tservo2049's profile

11 Messages

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526 Points

Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 11:51 PM

Lots of fake animation credits

Here's something that has bugging me for a while. There's a ton of fake animation credits on IMDb, which I suspect might have all been submitted by the same person (or few people). Over the years I've been trying to manually delete them, I think they've been around for a while, but now I'm wondering if they could be traced and possibly undone without me having to go through and make manual submissions (which would also involve having to watch many of these titles, to verify which credits are real and which are fake)

Here's a particularly obvious example: A ton of fake credits on an episode of _"Homestar Runner" (2000)_, which was/is a Flash web cartoon done by just two people, Mike and Matt Chapman, and a couple of their friends. But someone added a ton of Hollywood animation crew members to a lot of episodes. Here's an example: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10746168/reference

I can tell that a good deal of these fake Homestar Runner credits were bulk copied from episodes of _"Alvin and the Chipmunks" (1983)_, this episode's (100% real) credits have a lot of the same names, with the same roles, as show up in those fake Homestar credits: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1227993/reference

There are also fake credits on episodes of _"Digimon: Digital Monsters" (1999)_, some of the same names show up, as well as others, see for example: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0560435/reference

There is also crossover with a lot of bogus credits on VeggieTales-related titles, see the Animation Department of this one: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284611/reference

Some of the people who have bogus credits also have fake credits on episodes of _"Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends" (1984)_, see the Animation Department: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7423810/reference (I'm noticing a lot of these bogus credits are for the occupation "sheet timer".)

I've been going through trying to manually delete stuff, but this is a tangled web. It also involves fake credits on Codename: Kids Next Door, Robotboy, old Humongous Entertainment and JumpStart educational computer games from the 90s, and possibly much more. (For example, I already removed similar fake credits, including names overlapping with these other fake credits, from episodes of Pokemon and Jay Jay the Jet Plane.) I have watched credits for some of the titles in question, some seem to have more fake names in the database than others, but I'm not familiar enough with all of them to instantly recognize how many of them are fake. I'd have to go back and find the credits for all these titles, which I can do, but it's a terrible mess to have to clean up manually.

(And some things, like the fake credits for 'Timothy J. Borquez' on the Thomas and VeggieTales stuff, would have to be deleted title by title because there's a glitch in the contribution system where lists of credits that are long enough will just ignore any requests to correct/delete credits far enough down the list. I'll re-check and they're back to Keep.) Timothy J. Borquez's Sound Department credits list is so big that if I get down into the T's or V's, this happens.)

Can it be determined who, for example, submitted fake credits for 'Marlene Robinson May' on all those VeggieTales titles? https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0562053/?ref_=tt_rv I have a strong suspicion these are all the work of the same person, since they involve many of the same names on overlapping titles.

Apologies for not asking about this sooner. These fake credits could date back to 2017, or even 2016. Can someone look into this? Thanks.

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755 Messages

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20.4K Points

5 years ago

Hi tservo2049

Thanks for the report.

As long as you provide any or as much evidence as you can with your corrections you should come up against little to no issues with your manual deletions submitted through the Edit Page button on the title pages.

Best of luck!