Issue with how Comma's are displaying.

I’m a bit confused about the ”Self” part. You appear as ”yourself” in some documentary etc? Or did you worked as a director for ”Main Title Sequence”?

Yes, I also use common sense when adding info from the ”second line” (let alone third, fourth etc). Not everything that is listed on-screen should be listed to IMDb. There are no ”rules” for that.

Hi, VonPunk:

I sincerely hope that this is just a bug.

I still remember when, years ago, the prohibition of using parentheses in character names was radical (except exclusively to identify the segment of the movie in which they appeared) and they were mostly replaced by hyphens. For example, 9 years ago I sent a contribution (120729-211052-459000) to correct the cast of the movie 7eventy 5ive (2007), in whose on-screen credits several characters have parentheses in their names. Today you can still see how those characters were stored then¹.

In the following years, even though that rule is still supposed to be in force, I have noticed how it has been relaxed, as the "exactly as they are on-screen" rule has become universal for most of the fields in our beloved database (in the past there were more exceptions or particular cases that had to be dealt with). And I started to notice the presence of correctly placed parentheses (if we stick to the credit titles) in character names of not precisely obscure or little known titles, but of renowned movies, which passed the editors' filter not only once (although these cases are theoretically scrutinized more closely), but possibly more than once (being known titles, someone would possibly notice the "mistake" and propose to change the parenthesis for a hyphen; being rejected).

Therefore, I began to assume that "parentheses should only be used to define segments" was one of those old rules that were still written in the guides because nobody had yet realized that it had to be rewritten according to the new code of standards, and I myself began to follow the norm (not written, but applied in practice) "if the name has parentheses in the credits, it will have them in the title page", and so far all the ones I have sent have been accepted (I haven't found many either, to be honest, since they are more abundant in documentaries and series, and I usually audit more films).

I have explained all the above because I have the impression that something similar happens with commas, that is, that the "exactly as on-screen" rule prevails. Moreover, as a final litmus test, 6 months ago I audited the cast of the episode Sante Kimes of the series "Diabolical Women" (2015), as part of the task of cleaning up a person's made-up profile, and I found two character names that contained both commas and parentheses and, as you can see, they processed without a hitch.

I take this opportunity to remember that the attribute (also archive footage) is still not displayed on the page, and this is a problem reported by @adrian (and interested by @Marco and @nikolay_yeriomin) that has been unresolved for almost 4 years (with a ticket supposedly open).

Therefore, since the trend is to go the "as on-screen"-route, I would not want commas in character names to be changed automatically and certainly would not support in any case the automatic change for a slash, as that would be aberrant in terms of data classification. I would certainly understand more scrutiny by the editor (e.g. mandatory screenshot) of that contribution before approval.

¹By the way, using the Wayback Machine, I see that sometime between 29 Aug 2013 and 2 Feb 2014, someone vandalized some character names and the order of most of the actors, I guess annoyed by the fact that the alphabetical order, which is the correct one in this case according to the on-screen titles, has relegated Rutger Hauer to position #13 and Gwendoline Yeo to the bottom of the list. I have sent 211106-144435-102000 to fix the order. However, I've always had a question: doesn't IMDb keep the images we submitted as evidence? I mean, in 2012 I included a Tinypic link (now resubmitted to Imgur) with the above capture to support the modifications I made (I bothered to merge the scrolling title captures to create a single image, including the order numbers) and in a quick way the data manager could have verified that the further changes were probably not correct, and returned the irritating "Unable to verify" which would have been appropriate at the time.

Hi VonPunk & All -

To help clarify the correct credit display, our policy to replicate exactly what is seen within the onscreen credits stands for the usage of comma's, and these credits should not have been replaced with parenthesis (we have specific rules where parenthesis are applicable, and they are not applicable in this instance).

I just reviewed the episode title page and can confirm that the cast credits are now correctly displaying the comma's.

If you continue seeing this problem re-occurring (where comma's are being replaced with slashes), post the 18-digit submission reference numbers here associated with the updates and I can investigate further.

Cheers!