Updates to TV Series Full Cast & Crew pages

The whole old platform hurts apparently, and the developers don't seem to have the prowess or motivation to immediately (if ever) cause to new platform to produce certain effects. It's strange indeed.

A page such as you describe is a severe technical challenge for series with thousands of episodes such as "Coronation Street" or "Days of our Lives". A page listing all the thousands of episodes with the credits for each episode would have hundreds of thousands of credits and pages that size tend to cause trouble.

There are ways to incrementally add more data as you scroll down the page but that sort of approach would not necessarily do what you want as well as being an unnecessary overhead on pages that do not need it.

This is not a simple thing that IMDb staff can't be bothered to do, it is something where it is difficult to know what is the right thing to do, let alone to find a technical solution to do whatever has been chosen. With series that are still adding multiple episodes per week, a solution that works today may be overwhelmed by the volume of data in the future.

For shows where the data is already there, shows no longer making new episodes, there is no reason to remove access.  The new system takes much more time and is far more demanding of time to find pieces of information.  IMDB is often updated by individual members as well.  I rely on those episode cast pages and having them removed is unacceptable to me. 

Surely then the most obvious answer is to decide on a page limit (for instance 100 episodes) and have a Next Page link at the bottom for the next 100 and so on. Much like the existing User Reviews or the advanced search which have a display limit and next links. That would be better than not having it at all.

That is a lot better than nothing, but what's wrong with continuing as you used to, and creating a single page of all the episodes? Or is there some new limit to the size of dynamic page that your scripts can generate?

It used to work fine. Lots of people used it, judging by the many people who have said that they want it brought back.

IMDB, you've broken it, so you fix it.

Maybe impose a limit on the number of episodes, so as to exclude soaps with many thousands of episodes, but to include a shorter-run series with (for example) up to 10? 20? seasons each of up to 13? 26? 52? episodes per season.

Maybe break down the list into groups of seasons - S1-S10, S11-S20 etc, though that means that people will need to join together the list themselves if they want to compare "all the cast for all the episodes, as of 1 week ago" with "all the cast for all the episodes, as of today" which is how I normally use it so as to look for cast who have disappeared from old episodes because of tinkering and misguided deletion.

A common problem that I have found is that someone decides to delete all the credits that an actor has for various programmes because they think that this is not the same actor who has one credit for something else - and instead of creating a new entry for that one credit and moving it, they delete all the other credits - and they don't even create a new entry for those, they just let them die. This happened to Irish actor Jim Norton a few years ago. My comparison technique showed that he'd disappeared from various programmes that I monitor, and I was able to get IMDB to resurrect them from a backup copy.

But if IMDB don't want their submitters to trap situations like that, then that's fine by me: I'm doing it as a favour, not a duty. If the ability to do it goes, so does my offer to find the problem.


Above all, CONSULT!!!! Discuss what you are proposing to change, BEFORE you remove it. Take your loyal band of submitters into your confidence and don't alienate them.

Keep all existing functionality (even if the code behind the scenes changes), even if you add new functionality which you think is a replacement. Only ever add new functionality, never remove.



I have NO CONFIDENCE that IMDB will listen to this. I think they can't be bothered to work with us to find a solution - maybe they are even concerned about loss of face if they backtrack. Shame on them.

About those ads, a certain eponymous extension for the purpose of blocking web advertisements seem to eliminate them (even in the image gallery slide show), but I should caution that ad blockers can impair the functionality of the site, so, you might want to reconfigure them to not indiscriminately block ads. Also, every site that you visit would really appreciate it if none of us blocked ads. It's how a lot of sites earn revenue, and IMDb is not exactly an exception. For IMDb, what I do is temporarily disable my web browser's ad blocker once in a while to see what ads there are to see. I've observed a lot of Amazon, Amazon Prime, Amazon Video and Amazon Prime Video ads, which is kind of funny. I hope it is not a sign of IMDb being a struggling company.

Considering how I feel about IMDB right now, I don't care.  lol  They've taken away my most used function for what feels like a whim, and I'm not happy about it at all, so personally, keep those ads off.  That said, my ad blocker doesn't actually do much these days anyway on some sites, including IMDB.  I should probably look for a newer one.  Back to ads, I'm sick of them, especially those pre-rolled ads that play up to 30 seconds before videos you want to watch.  Most of the time, I forget it and close out the page.  I'm sick of ads.

First of all, the Site itself has ads framing the page your viewing, so no ad blocker is going to stop it. The ad after every three photos in any IMDB photo gallery IS IMDB doing the inserting. And it's getting out of hand.
Yes, IMDB needs revenue like every other site, but while framing the whole page with a monster ad for "Thor: Ragnarok", and THEN have it burst through the center of the page (As if we POSSIBLY MISSED IT!!!) has crossed the line into the OBNOXIOUS, and drying us AWAY from the site. Is it REALLY worth that much more revenue to frame it AND have it burst through the page? I'll start boycotting films that do that.
At what point does IMDB think it's 'ad saturation' is too much? Because as far as the rest of us are concerned THEY PASSED IT!

Actually some ad blockers do work to an extent.  All we can do as individuals is follow through.  I'm already not using it nearly as much as before because it's too difficult to find what I need.  I'm not recommending the site anymore either.  It's all I can do as one person.  I just have to hope that people continue to complain and lessen site usage and stop viewing those ads until they listen and reverse themselves.  I want my ep cast pages back!

And yes, looks like they have! What an awful decision. Thanks very much for making my life researching characters much more difficult. Please reconsider this stupid move.

You are absolutely right.  My time on IMDB is down 75% and lessening because I'm so frustrated by the change.  It's annoying and way too time consuming for my tastes.

Sadly I doubt that IMDB are listening to us or think that our opinion matters in any way,

Which is sad, because they depend on submitters like myself for their raw data. How they mess up the data that the punters see, with popup and pop-over adverts and dumbed-down presentation is of no great concern to me.

But I would like a submitter's view of that data, in credits order, and with as few distractions as possible, to make it easy to check and cross-check.

But as time goes on, I think things are turning worse and worse. I see that even with Reference View turned on, the entries for people have changed to the dumbed-down version that non-ref-view people have been getting.

Ho hum. IMDB used to be good when it was data-oriented rather than presentation-oriented - the usual and inevitable style-over-substance decline.

The time I spend using IMDb has largely been forgone for interacting with the Get Satisfaction portal for IMDb. Come to think of it, I should check to see what is being expressed on the Twitter page for IMDb, and maybe Facebook as well (though I'm not fond at all for Facebook).

The question is why the IMDb company will not instate a new Episode Cast page generator. I'd guess that pages of such kind consume too many resources for shows that have many episodes or large casts.

Because they're IDIOTS. It isn't "consuming too many resources" because the cast-per-episode pages still exist! (Just harder to get to)

I'm referring specifically to the situation of running all those casts lists together. It creates a very large page to transmit from the server machine to the client machine. That costs time, network bandwidth, processor usage and RAM usage. The company, regardless of wisdom or lack thereof, doesn't believe that we're worth accommodating. That is the bottom line.

Well, my use of their bandwidth is dramatically down.  They are no longer a user friendly site.