New Contribution Feature Launch: "Track My Title"

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the feedback.  We are still collating feedback on the customer experience from within the new site, I've noted your request and will investigate potential options.

Cheers,

Rachel

Thank you. Your new title submission has been processed and approved for publication by our data editors. You can click on the link above to see it on the site.

where is the link??? :-)   The film is still not in the database ???
Best regards, Steff Gruber, Producer

Hi,

Could you post me your submission reference? I will be able to check what's happening with our internal tools.

Cheers,

Rachel

Rachel: I had a similar experience as Martin with submission no.
141216-030439-507000. In that case, I got a message that the title was "Approved for Publication" within two minutes after I submitted it. Of course, clicking on the link did not display an actual page for the title -- the Approved for Publication designation was too early.

On the other hand, by now, the title actually does have a page, so the situation has changed.

@Martin,

Do you have set 'Reference view' on your ordinary IMDb profile? If so, that is the culprit. All the old design pages (including Reference view and Combined view) are served from a database that lags a little to the rapid publish one.

@Rachel,

Think I'd hit a bug within the 'Track My Title' software. I'm contributing episodes for the same TV series (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3602666) from March this year. Before the launch of the TMT system, when a submitted episode were approved and published, it appeared in the right place by the episode number in the episode's sequence. Now, an approved and published episode (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4284242), having the correct season and episode number at the heading, had appeared as episode number 0 and isn't included in the total episodes count. The submission reference for this episode is 141216-034734-660000.
There is another submission not yet approved sent an hour ago, reference 141217-042851-090000 that may suffer the same bug.

Regards, Pedro.

Hi Pedro,

Thanks for the feedback and the information regarding the reference view, really useful.  I've just looked at your approved episode, and it does have a season (1) and episode number (156) on the episode page itself -> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4284242/ now.

Also, on the episode page -> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3602666/episodes?season=1 it is now located in the correct place (at the end).

I note that you posted this thread 3 hours ago, so in that time we have updated with the correct season/episode number in both locations.

To try and reproduce this though, I went to your pending episode 141217-042851-090000 (season 1/episode 157) and approved it. I refreshed the 'track my title' page and could see that it was approved and live -> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4287462/

I then refreshed the episode page (which took about 10 seconds) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3602666/episodes?season=1 and the episode was located in the correct position.

There can be a slight delay with data that is rapidly published, can you tell me how quickly you checked the episode page after you saw that the episode was approved.

If you come across another example, please to add it to this thread.

Cheers,

Rachel

Rachel: As a matter of interest, when a new episode with cast, writer, director and producer is submitted, are *all* these details published as rapidly as you describe, or is it only the "skeleton" of the episode (eg title, episode number) that is published initially, with cast/crew appearing later?

Using the reference view, I find that the skeleton appears in the daily build (ie in the evening of the day that the submission is made - UK time) and the rest of the data appears in the following night's build or the one after that.

When the full Tracking system is eventually released (ie for submissions other than titles) will it allow separate tracking and accountability for each piece of data within a submission or will it only be for the whole submission. Suppose I make a single submission for an existing title which contains cast and crew additions and alterations, quotes, locations etc. Suppose all of this gets published within a day or so, apart from one item which fails to be published even after many days. Will there be a way of discovering why that item has failed when everything else has succeeded - or will the status be regarded as "published" because at least *some* of the data has been published?

Hi Martin,

New Titles/Episodes:

Currently, the title or episode is published rapidly to imdb.com (non-reference view) and IMDbPro and the page is live immediately after approval.  The data 'attached' when the title/episode was submitted has to wait in our internal vetting tools until a once a day internal publish, releasing the 'attached' data for processing.

When the 'attached' data is available to process, when approved it will be displayed on imdb.com (non-reference) and IMDbPro immediately.  The reference view again has to wait for up to 36 hours to have the data displayed.

We will be working, in 2015, to make 'attached' data available to be vetted immediately after the title or episode is approved.

When that work is complete, within the 'track my contribution' feature, you will be linked to a live title page with live approved data immediately on imdb.com (non-reference) and IMDbPro.

Adding Data to Live Titles/Episodes:

Currently, data attached to live titles/episodes is rapidly published to imdb.com (non-reference) and IMDbPro immediately after approval.  The reference view has to wait up to 36 hours for have the data displayed.

Track My Contribution - non new title.

We are still evolving the plans for this feature, but we are planning to show you the status of each individual item within a submission. e.g. if you add 10 cast, 20 crew, 2 trivia - you will be able to see the processing status for each individual item.

Please let me know if any of this isn't clear.

Cheers,

Rachel

It's all perfectly clear. It sounds excellent news.

I look forward to seeing the new features as they get released.

Do you anticipate that the 36-hour delay on data appearing on the reference view will always be present, or do you have any plans to make all the views of the data (imdb.com ref, imdb.com non-ref, IMDB Pro) get updated at the same time?

Hi Martin,

With regards to the 36 hour delay on data appearing on the reference view, yes - it will always be present.  That view is built from a different technology stack with doesn't enable us to update data rapidly.

IMDb.com, IMDbPro, m.imdb.com and all our apps are using the new technology stack where data goes live rapidly.

I'm curious, have you tried using the 'track my title' feature with the reference view preference switched off?

Cheers,

Rachel

I've just tried turning off reference view, but because I have a Pro account as well as the normal one which is the one I use, I only see the Pro view when I follow the link from Track my Title.

If I search for the title manually from imdb.com, I still seem to get the reference view, even though I've tried logging out and back in after turning off reference view. Weird.

Anyway, in Pro I can see the cast that I submitted in the same submission (though they are not yet available for editing - maybe that takes a bit longer) whereas in imdb.com with reference view turned off I don't get the cast (yet). This is for Combined view http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4282804/combined; if I manually select Full Credits http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4282804/fullcredits I do see the cast.

Hi Yann,

This was caused by a bug.  As you may have noticed there was a link to the live title despite the status being 'needs attention'.  We have fixed this and you should not be seeing the correct status.

Thanks for the report.

Cheers,

Rachel

Thanks Rachel!

There's also a variety of times for approving and adding episodes: On 16 Jan I submitted five episodes for the same series and one has now completely appeared on www.imdb.com, including cast and crew, whereas the other four are still generating the "The requested URL was not found on our server" plus funny movie quote, so neither title nor its cast/crew yet links to anything. And that's for five submissions spaced at roughly 1-minute intervals - and the one that has appeared is not the earliest to be submitted.

Still. it will all get there in the end and I'll eventually be able to put the submissions into my "processed" archive.

I'll be most interested to see how the feedback from IMDB staff to submitter works when something is rejected. For this, I may need to wait until Track My Changes is extended to submissions other than new titles. I wonder if it will allow a precise reason to be given for a specific part of a submission being rejected, or will the whole submission be flagged as "rejected" and with a vague catch-all reason? The level of feedback and the ability to enter into a dialogue with the person who has rejected part of the submission to resolve the problem - that will be the criteria by which I'll judge whether or not Track My Changes is useful.

Anything which allows IMDB staff to communicate more quickly "this bit of the submission has been rejected and this is why" is definitely a Good Thing, so you don't have to wait several weeks when nothing has appeared before assuming that there's a problem without knowing why it has occurred.

A further enhancement for the future would be an automatic verification that every part of every submission has been published, to save the manual checking that's necessary every night at present once the "Site Build Date" has changed from yesterday's date to today's date.

Hi Ron,

With regards to a) that is a bug.  I've raised with with the development team and we will work on it.

Your second comment (b) is actually working as designed. This scenario doesn't often happen, but we can have instances where not all of the title related data 'goes live' at the same time.

Thanks for the reports - I'll reply when we have fixed the issue with the bad URL.

Cheers,

Rachel

Hi Martin,

Different times for approving titles can occur based on how we work through the new title queue.

The 'The requested URL was not found of our server' message is most likely caused by using the reference view.

With regards to items that are not approved, these end up in a 'Needs Attention' status with the reason it was not approved, and guidance on what the contributor needs to do to re-submit it.  This is an example of a new title that I contributed (and rejected as it didn't have enough evidence).




When we do roll out this feature for multiple data types, we do plan to provide the status of each individual data item.  For those that are not approved, the contributor will have the reason.

Cheers,

Rachel

Sounds good. Will there be a way to "chase" a data item which has not appeared, or is starting a thread in GetSatisfaction or Contributors Help still going to be the best way of doing this?

I ask because there have been a number of cases where I've had isolated data entries that haven't appeared, and when I've chased them the response has sometimes implied that the list manager has already approved the data and is therefore surprised that the entry has not appeared - so there needs to be a way of chasing submissions that have an "Approved" status as well as those which have a "Needs Attention" status.

As a matter of interest, when it is likely that Track My Title will be extended to cover submissions that modify data (eg cast, crew, filming location, companies) for an existing title (or person) rather than creating a new one?

Hi Martin,

We aren't building functionality to chase an item within the UI. For data types that are being published rapidly, there should be no delay in items being 'live' on the site (our SLA is minutes).  Our focus is to move more data types to this rapid type of publication, so the 'tracking' feature will reflect the live status of the item on the site.  A lot of the instances where data is currently approved but not live is due to it being published via our old once-a-day publish, which can delay items appearing for up to 36 hours after approval.

Of course, no system is infallible - we are monitoring whether items at the approved status are actually being published and addressing any issues we identify.  If anyone finds any issues, please use the feedback link in the tracking feature (which currently directs you to this thread).  We are monitoring this thread extensively.

With regards to extending the feature, we are currently working on a plan for the next types of data to enable the feature for.  As part of that work, we are looking to support not just new submissions but also corrections to live data and deletion requests.

Cheers,

Rachel

Hi Ron,

Just a note to say that we have fixed the issue with a pending episode for a TV series having an invalid link.

Cheers,

Rachel

Hi,

Thanks for the report.  We had an issue occur with some new title contributions for 18 hours overnight.  This affected one sixth of new titles that were contributed. 

These new titles were received by our internal vetting tools and have been vetted, but the tracking feature is not available for them. We aren't able to retrospectively add the tracking feature for these contributions.

We will be working for a fix on this intermittent issue in due course.

Cheers,

Rachel

There was a problem with the tracking system that should now be fixed for new submissions. As Monday is a holiday in both the USA and the UK, it will be Tuesday before we can investigate whether or not the tracking data can be recovered for the submissions made while the tracking system was not working.