Updates to Characters

Our new character experience will support title specific images, quotes, and keywords.

Nic: I see how images and quotes factor into this, but I don't understand what keywords have to do with title/character pages.

In the coming months, we plan to re-enable character search based on our new experience.

So, after December 6, if someone is wondering, "What was the movie where there was a character named Ugarte?", will they be able to find it?

If I understand correctly, there will be a page at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/characters/nm0000048 showing pictures of Peter Lorre as Ugarte in Casablanca and a bunch of quotes from the character. Right? But will there be any way to search for that character and find that page, if one doesn't know the film title or the performer's name?

Hi Nic,

What do you mean by "Archiving a poll"? Our polls have ongoing vote totals attached to them, so will this function be able to transfer over from a character poll to an image poll?

Thanks and let me know when you can.

Thanks for the advanced notice.

1. As part of this change, IMDb will no long be supporting character lists
and polls after Dec 6, 2017.  If you wish to retain your past Character
polls, they recommend recreating any Character Lists as an Image List
and then building the poll using the new image list. They apologize for
any inconvenience this has caused, and want to stress the decision to
deprecate their existing Character experience has been an extremely
difficult one.

2. To aid your effort in identifying your character polls, I’ve created
this list of 843 character polls as of 8-Nov-2017. The polls are sorted
in descending order of votes on the first tab and by author on the
second tab.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PJNRJC2Ld-0_yzPjCExQr0Q7R_-ApAGP/view?usp=sharing

or

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LV_vFEXD9tg90B-Ko5pPJbtVUgjwizrPGZf1MS0Udtw/edit?usp=sharing

3. If I have your email address, I will also send this message to you via
email along with a copy of the Excel spreadsheet.

4. I recommend recreating your live character polls and pending polls as
soon as practical. IMDb is unlikely to extend their deadline and will
probably make the change at midnight GMT (London Standard Time).

5. IMDb will be adding additional wording on the site. For example, we’ll
include a large message on the character pages themselves, referencing
the Get Satisfaction message.

6. The images (which are associated to a specific title/name will still be
visible on the new character pages).  In general, if you add a
still_frame to a title and tag it to a name, it will automatically
appear on the new character page.  The same is true for a quote.  If a
quote is added to a name for a specific title, it will automatically
appear on the new character page.  A new character page will “exist” if
it has at least 1 quote/image

7. Recasting a poll from a character based poll to an image based poll
will effectively create a new poll with no voting history.

8. At this time, IMDb is unable to transfer poll counts to the new poll.

9. It’s not realistic to recreate all existing polls; I recommend
reviewing the top character polls and recreating those as new polls, but
not the full list.  Please note, anyone who has a poll taker badge will
still have the same “count” post taking down the character polls.

10. When someone accesses a character based list or poll on and after December 6,
2017, the user well see a 404 (page not found) error.

11. I am attempting to archive as many of the character polls as possible on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/).
I am archiving the polls with the most votes first. Many of the lists,
polls and poll results may already be archived. However, I would not
count on these being archive. For instance, I’ve specifically archive
this poll to the Internet Archive:
Poll: Who Are You?
List: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.imdb.com/list/ls056811342/ 
Poll: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.imdb.com/poll/1wyam4mgszE/ 
Poll Results: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.imdb.com/poll/1wyam4mgszE/results

12. I will create a separate thread where you can post the links to polls
that you’ve converted from character polls to image polls. It’s not
practical to push all of the recreated polls at once. The recreated
polls still need to be reviewed to ensure they will work properly. The
admin will push a certain number of recreated polls per day while still
pushing new polls.

Ideally, the original authors for polls will have
preference over other authors. Given the short suspense time, this may
not be practical.

Very disappointing.

Nic,

An image may be accessed via two different URLs (links), one from the title page and another from the character page.

For example:

http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0383426/mediaviewer/rm985594112

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2179136/mediaviewer/rm3346727168

Are links for the same image.

If the character page URL is used instead of title page URL to make the image list, will there be any problem after Dec 6?

= = =

In essence, when a character appears in multiple titles, there will be a character page for each title. A character page is defined explicitly by the title ID and name ID. Is this correct?

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)
Harrison Ford: Han Solo
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/characters/nm0000148

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Harrison Ford: Han Solo
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080684/characters/nm0000148

Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
Harrison Ford: Han Solo
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086190/characters/nm0000148

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
Harrison Ford: Han Solo
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2488496/characters/nm0000148

= = =

Will this kind of link will work after December 6, 2017?
[link=nm0000148]
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000148/
Harrison Ford

How do you access the new character pages, without manipulating URL's?

First watchlist, now characters pages... Very dissapointing changes indeed. Please, stop ruining IMDB

When remaking already published polls, I was thinking of trying to put the remade poll options in the order of the votes as they are right now and put the vote counts in the description areas for each option. For example, here is one I already remade vs. the current version:

Current poll as published: http://www.imdb.com/poll/C1W-zbjcRyQ
Remade: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls027056203

Is this acceptable/advisable? Or should the list just be remade in the order/manner that it is right now and thus completely lose any evidence of previous vote totals?

So far, what I'm getting from this is a filter for anyone to see a character's quotes on a specific title. Fair enough. But when I click a character page link, I expect and NEED to be taken to the main character page! There should be a link in place to be taken to the main character page, getting rid of it does no one any good.

What if I voted on a character poll .. the count of that vote will be removed?

It's a remarkably stupid idea to delete productive content in order to justify uniformity of ephemeral "user experience". But let's pretend this was the right way to proceed, in general. I'm less concerned about moving/recreating character polls than about other associated content, specifically, bios, cross-links and searchability. While much of IMDb use is effectively fandom or trying to recall the cast in a particular movie, character pages that had content had served effectively as research vehicles. Removing bios, cross-links and searches by character name effectively kills IMDb as a research tool (much as Google Books lost research value once Google removed chronological listings).

To make matters worse, this will make series pages effectively useless. There's already a proble in trying to decipher cast & characters of any show with more than 3 episodes. Inability to search for non-lead characters makes pages for these shows completely superficial.

Hopefully, search features will be restored sooner rather than later. But the proper way of handling the transition would've been to archive the content being eliminated (except polls) and offer the link to that content at the bottom of new character pages. Why this was not done is puzzling. The whole premise is that there's an insufficient number of content-specific character pages, so archiving them would not be a burden. And both archiving and linking could've been automated without much cost. Instead, we got stupid, stupid, stupid...

While the temporary disappearence of the old character pages is sad, that new feature/improvement is very welcome!

Nooo..... :(

I loved this function, despite it's (minor) faults.
Removing it altogether means removing access to a source of information ('what titles had a Sherlock Holmes character in it, and who played them') for which it will be hard to get a good and easily accessible answer, without IMDb.
I mean, even if the data wasn't 100% correct or complete all of the time, it was still the most comprehensive and most easily accessible source for this kind of information that I know of. Besides: even if there are other websites where I can find an answer; I don't really want to have to do that, because I go to IMDb for my film/series information. For a number of reasons. :/

I also feel like you could have taken other steps than deciding to remove the function altogether. You could have made it more accessible to 'crowd-sourcing' the addition and correcting of incomplete/incorrect data on the character pages. I have found myself correcting the occasional entry now and then, and I found the process a little tedious. Nevertheless, like I said the function certainly has/had it's merit.

Also, after deleting the Message boards, I hope this trend of removing functionality from the IMDb website isn't going to continue much further. :(