Col_Needham's profile
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Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

Monday, January 1st, 2018 8:01 AM

IMDb Top 250 Data Contributors for 2017

Included below is our end-of-year message to IMDb's top 250 data contributors for 2017. 

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to IMDb -- every data contribution helps. If anyone outside of the top 250 would like to know their 2017 (only) live item total and position in the complete list, please post a reply here and, for a limited time, we will try to let you know.

Happy New Year 2018 from IMDb! 

[sorry for any errors in the format due to cut-and-paste into Get Satisfaction; a clean copy is also available via the IMDb home page today at http://www.imdb.com/best-of/col-needham-letter-2018/]

Introduction and Thanks

Welcome to the 23rd edition of our end-of-year message to IMDb's top data contributors. A year in which we celebrated IMDb's 27th birthday and in which we saw a record number of data contributions. In addition to sending this letter to our Top 250 contributors, it will now be distributed to everyone who contributed data in 2017. If this is your first time reading, I am IMDb's Founder & CEO and you can catch up on old editions of the letter here, as well as follow IMDb’s progress in our press room.

We could just write "thank you" some several tens of millions of times, once for every new update you contributed in 2017, however, in this letter we like to draw attention to some of the achievements across the year. Let's start with an individual "thank you" for everything you have personally contributed - we could not do it without you - every data contribution is important, whether you are in the Top 250 or whether you made only one update.

We have continued to build new features across IMDb’s website & mobile applications and we recently completed a major technology upgrade which will significantly increase the pace of developments in 2018 and beyond for our 250+ million monthly visitors worldwide. We are thrilled to see IMDb content in use outside of the IMDb platform, particularly at our parent company of (nearly) 20 years, Amazon.com. You will see IMDb content weaved throughout the Amazon Video experience, and IMDb is powering more of the entertainment questions via voice interfaces on Alexa devices too (especially try the fun MovieBot skill).


The Numbers

The table at the end of this message shows the number of approved, non-duplicate data items which the Top 250 have contributed in 2017, including corrections and deletions. A new record of nearly 500,000 different people in turn contributed a record volume of data in 2017. Even though contribution volumes have increased and the database is more complete, we still made significant reductions in the time between submission and publication, expanding our weekend and international teams in the process.

IMDb now includes:

  • Over 4.8 million titles with over 650,000 added in 2017
  • Nearly 8.8 million names with over 700,000 added in 2017
  • Over 93 million filmography credits with over 12 million added in 2017
  • Over 6.8 million images, 3.4 million videos and 3.5 million customer reviews

More statistics are available in the press room.

The minimum number of items required to be in the top 250 contributors exceeded 12,000.


Progress

... From a contributor perspective by Thomas Porter ...

Another exciting year end, another Star Wars movie to argue about (yes, that is three references for three years in a row but who's counting?) and another trip down memory lane to look back at all the contribution-related changes and improvements. It has been quite a year...

Last year we celebrated processing 90% of contributions within 24 hours from the point of submission. In 2017 we upped this to 95% within 24 hours and took a new goal to make sure none of the remaining 5% waited more than 5 days to be processed. We care deeply about this service level and we've had a lot of positive feedback following our focus to improve it. Don’t forget, earlier this year we launched a new processing times page so you can keep an eye on progress.

We're also proud to have continued to handle 95% of your customer service contacts within 24hrs. Regulars on Get Satisfaction will have noticed all the new staff faces announcing changes and answering questions quickly, and of course we're all familiar with and eternally grateful to our Champions. Special thanks to you all for making the community so invaluable. In an effort to improve our customer service even further we also launched https://help.imdb.com/ - our new help hub centralizing submission guides, FAQs and help content in one handy place.

Speedy service was not the only focus. Speed of data availability has been super-charged over the past few years and 2017 welcomed in one of the final non-rapidly published areas of IMDb; the submission interface. Now, instead of having to wait up to 1-2 days for the submission interface to update following a data change, contributors can submit a subsequent change almost immediately (add episodes to a just-published TV series, for example). Long-time contributor Marco put it neatly: 'Just when I thought processing of contributions couldn't be faster :)'. We also (just) launched suggestion search for Titles and Companies within the new title submission form, which should make it a lot easier and faster to find the right pages.

One large piece of work spread out over the year has been replacing the technology stack known as 'Swiki', previously home to a handful of wiki-style un-vetted data types with submissions limited to a pre-approved whitelist of contributors. In its place we've launched brand new experiences for Characters, Title FAQs, Parents Guides and a new Plot page combining Synopsis with Outlines and Summaries. While we have had to say goodbye to or temporary pause some of the old page features, importantly all contributed data to these data types now benefit from the same contribution experience, vetting process and rapid publish as standard. For many of the same reasons we also rebuilt the old User Review contribution pipeline coinciding with the new Review sub page launch, and changed the supported formats for creating links within contributions.

While the benefits are not always immediately obvious, deprecating this old technology represents significant progress for the future of contribution, enabling us to focus on building bigger and better experiences next year and beyond. Thanks so much for your continued patience and support while we got to this point.

Now we're in this position, there has never been a better time to get involved on Get Satisfaction to provide your feedback and ideas to help shape that future. From contribution feature requests (like this one to have more control over primary title images, which we built and announced here earlier this year) to data policy discussions (like this announcement of our Motion Capture Cast policy) so we keep our guidelines fresh and in line with the ever evolving industry - whatever you want to discuss, we want to hear it.

So, thanks a million again to the Champs, the contributors, the Beta testers and the Get Satisfaction community. I know I speak on behalf of the entire IMDb Content team when I say it's a real pleasure to work alongside you all. See you in 2018!

Thomas Porter
Manager - IMDb Database Content


... From a customer perspective by Col Needham ...

We remain true to our original vision of gathering and organizing the largest collection of entertainment information and making it available on a wide variety of platforms. Our aim is to be the first thought for all of your entertainment information needs, whether you are a deep fan, a casual consumer, or an entertainment industry professional.

The rhythm of the entertainment industry comes from festivals, awards and the release of new movies and TV shows across the year. There is literally never a dull moment here. Our team brings coverage of these to you as they happen, increasingly with live video. New in 2017 were: our viewing party for The Oscars; an expanded IMDb studio space at The Sundance Film Festival; a bigger presence at San Diego Comic-Con; our interview studio at The Toronto International Film Festival; and our live show at New York Comic-Con. In 2018 you will see more video on IMDb and more of it live with improved playback and device compatibility.

The IMDb STARmeter awards were presented at various events to Peter Dinklage, Stan Lee, Tatiana Maslany, Sverrir Gudnason and Sam Rockwell. The award is based upon actual traffic to IMDb so every page you visit effectively forms part of the vote. Your visits to IMDb also define many of the lists in our Best Of 2017 section - thank you there too.

Finally in editorial, special thanks are due to our wonderful and active poll community whose often fun and always inventive polls appear across the IMDb sites and apps throughout the year. For poll fans, we also have a growing number of FanIQ quizzes.

One of the things which makes working at IMDb exciting for me is the way we are always improving the services and features offered to our customers, even beyond the continuous (by the second) growth in the content available. We have the main site, a mobile site, the iOS app, the Android app, the IMDbPro site, the IMDbPro iPhone app, Withoutabox and Box Office Mojo. All of these sit on top of our 250+ million item database. This means we almost never run the same software on two consecutive days (or these days, two consecutive hours). To better manage all of this complexity and to allow us to make even faster progress in future, a big focus during 2017 has been to complete the move to our new technology platform. We announced this on Get Satisfaction and we appreciated your patience while we completed this work.

The technology update does mean some temporary feature losses on the IMDb site in much the same way you would prune a garden to enable future growth. We will work on the highest impact items early in 2018 at speed, since everything is now on the same modern software system. We already simplified, replaced or updated over 200 different features or software systems, including several major ones to achieve this goal. Two of the more visible enhancements which launched late in 2017 are: support for list editing on the Android app; and the addition of all user reviews to our mobile apps instead of the previous tiny subset. This is in addition to the resolution of countless bugs in the old systems plus the implementation of many feature requests gathered in the ideas section of Get Satisfaction over the years.

We are particularly pleased with the progress on our mobile apps in 2017 and you can read release notes or reviews in the iOS and Android stores. We will continue to work on creating simple, fast, and easy features which are as consistent as possible between the various IMDb web sites and apps.

One of our goals is to make advertising units which our customers will love. If you are located in the UK or US, you may have seen our updated enhanced title pages, with Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) being team favourites.

On IMDbPro we have launched a steady stream of features and updates, including: the ability to manage featured images on IMDb/IMDbPro/Amazon Video; an easier resume data management system; streamlined news; improved box office; easier sign-up with Amazon Payments; and the much-requested IMDbPro iPhone app.

Our film festival submissions platform, Withoutabox, welcomed new festivals including Tribeca, The LA Film Festivals and (local to us) The Bristol Encounters Short Film Festival, as well as continuing to represent major festivals such at The Sundance Film Festival, The Toronto International Film Festival and The Edinburgh International Film Festival. We added new search options for filmmakers and improved judging and management tools for festivals are now launching.

Overall it has been a busy year for updates and one which has also seen a record number of new customers registering with IMDb. Thanks to our growing international community, we now have over 200,000 Indian movie, TV, and celebrity pages on IMDb. We have observed strong growth in our user base from India, and are happy to see strong engagement with our trending feature. This helps fans stay up to date on the global movies and TV shows trending in India, as well as the most anticipated Indian movies. We have grown our presence on social media and hopefully many of you are enjoying our regular email program which will become more customized in 2018. We added ticketing options via Atom Tickets in summer, with fun features such as the ability to order drinks and snacks to be ready-made for collection upon arrival at the cinema. IMDb data is becoming more alive via the addition of features such as soundtrack samples too. Finally, after 26 years in operation, we are moving the public IMDb data from FTP to an Amazon S3 and https replacement service.

We are looking forward to a fabulous 2018 and to serving you better as both contributors to and customers of the IMDb data. If you would like to join our team or have friends or contacts with the very particular set of skills we are seeking, please keep an eye on our jobs page where we are regularly recruiting in Bristol or London in the UK and Seattle, Santa Monica or New York City in the US.


Thanks and Feedback

In recognition of your contributions, as usual, we are offering everyone in the Top 250 contributors free access to IMDbPro for all of 2018. [Separate instructions have already been emailed to the Top 250].

Thanks again for all your support during the year. As always, ideas and constructive feedback are welcome via Get Satisfaction.

We wish you a Happy New Year!

Col Needham
IMDb Founder and CEO, on behalf of the whole IMDb Team

[the actual list will be posted in the Contributor Zone Hall of Fame within the next day or so; a copy of this letter, including the list, will also be emailed to every 2017 contributor]

8.3K Messages

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174.5K Points

7 years ago

IMDb Top 250 Data Contributors for 2017
Posted 2 days ago (Jan 1 2018)
by Col Needham, Official Rep

- - -



A few Users here ask for their numbers

Profile pages have ... (for example)

Col Needham
IMDb member since October 1990
Founder and CEO of IMDb.
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur1000000/

Lifetime Total: 10,000+
Lifetime Name: 150+
Lifetime Filmo: 2,500+
Lifetime Plot: 10+
Lifetime Bio: 10+
Lifetime Trivia: 500+
Lifetime Title: 250+
Lifetime Image: 1,000+

Ratings: 10,760 titles
Lists: 177
Watchlist: 363 Titles
Check-Ins: 3,426 Titles
Reviews: 1 Review

Could IMDb add the Count for all the world to see on Your page and other Top Contributors for ...

Top Contributor 2015
Top Contributor 2014
Top Contributor 1995
Top Contributor 1996
Top Contributor 1997
Top Contributor 2010

Top 250 2015
Top 250 2014
Top 250 2013
Top 250 2012
Top 250 2011
Top 250 2010
Top 250 2009
Top 250 2008
Top 250 2007
Top 250 2006
Top 250 2005
Top 250 2004
Top 250 2003
Top 250 2002
Top 250 2001


17 Messages

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354 Points

7 years ago

I just wanna known, any other IMDB user managed to be in Top Contributor in his first two years?

Champion

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4K Messages

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244.1K Points

I've seen some people in 2015 and 2016 being pleasantly surprised by making it in their first year but it is likely a rare occurence. I'm on IMDb since 2010 and only first  made it to Top 250 in 2015. 

2.7K Messages

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82.6K Points

any other IMDB user managed to be in Top Contributor in his first two years?
These things happen sometimes. An example I just happened across: http://www.imdb.com/user/ur81457216/. She's only been on IMDb for two months now and has already added/corrected/deleted over 50,000 items!!

227 Messages

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4.4K Points

I have been a member of IMDb for 18 years, but was only a Top Contributor for the last 15 of them.

9 Messages

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310 Points

7 years ago

Hi!
May I ask what place I have this year? Thanks!

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

You were #987 with 2,446 items, thanks!

16 Messages

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424 Points

7 years ago

Happy New Year, Col.
Can I bother you for my ranking as well. (kappa88).
I was really looking forward to make it to Top 250. Fingers crossed for next year.
Thanks.

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

You just missed out at #263 with 11,524 items, thanks!

2 Messages

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90 Points

7 years ago

From scanning the previous replies I see I'm not the only one to get tripped up by opting out of Informational Emails. It seems many of us came to the same logical conclusion that the phrase "you will still receive transactional emails, such as information about your account" meant we would still get the year-end announcement about where our accounts ranked for the year. I also saw the comment that you are already looking at changing the system to make this clearer and/or prevent it from happening next year. So, thanks in advance.

For now I've changed my Email Preferences. Since I made the top 250, can you please resend the year-end notice and info about free IMDbPro access that I missed.

Thanks and Happy New Year.

13 Messages

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418 Points

7 years ago

First of all, pleased to be in the top contributors for the second year in a row. Although Col is not kidding when he says you needed for the first time, over 12000 contributions to make it in the top 250.
Through the badges, you can more or less guess where you are at, but you are never really sure if it will be enough to make it to the top 250. I would like to suggest an indicator on our userpage with the total number of approved items so far (updated every 2 weeks, for example). It would also be great, if you could see it per category (number of images that year, number of filmography items,... and so on). That would really give us, contributors, a good view as to where we stand.

Let's hope for another year filled with great movies.

Happy New Year to Col, the entier IMDb team and all of the contributors.

39 Messages

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852 Points

7 years ago

Please let me know what my ranking was. I was a little surprised I was not in the top 250 like I was in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. My user name is "hatoju".

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

Have you opted out of email communications from either IMDb or Amazon?

Otherwise you should have received the email as you were #72 with 40,711 items, thanks (https://contribute.imdb.com/czone/hall_of_fame#top2017)

39 Messages

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852 Points

I have not opted out. I also checked my trash. No email there regarding the Top 250.

320 Messages

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7.1K Points

7 years ago

I doubt that I ranked in anything significantly, but I am curious. http://www.imdb.com/user/ur30023226/?ref_=nb_usr_prof_0

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

You did well ... #1,805 with 1,183 items, thanks!

320 Messages

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7.1K Points

:)

45 Messages

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676 Points

7 years ago

I am VERY curious to find out what my total and ranking was for 2017 please?  I was TOP 250 for 2012, 2013, and 2014, but not since then.  However, those three TOP 250 years alone added up to 64,896 entries, which put me on the Hall of Fame/lifetime top 250 list, at #217, with 69,090 items, but as best as I can tell, that list does not include the numbers for 2017, why is that?

Also, are there any tips and tricks for making huge numbers of entries?  I can't even comprehend how someone could post 250,000 or more in one year, much less this year's #1 contributor, inespape-1, who posted 3007815 entries for 2017 alone! How does someone manage to do that?

Thanks!
TrivWhiz

45 Messages

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676 Points

I certainly post keywords as much as are appropriate, along with lots of data.  It is still incomprehensible to me for someone to contribute 250,000 pieces of data per year and keep their sanity!

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

You were #632 with 4,329 items, thanks (and sorry for the delay ... busy week).

45 Messages

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676 Points

Thank you.  I thought I had a lot more than that, must have been a mental illusion on my part.  LOL

398 Messages

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9.4K Points

7 years ago

Since my post about the filters was deleted,at least tell me how did my contributions fared?

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

Your post was moved to the correct thread, rather than being deleted. 

Please can you let us know which page loads when you visit www.imdb.com/profile as the email you used to register here has no contributions on IMDb.com?

2.7K Messages

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82.6K Points

7 years ago

[the actual list will be posted in the Contributor Zone Hall of Fame within the next day or so; a copy of this letter, including the list, will also be emailed to every 2017 contributor]
I assume the letter will also be added to this page: https://contribute.imdb.com/czone/top_msg?

Also, can you reword the second sentence "This message later gets posted on the Contributors Help message board" into something like "This message later gets shared with the contributor community"?

181 Messages

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4.8K Points

Thanks Marco, this has been updated now.

Champion

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4.3K Messages

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88.6K Points

7 years ago

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Getting connected.

I was in the top 250 of contributors this year and received an email relaying this information, but never got anything explaining how I could access my free Pro account. I tried posting about this on Col's top 250 thread but haven't received a response. Help?

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

Hopefully resolved below now but please let us know if not. 

Champion

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3K Messages

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72.5K Points

Hey Col,

I still haven't received the email. Was it re-sent? I didn't get the top 250 email either but I am on the list.

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

Yes, we obtained approval to email everyone and sent it yesterday. The text is as above and is also on https://contribute.imdb.com/czone/top_msg  minus the IMDbPro instructions which I will resend you now directly.

Champion

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4.3K Messages

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88.6K Points

Still haven't gotten anything.

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

I am not sure what to suggest here, sorry.  We have emailed you at least once and possibly twice via the general system. I have emailed you directly myself.  It sounds like you have some crazy aggressive spam filters.  Do you have my email covering 2016 handy? Perhaps if you reply to that and then I reply to you, it might make it through your spam filters. 

Champion

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3K Messages

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72.5K Points

I would suggest using an email account with Google or a similar provider. I did not receive Col's initial email through my Roadrunner account (which is my ISP). Similarily, I stopped receiving emails from Get Satisfaction on that same account. I think they are blocking them at the ISP level because they do not even show up in my spam folder.

When I change my Get Satisfaction account to my Gmail account, things started working again. Also, Col re-sent the notification to my Gmail account and I got it the second time.

Champion

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4.3K Messages

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88.6K Points

Col,

I just responded to the 2013 year totals email. Hope that works so you can respond back with the Pro info.

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

Thanks.  I just replied with a copy of the message, details towards the end of the email. 

Champion

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4.3K Messages

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88.6K Points

It worked. Thanks.

1 Message

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60 Points

joeri

45 Messages

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676 Points

7 years ago

OOPS!

I am VERY curious to find out what my total and ranking was for 2017 please?

Thanks!

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

Now answered above, thanks. 

45 Messages

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676 Points

7 years ago

Hi Col-

Is there some reason why you have not answered my inquiries about what my total contributions and ranking were for 2017?   I have actually asked you three times, once by private e-mail to you (because like some of the others here, I did not receive the regular end of the year notification, plus I had not yet found this thread), and then, after finding it, two other times in this thread.  I hope that I asked politely, I did say please each time, but so far, there have been no replies from you at all.  Since you have always answered my messages (and e-mails) in the past, I can't help but feel like I might have done (or said) something wrong? 

So, I would like to please ask one more time.  I am VERY curious to find out what my total contributions and ranking was for 2017 please.  Could you PLEASE share those numbers with me?  Thank you!

Kind regards,

TrivWhiz

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

Now answered above, thanks. 

Champion

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4.8K Messages

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98.5K Points

7 years ago

Col,

Can you please tell me my position in 2017 contributors' list, if possible? I was not in top 250.

Employee

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7.2K Messages

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177.8K Points

You were #802 with 3,269 items, thanks!

Champion

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4.8K Messages

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98.5K Points

Thank you.

DC