IMDb Title Subpage Redesign: FAQ & TV Episodes

Hi @cinemacriterion​ -

A few months ago we redesigned episode pages on the iOS app, however, we do not have any upcoming plans to redesign the iOS app.

Hi @Peter_pbn​ -

Thanks for reporting this display issue, I filed a ticket (#P95379892) for the team to take a look.

Hi @Peter_pbn  -

I'm circling back to confirm that both the plot and rating display issues have now been fixed.  Thanks again for reporting!

Thanks for reporting @Peter_pbn​.  I also have the tech team investigating the plot display.

@Michelle​ Please stop changing the layout, this is terrible. Also the episode page for Outer Limits season 3 was perfectly fine yesterday, now it not only looks different but it's missing episodes 19-22 from the list when it wasn't yesterday. PLEASE STOP DOING THIS. If you want to make changes to UI then fine, but do not FORCE it on everyone. Allow us the CHOICE for gods sake. Classic view is perfect already, it did not even need changing. And straight up, if classic view is removed from the main pages of the site I really don't think I'll be using imdb anymore. It's that terrible of a layout. I didn't complain much before because we were allowed to keep classic view, but what you're doing right now is not a good sign to me about the future of the site.

Stop forcing things on us we never asked for. 

@FoxBlack​ 😀

??
With more than 168,600,000 Users registered
IMDb may not care if You and 100,000 others stop visiting

Now if more Users found this and added more comments
IMDb could ....

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sacramentonatalia
IMDb member since July 28 2023
https://www.imdb.com/user/ur168600000/

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@ACT_1​ Then let them not care and drive their site into the ground, not my problem I will find something else to use. I don't care if I was the only person with the problem, I'm not going to roll over and accept something I think is inferior and unnecessary. But the fact that most normal users I've seen on here so far are also against these changes makes it even more valid. IMDB staff should be smart enough to know that typically when most of even just a 100 people are saying one thing in the forums, you can apply that measure to the bulk of the population

@FoxBlack​ 😀

If IMDb posted this

IMDb Title Subpage Redesign: FAQ & TV Episodes
https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/imdb-title-subpage-redesign-faq-tv-episodes/64c2ad8cc2f32a2d3175d7b3

at the top of FAQ & TV Episodes we might get a few more replies.

🙄

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@ACT_1​ Yes agreed

@FoxBlack​ 😀

and only a few of the 108,050 sprinklr members read & reply to this
So, IMDb must think what they are doing is OK 

2,161 pages with 50 names per page
https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/leaderboard?sortKey=JOINED_AT&sortOrder=DESC&dateFrom=ANY&page=1

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/leaderboard?sortKey=JOINED_AT&sortOrder=DESC&dateFrom=ANY&page=2161

This link only works 1 time: "No leaders found!"

Start here and click next....
https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/leaderboard?sortKey=JOINED_AT&sortOrder=DESC&dateFrom=ANY&page=2000

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October 22 2023

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/leaderboard?sortKey=JOINED_AT&sortOrder=DESC&dateFrom=ANY&page=2185

2,185 pages with 50 names per page = 109,250 sprinklr members

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Col_Needham, Employee
Wed Nov 30 2022 

Correct, registered customers make-up only a fraction of our userbase. 
IMDb has over 200 million unique visitors per month 
(and that's visitors not visits, the latter being significantly higher).

 
https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/imdb-name-page-redesign/6351563ae7100d725d54c0bb?commentId=63878b2b038ef261b8f4b7fb&replyId=6387e1b00693e36e8a570bfa

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I notice that the webpages built on the new generation platform are increasing in bloat and declining in performance, over time. Almost makes me wonder if the parts of the page that run on the client end are utilizing computer resources to mine some kind of cryptocurrency, but thus far I've seen no obvious evidence of this with regard to IMDb. Technically all the software on the client end needs to do is access a URL (image tags, frame tags, style tags, JS tags or AJAX/fetch requests) that contains a key string that constitutes a guess/solution piece to a problem.

@ACT_1​ 

What's really sad is that out of the 108,050 accounts, a vast majority of them are dormant and/or created by people who posted once and moved on. A lot of the you see are from the same handful of people. You get to the point that you recognize users names and you have a pretty good idea on where they stand on the subject.

At the very least as you mentioned, better link placement would be a good way and/or maybe randomized surveys through e-mail before the thing is even launched e-mailed to the consumer. I've developed several surveys and while the response rate isn't the best  with e-mail, it may help get the more casual user whose registered with IMDb.

Just look at the leaderboard, there's only 153 people on the leaderboard who have made 29 or more posts in it's decade long existence and only around 100 of those users were logged in within the last year so if their goal is to get feedback, it might be better to use another additional method because you'll be lucky to get 65 responses and it is a very bias survey anyways because if the persons isn't one of the regular posters, they are most likely here to express their displeasure because I suspect there have been very few incidents where somebody followed a link to go to navigate from the main site to register just to voice their approval of the design. 

@ACT_1​ Probably because this forum is very difficult to find for any user that didn't know it existed!

I swear they don't even care about the user's opinions. No one likes this and I bet money they don't care and just expect everyone to deal with it. We need to have a choice of UIs, not have them forced on us

Most of the other subpages have already been changed. There is no option to keep the old design of the subpages.

But there has been no announcement about any change to the reference view of main title pages.

I've only seen it on the tv season pages, and it was normal up until yesterday/today, still had the old layout on everything without a problem

That's interesting. 

There are announcements about these changes from the last six months:

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/search?q=subpage%20redesign

@Peter_pbn​ By the looks of the link you gave it sounds like they are going to force this change on us, really not happy about this. Thank you for the info though. They really need to stop "fixing" things that aren't broken. Classic view is perfect to me.. and now I can't even see the rest of the episodes in the season I am trying to watch with this forced changed. It's only showing 18 episodes in season 3 when yesterday it was displaying all of them (22).

Ugh

@FoxBlack​ 

Other sites like Wikipedia also say 18 episodes for season 3, and so did IMDb in the past. Perhaps you are confusing it with season 2.

I have the episodes of 19 -22, I also see the S3 E19 on dailymotion, IMDB was showing 22 episodes in the season up until this layout change. Maybe the change was a coincidence and someone re-wrote it to match wiki's? Either way, hating this layout change regardless of what happened, and this seems like an attempt to weed out classic mode in the long run altogether. One staff member basically denied it's existence the other day despite me using it right now. Not a good sign for the future..

@FoxBlack​ 

I doubt this has anything to do with the layout change.

Dailymotion has an episode labeled S03E19 Hearts and Minds. That episode is listed as episode 4.3 at IMDb.

This version from a few years ago lists 18 episodes in season 3, just like now.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190529063547/https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0112111/episodes/?season=3

So does the current Google cache, which is a week old.

Some apparent examples of this:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044298/episodes/?year=2022

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10468790/episodes/?year=2022

Hi @valkyrslayer​ & @Peter_pbn -

Thanks for reporting and providing some examples.  I was able to replicate the issue and filed a ticket (#P95604149) for our tech team to investigate further.

Any progress on this? Its been almost a month and the problem still persists.

I stopped contributing data at the end of last year due to the changes made to the layout. I found a lot of the data I was contributing was hidden in drop down menus on actor pages. Seemed pointless to contribute data that most users would never find.

So I stopped... cold turkey.

You might as well just rate it would you remember it being. It will help you far more than it will screw things up for others. Having my rating helps me remember if something was worth recommending etc. 

Given all the "?ref=" and "&ref=" that appear in the query string portion of IMDb URLs, you would be hard pressed to reliably keep track of things in the browsing history anyway. Meanwhile, nobody seems to even know what purpose this useless "ref" parameter serves.

@jeorj_euler​ 😀

ACT_1
Thursday, October 12th, 2023
?ref_=
https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/ref_/65282ee2635a8c0f7c2c75ad

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Fran, Employee
Sat Oct 14 202
Hello ACT_1,
We are inquiring with the appropriate team 
and we will circle back once we have that information.
Thanks for the patience.

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Yes, I'm following your thread about that, as you probably know,, ACT_1.

@jeorj_euler​ 😀

Maybe get a reply from Fran, Employee Monday ??

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@FoxBlack​ I've only ever rated titles, never individual episodes. 

I still rate titles genuinely. Episodes I now rate a 2 if I've watched it. Perhaps a "watched it" tag could be introduced.

@EvanD71​ 😀

? ?

EvanD71
IMDb member since September 2000
https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0853775/

https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0853775/ratings

8,469 titles

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@ACT_1​ Not sure what your reply is meant to convey.

But then I find most of your replies difficult to understand.

@sss_sss_6922125​ And now the ratings and votes disappeared. What a disappointment!

@sss_sss_6922125​ No need to worry -- this was always a temporary experiment which was shown to only a subset of customers.  The team will now analyse the usage between the group who saw the new layout vs. the group who did not.  If the page with the votes is deemed a success, then it will return for all customers as a permanent change (we also need to fix a few bugs before it can return). 

@Col_Needham​ This is a very handy feature. Since I started using it through the google chrome add-on, it has become a must for me. But after the changes on the site at the beginning of this year, the add-on began to work very poorly, and the developer does not want to finish it. I will be very happy when you implement the function in the site. And when it will be available on award pages and in search results. If it causes problems, it may be worth making it enabled / disabled through the user settings.

@sss_sss_6922125  As you may have noticed, the ratings are now back on the /name/ pages following (a) successful test results (b) fixing the bugs which were detected during the testing.  If you cannot see them just yet, they will be launching to all customers soon. 

@Col_Needham​ That is some really great news, thank you!

@Col_Needham​ it appeared a few days ago, maybe a week ago, it's just wonderful, great thanks. As I wrote earlier, it would be nice if the ratings were also displayed on the awards page and the quick search results page.

I can't remember if that problem didn't always exit.

@pascal_baspeyras​ Thanks for the problem report.  The pages are currently only being shown to a subset of customers in order to catch problems like this which may have been missed in the testing. 

@pascal_baspeyras Thanks again for the feedback. All of the above issues have now been fixed. 

Thank you very much for your great work!