Rejected, Why?

Fran

gromit82

argman

gromit82

Michelle

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