IMDb Name Page BETA OPT-IN

@LeftLegFirst​ Thanks for taking the time to try the beta and to comment. The “30 more” is a temporary experimental situation while we are still working on the pages.  We are aiming to strike the right balance between how many credits to load initially and when to have a “Show all” option to display the rest.  Thanks for confirming that 30 is too small. 

@Col_Needham​ Just leave it as is...or give us actual users and contributors he option to stay how it is now!!!
I'm so sad about this. I use IMDb or soooooooooooo many things...from actors ages to ALL of their movies/tv shows they have been in, to their height, to even if they sing in real life...to keep a list of what I have watched....filming locations & dates...but being able to simply to scroll down through the moves/tv shows is so easy....and with the new update it makes it VERY VERY VERY HARD to navigate.
I'll have to find somewhere else to get my information and keep track of stuff I have watched!!!

@ay8918​ Thanks for taking the time to try the beta and to comment. The “30 more” is a temporary experimental situation while we are still working on the pages.  We are aiming to strike the right balance between how many credits to load initially and when to have a “Show all” option to display the rest.  Thanks for confirming that 30 is too small. 

@Col_Needham​ Please understand, the groupings of 30 are only part of the problem! Read nearly any of the comments hear and you will see that the far, far bigger problem is moving from a nice compact list view to some sort of grid of tiles that requires extensive scrolling. This format may look pretty but is totally useless.

I know there is this belief that you have to keep changing things up to keep things interesting, but but NOTHING can be further from the truth. Look at the biggest and most successful sites like Amazon, Google, Twitter, etc. They have made only the slightest of changes over decades of operation.

My advice, DO NOT make such a radical change. You will regret it!

@ay8918​ ❣❣❣❣❣❣❣❣❣❣
As @Col_Needham  said...WOW just learned how to tag the people here...sweet.
They are only looking to support mobile users and not computer users or their contributors. This is what he said: "The new name pages are also available when accessing IMDb via a web browser on your mobile.  This is one of the advantages of the new technology — it’s the same page, with the same content on both desktop and mobile web.  The page scales to fit whatever size device you use to access it.  This already happens with our main title pages too, following the update there last year. "
So yeah to some it up.....mobile users is where they are going

@Coreena​ For what it's worth, I'm also a computer user. I don't have a cell phone, and my tablet is seldom turned on. No way I'll consult IMDb on the tablet, too much bother.

@pikrodafni​ No cel phone, nor tablet, for me either...spent too many years chained to the bloody thing.  
This is so sad really what they are doing!!!

@vgamerdc​ Thanks for taking the time to try the beta and to comment. The “30 more” is a temporary experimental situation while we are still working on the pages.  We are aiming to strike the right balance between how many credits to load initially and when to have a “Show all” option to display the rest.  Thanks for confirming that 30 is too small.  

You make a good point on the sort-by-date option, thanks. 

@vgamerdc​  Good catch, thanks. 

@vgamerdc​  Thanks for the screen-grab; part of the reason for the excessive empty space is because there is supposed to be an ad in the shaded portion of the page :-)

@Col_Needham​ That may be, but there is still that blank rectangle between Photos and the news article. It doesn’t help that because things are so large there is also less on the page; thus more scrolling is required. 

@Diesel_Nut​ Thanks for the feedback. To opt out you should see a little timer / clock icon in the lower right of the page.  If you click on the icon, there’s a “Go Back” link in the menu which pops-up. 

Hope this helps. 

@pikrodafni​ To go back to the old view, you should see a little timer / clock icon in the lower right of the page.  If you click on the icon, there’s a “Go Back” link in the menu which pops-up. 

Hope this helps. 

I'm sorry, I don't see it. I have disabled all the anti popups on the page, but can't see any icon, in any corner. :(

I thought it was temporary, that it would go back to the old view after a while...

@Col_Needham​ Ohhhh that is awesome. Thank you so much. But I guess we can only keep that way for a limited time.  Very sad about that.   The new one is so hard to navigate.

@pikrodafni​ 

@ Col_Needham​

by ACT_1
Sat Jul 23 2022

Add a banner ad top of all the 11,746,200 Name Pages 
Many of the 154,950,000 Users may not see the floating timer / clock button on the page
or know why it's there...

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/imdb-name-page-beta-optin/62db09f1e232bb632089ba01?commentId=62dc829dc998636027acbff0

.

@Coreena​ To go back to the old view, you should see a little timer / clock icon in the lower right of the page.  If you click on the icon, there’s a “Go Back” link in the menu which pops-up. 

Hope this helps. 

@floodseeker​  Thanks, yes, this is already supported.  Please see the "All topics" menu in the upper right of the page and then click the "by Ratings" link in the "Credits" menu.  For example from https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0428065/ (see red highlighting):

which leads to https://www.imdb.com/filmosearch/?sort=user_rating&explore=title_type&role=nm0428065&ref_=nm_ql_flmg_2

Hope this helps. 

@MovieCat​ To go back to the old view, you should see a little timer / clock icon in the lower right of the page (it sinks to the bottom right corner wherever you are on the page).  If you click on the icon, there’s a “Go Back” link in the menu which pops-up. 

Hope this helps. 

@Col_Needham​ Thanks. I'm sure it's good for people watching movies, etc., but I like to be a nerd and just do the data adding stuff.

@pikrodafni​ Using both thumbs and both big toes ;-) It is spectacularly bad.

@martin_695862​ You know, in Brazil people say "when a team is winning every match, you don't touch it! You don't change anything!" IMDb is destroying a winning team. I wish I could stop them. It makes me so sad. I love the site (AS IT IS!) and don't want to live without it.

Me too. An equivalent comment in English is "if it isn't broken, don't try to fix it".

I've seen so many useful features in IMDB disappear over the years, and I feel that the site is being changed to benefit the casual users, without a though for the needs of the people that IMDB depends on: the contributors and information-checkers.

An example of this was the "Episode Cast" link on a TV series main page: it displayed all the cast for all the episodes on one page. For series that I contributed to regularly, I copied the page periodically and compared the one from a few weeks ago with the current state of the page. Any changes that I hadn't made, especially for episodes that were broadcast a long time ago, needed to be checked. Over the years, I found two examples where all the entries for a certain actor had been deleted from every episode, and on closer inspection, his credits for other titles had been removed. Having detected and reported this, I was able to get an admin to investigate this vandalism and retrieve the deleted entries from a backup. Without the series-level episode cast page, I'd never have noticed.

Likewise, they removed the Literature page which gave the title, author, publisher and ISBN of any book that was either a source novel or a making-of book about the film. OK, they needed to make a proper distinction between the two, especially to distinguish between a book which spawned a film and a film which generated a novelisation based on the film's plot. But if they had done that, and got people to sort existing Literature entries into one category or the other, it would have been fine. Much more relevant than all the subjective info like "most popular actor".

I continue to contribute, but I always feel pissed-off and disenfranchised whenever IMDB imposes a change that makes the work of contributors harder.

@pikrodafni​ 💝💝💝💝💝
Col_Needham said they are gearing everything for the mobile user....and is basically discriminating against computer users and contributors. It's HORRIBLE!!!

@martin_695862​ 💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝

WOW!!!!  Thank you for all of your time and efforts here, it is SOOOOOO amazing.  Loved reading all of your comments....it's like Meatloaf said: "You took the words right outta my mouth"
I think I'm in love........🤣🤣🤣🤣🥰🥰🥰🥰

@davew​ To go back to the old view, you should see a little timer / clock icon in the lower right of the page (it sinks to the bottom right corner wherever you are on the page).  If you click on the icon, there’s a “Go Back” link in the menu which pops-up. 

Hope this helps. 

@Col_Needham​ So many people have asked "how do I change back to the old page layout" that I think the way to do so needs to be made more intuitive. Maybe that button needs visible wording beside it which says "Go back to old page". The timer icon (without wording) is not at all intuitive, in my opinion.

I won't comment on why people are wanting to go back: I think the user comments in this thread speak for themselves ;-)

@martin_695862​ 💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝

@Col_Needham​ Hi Col I have seen many many posts asking for a button to 'go back' and I believe that you may be misconstruing many of them to mean they are stuck in the current page. I believe that you need to consider that maybe at least some of the people are wanting a "simplify" or "go back to the old" button after the new rollout, especially when you consider the context of their message - "I tried the new search results page, nice, but, verbose. Can you put a link on the page that will use to old search results layout: movie, and series with episodes?"

@raynor_pretorius​ No, I was really stuck in the new shooty pages. No more clicking on "try the new, horrible, useless changes" for me. Once was one time too many.

@gjlhome​  Thanks for joining the beta and for taking the time to comment.  

The update moves the name pages onto a single, modern, responsive design which works across browsers from desktop to mobile phones and everything in-between. The design has better accessibility in English, and is also localisable, covering nine language-country combinations at launch, with more to come in the future. It fixes a large number of long-outstanding bugs with the old page as well as including feature requests.  On the back-end it is more scalable, regionizable and it means IMDb can deliver more new features and new content to customers faster long into the future. It eliminates the missing data / inconsistencies between the desktop and mobile sites since the same design and technology now serve both.  It also improves interface consistency between the site and the mobile apps, reducing the cognitive load when switching between the site and apps. Similarly it improves consistency with the pages already on the newer design (home, title, images, videos and many what-to-watch and editorial pages). 

This all helps to see IMDb long into the future and more able to respond to customer need, and therefore to protect the 32 years of hard work which has already gone into building IMDb from both the staff and contributors alike. 

Hope this helps. 

@Col_Needham​ With all do respect, exactly none of those reasons require you to move away from a compact list oriented view.

@gjlhome​ 💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝

@martin_695862​  Thanks for detailed extra feedback … 

I see that this is a temporary restriction, but the page should not have been released until the restriction had been lifted.

This requires some extra work behind-the-scenes, and in the meantime, the team were keen to get early feedback on everything else on the new pages (plus to understand the reactions to the smaller initial display).  We have learned through multiple redesigns that it is better to show things earlier while changes can still be made vs. unveiling a completed update when it is too late. 

The "Update" button is buried somewhere in the middle of the page, followed by irrelevant "adverts" for other services that IMDB offers.

Do you have a screen-grab of this?  The update section / button already should be the last thing on the page, other than the footer and “Recently Viewed” (which is the same as on the old name pages and every other page). We are wondering if a third party plug-in is injecting extra ads / content in your browser.  

Thanks for the other comments around contributors vs. other customers.  I did not mean to be unhelpful in the earlier comment.  The problem is that the 12+ year old name page technology is out-of-date and is not scaling to meet modern and global customer needs, nor the size of IMDb.  People are quick to judge when it is almost impossible to do things like even add new genres, or it takes too long to fix too many bugs with this old technology.  We are aiming to address these larger limitations with the new technology and to see IMDb more scalable and responsive long into the future. 

Hope this helps. 

"The problem is that the 12+ year old name page technology is out-of-date and is not scaling to meet modern and global customer needs, nor the size of IMDb.  People are quick to judge when it is almost impossible to do things like even add new genres, or it takes too long to fix too many bugs with this old technology."

Those are very good reasons for updating the underlying technology. But they are not reasons for changing the way in which the page is displayed, for adding unnecessary information (over-large graphics, adverts etc) and for removing important information (episode titles).


The goal should surely be to make behind-the-scenes changes without impacting what the user sees.


And I knew there'd be a "so it works on a phone/tablet" in there somewhere ;-)

@Col_Needham​ Hi Col

Here are two screenshots with different sizes of browser window. Sometimes it is necessary to make a browser narrower than full-screen so a second window of source info or TV player can be placed alongside it, to transcribe info into IMDB's Update page. That's how IMDB is used in the real world.

I can see what is happening. If the browser window is narrowed, the second "More to explore" column (which is information that it utterly irrelevant to the person whose filmography is being displayed, so why is it even there?) is wrapping below the first column (including the Update button) because there is not space to display it alongside. Maybe the Update button needs to be placed outside the first column so even if the second column wraps, the Update button is still below it.

https://i.postimg.cc/tgvY6WSw/Screenshot-2022-07-24-at-20-14-29-Leila-Mimmack-IMDb.png

https://i.postimg.cc/XNHQvzkk/Screenshot-2022-07-24-at-20-14-59-Leila-Mimmack-IMDb.png

That "More to Explore" column is a prime example of the comments that people (including myself) have been making: it is irrelevant clutter that detracts from the only thing that a contirubutor needs to see: the filmography. Likewise for the More buttons for every TV series which expand to display the episodes, instead of being pre-expanded.

OK, only contributors may care about that, but this is precisely the point: we need two formats of each type of page - the punters' view and the contributors' reference view.

The more I examine the new page layout, the more convinced I am that it is not fit for purpose, as used by contributors. Sorry to be brutal, and the last thing I'd want to do is to stifle innovation, but I really think it is a change for the worse. Change the way that a page is contructed, change the scripts which auto-generates the page from the database, but keep the visual arrangement on the screen (ie what the user sees) as similar as possible.

If page layouts in IMDB change for the worse, making it harder to contribute new data or to cross-check with existing data, contributors will stop contributing, which will affect the accuracy and completeness of the data. And I'm sure none of your band of loyal contributors want to see that happen.

I've got a whole load of suggestions for changes that would improve IMDB, which would actually be useful instead of change-for-the-sake-of-it changes, but that's for a separate thread! When I say "change-for-the-sake-of-it changes" I refer to the information that the user sees; I fully understand the need for behind-the-scenes, invisible changes which make the code easier to maintain or easier to display on a small-screen device. All too often, change to "the engine" is seen to imply change also to "the controls", to use a car analogy.

@martin_695862​  Thanks for the extra context on your contributor experience. 

@martin_695862​ 💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝💝

I'm in full agreement with @martin_695862

Trying to pass off this redesign as "the tech running it is too old" is complete nonsense. Sure, update the old tech behind it, but the frontend can be literally anything, even with new tech running the backend. Stop pretending like you couldn't just mimic the current design when building the new page. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard and shows that you are being dishonest.

There are no technical restrictions to how you code the CSS. That's the biggest bullshit excuse I've ever heard.

@paul_penna_3vyh933ru92u2​ I also think that the people that design the websites and game developers NEVER use the page nor play the game....it's all about how "creative" they can be and "flex" their brain muscle...and go..."LOOK AT ME"...I can do this...I'm great!!!