Support for Unicode.

I agree. This affects titles, names, characters, discussion, and probably more.

Where I run into the problem most is in the discussion forums. If you paste non-ASCII characters copied from somewhere else (for example, to show a symbol that was in the film, or indeed to show the native-language title of the film), they just get turned into what appears to be the HTML text code for those characters, instead of the symbol itself.

It's 2013. This shouldn't be happening.

Since MobyGames supports Unicode, macrons in Japanese are OK for long vowels. Note that the title ends with a punctuation mark (full stop). Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Slovak etc. requires a bunch of accented letters.

It is almost like Randall Munroe has been reading this forum.
http://xkcd.com/1209/

You quote the comic: “The Skywriter we hired has terrible Unicode support.”

After correcting Miroslav Kure's suname to Miroslav Kuře (to match Czech support: the Danish/Faroese/Norwegian ø is rcaron) in Battle for Wesnoth 1.11.1 contribution community, you have many problems with the Internet Archive Wayback Machine this time. First the connection is too slow to load and you get the error mesage “The machine that serves this file is down. We're working on it.” twice. Unicode in their own forum affects subjects (titles) and more. Note that the thread has nonsense!

This has been mentioned many times over the past few years. A bit of history may help here.

When IMDb first started, it was updated by an automated email system. This was at a time when some of the email routers still only handled 7-bit ASCII and special encoding was needed to ensure that 8-bit codes would not be trashed. Moreover, some characters (e.g. | the 'pipe') were used internally (and in the email) as controls/delimiters. This is why you may sometimes see older contributors indicate a credit update as :

John Doe | 2nd Pirate | 22

By the time Unicode became standard, the system had grown quite complex. Before Unicode can be implemented, every part of the system needs to be checked and potentially modified to ensure that it will not be broken by any of the Unicode codes.

IMDb is currently in the process of moving the various lists (sections) to new internal systems. I hope and expect that they are designing these systems so that they will be able to support Unicode.

Once the moves have been completed, we may see support for Unicode, but don't expect it any time soon.

You will need an answer. You have removed the first reply by accident. Where a name includes a suffix, we use a comma to separate it from the name. On game credits and indexes it is not treated as an integral part of the surname. Examples are:

Hernandez, Jonathan, Jr
Rowe, William A., Jr.
Tibbetts, Richard S., III

It thinks that the Get Satisfaction software uses Unicode. It supports different accented characters for Eastern European languages.

Actually, it seems that after the message-board makeover, Unicode support is even worse! At least with the old ones you could enter most extended ASCII glyphs (assuming proper code-page is set). But now anything that is above 127 doesn’t work.

It's year 2014 and some Czech characters are still not supported.

It's almost 2015 and Greek characters aren't supported AT ALL.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
How many years will it take you to understand UNICODE?.

In 2009, in Contact #3034383 (http://www.imdb.com/helpdesk/thread?tid=3034383) you the owner of IMDB promised professional usage of UNCODE "in a little while". It is now 5 years and a half later and your web site is still crippled with no UNICODE implementation. 5 years and a half??? Don't you fill embarrassed with your "professionalism"? Shall we wait another 5 years for IMDB to understand the word "international"?

(This post is addressed solely and specifically to IMDb staff.)

We are making slow and steady progress on Unicode support.  Note that until every single part of a system supports Unicode, none of it works.  We have a lot of critical backend systems that need to be migrated.  Unfortunately, we don't have a timetable that we can share, but please be aware that we are working on it.

Note that in the last few weeks we've enabled full Unicode support in the message boards:

http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000043/nest/235469052

We had a number of encoding issues that I believe we have fixed.

Note that user reviews:

http://www.imdb.com/user/ur2278015/

...and lists:

http://www.imdb.com/list/ls001825868/

...also support Unicode.

Yes, but no movie display titles...

3 years has passed and IMDB is still mentally in the pre-unicode 1990's.

If you don't want to fix your database for unicode support, then just write parsers and translate user input to html codes.
Moreover, some html codes are not supported, eg. ń

NB. It is not possible to have a title with a non-basic-latin character. Even if I fix a movie and input a html the form will on the fly change it to unicode and report a problem (!!)

The last update on this (at least in this thread) was two years ago, so can a staffer tell us what has happened these past two years regarding this issue?
(I note that in the message boards on IMDb, one could see exactly when a post was made, here I can only see that Murray responded two years ago, not very specific).