Subgenre keywords

I agree with your comments, and I would also like to point out that the new guidelines on subgenres should be clarified to explain that the list of "accepted values" is not intended to be an exhaustive/exclusive list. I can think of a lot of acceptable subgenre keywords that are not on the list. 

Hi Peter_pbn & keyword_expert -

Thanks for your feedback.  We appreciate that some of the keywords do seem awkward, we'll take this on board for future iterations.  I'll pass your comments on to the relevant teams for their consideration.

Although some of these are possible with advanced search conditions, these keywords have been created to drive new search experiences to aid title discovery for users, please watch this space.  We are working on a draft to provide further guidance in the submission guides for how these subgenres will be defined.

Cheers!

I know it's already been raised by @Peter_pbn, but some of these keywords make very little sense, especially the redundant ones.  "Sitcom-comedy?""Docudrama-drama?" "Motorsports-sport?" Really?

"Basketball-sport?" I think everyone knows basketball is a sport, without tacking "sport" on. Why wouldn't it work to search within the "sport" genre using the existing keyword "basketball?" By creating some of these new subgenres, the unfortunate result is to duplicate and bifurcate the keywords, so that "basketball" and "basketball-sport" coexist, the latter of which is redundant (at least currently).

And why is it necessary to have four different "superhero" subgenres: "superhero-action," "superhero-adventure," "superhero-fantasy," and "superhero-sci-fi?" Isn't it enough to just add the keyword "superhero" and search by the main genres? 

As has been discussed in another thread, why is the British spelling of "whodunit" used for the subgenre keyword "whodunnit-mystery?"

Why do all the subgenres include the main genre within the keyword itself? Is that a requirement? Is a subgenre not acceptable if it doesn't include the main genre within the name of the keyword (e.g., "social-guidance," "video-nasty," "giallo")?

I think the list of "accepted" subgenre keywords could use an overhaul.

Again, the main guideline is: Unacceptable: Repeating genres - For example, we have the genres Romance and Drama so you can submit these as genres to the title rather than submitting the keyword romantic-drama. For an exceptional genre on an episode that does not relate to the overall series, please see the -episode special keywords below.

The list of subgenres needs drastic revision.  There are many on that extensive list that contradict the above guideline (particularly with unnecessary duplications), impede searches, and, frankly, make no sense whatsoever.

And, it even excludes other acceptable and important subgenres! ("screwball-comedy," for example, which I did an extensive audit on several years ago to distinguish it from another subgenre, "neo-screwball-comedy.")

Please, revise this list.  AND, there will need to be lots of auditing BEFORE deletions.

One interesting note for my fellow contributors: now that certain subgenres have been added to the list of acceptable keywords, IMDb staff have also "flagged" many genre words so that, when these words appear within keywords, they will require manual approval by IMDb staff before the keywords may be deleted or changed (as opposed to automatic approval).

By way of background, the vast majority of keyword edits are automatically approved (at least for top contributors). I say "automatically" here, but it may take a few minutes for the edits to be processed and show up. The point is that no human being on the IMDb staff ever sees these edits before they are approved.

A long-standing exception has been when certain words appear within keywords, especially when keywords are being added to a title. These include words like "rape" and "porn" within keywords.

Recently, around the same time as the "accepted" subgenre keywords were unveiled, IMDb staff have apparently added numerous words to the list that require manual (staff) review for keyword edits. I have personally observed this for keywords containing terms and phrases like "war," "crime," "action," and "adult." I assume the same will be true for keywords including "romance," "comedy," "horror," etc. 

For example, I have seen my requests to delete or change the following keywords slowed down for manual processing: "environmental-crime," "avengers-infinity-war," "ukrainian-russian-war," "action-film." During the same time these requests to delete or change these keywords were pending, hundreds of other keyword deletions were approved.

Note that each of these keywords included "war," "crime," or "action," separated by a hyphen from the rest of the keyword.  "War," "crime" and "action" are all genres. There has been a very obvious flag placed on certain genre words when contained within keyword deletions and changes.

The takeaway is that IMDb staff are trying to establish some safeguards that help protect genre-related keywords from deletion, and it appears they have cast the net pretty broadly (for example, they chose to flag all deletion of any keyword that happens to include the word "war," rather than limiting that flag to deletion of specific "accepted" subgenre keywords such as "fictional-war."). 

I'm not saying this is a good thing or bad thing -- I just observed this recently and wanted to share it with fellow contributors.

If nothing else, this explains some of the slight processing delays that @bradley_kent and I have experienced the past few days while we have been deleting invalid genre keywords. 

This "supposed" list is absolutely ludicrous and needs a drastic and thorough revision.  Obviously, whoever created this list DOES NOT KNOW what a subgenre is!  

There are numerous "things" on this list that merely combine two genres, which are already in the database under genres, I.e. biographical-documentary.  Such duplications are absolutely unnecessary.

There are also numerous "things" on this list that just combine an already existing keyword with a genre, which can easily be searched by entering a keyword, and then the genre, i.e. basketball-sport. docudrama-drama, etc.

One also cannot delete these ridiculous subgenres that are considered to be, apparently, "protected" keywords. 

Who created this mess anyway?  This problem needs severe and immediate attention.

After thinking about this some more, I am warming up to the idea of allowing keywords that combine more than one genre into the same keyword.

The examples Peter mentioned were crime-documentary and music-documentary. While it is true that these keywords would violate the preexisting rule against combining genres in a keyword, it is also true that we now have a different set of guidelines that expressly "accepts" many such keywords. So what we truly have is two guidelines that conflict with each other.

To resolve this conflict, I see little harm in deleting this language from the guidelines:

Repeating genres - For example, we have the genres Romance and Drama so you can submit these as genres to the title rather than submitting the keyword romantic-drama.

I think we have to ask ourselves, what is the rationale behind that guideline, and what problem was it trying to avoid? What would be the harm in allowing genre-combination keywords? Is it true that some potential combinations of keywords also constitute subgenres (which have always been allowed as keywords)? Why exactly should keywords like "sports-documentary," "news-talk-show," "comedy-game-show" and "sci-fi-short-film" not be allowed? 

While it is true that genre combinations can be found by using genres in searches, does allowing the same information to be replicated in the keywords truly cause any problems? And what about titles that have four or five genres assigned to them? Would the use of a two-genre keyword for such a title allow contributors to emphasize the two genres that are most relevant to that title (e.g., using a keyword like "sci-fi-horror" for a title that also has other genres like Adventure and Fantasy assigned to it)?

Clearly, the conflict between the two guidelines should be reconciled. But some serious thought should be given to allowing keywords that combine more than one genre in the same keyword (perhaps with some new parameters, like no more than two genres in a keyword, and some guidelines for how such keywords should be formatted).

I do continue to believe that the list of "accepted" subgenre keywords is a really bad list, for all the other reasons that have already been stated in this thread (awkward phrasing for some of them, use of the British spelling "whodunnit," a ton of valid subgenres have been omitted, the intro to the list should not imply that it is an exclusive list, etc.). 

This would be opening the floodgates to millions and millions of new keywords.  Generally, I think that IMDb's guidelines are quite good.  If only those guidelines would be followeded.

All this change has caused is keyword duplication of terms that mean literally the same thing.

"Alien Invasion" is a widely understood thematic concept. It doesn't need "sci-fi" as a suffix.

"Space Opera Sci-Fi" makes no sense. All Space Opera is sci-fi. We now have two competing terms.