jefflevin's profile

2 Messages

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150 Points

Sunday, November 1st, 2015 10:11 PM

No Status

15

Lists: How about organizing the lists better?

When you look at the lists associated with a movie, you shouldn't have to plod through hundreds of lists like "movies I've watched," "movies I've seen," "my favorite movies," etc. in order to find the few lists that actually have some effort behind them.  Lists with no commentary should come LAST.

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9 years ago

I fully agree in principle. However, ranking the usefulness of lists may be somewhat difficult to automate. The simple criteria that lists with commentary should be more useful than other lists appears to be a good start.

I recommend that you click the like button for this idea:
i think a search engine for list name is necessary
https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/i_think_a_search_engine_for_list_name_is_necessary

2 Messages

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150 Points

9 years ago

You can't rank the lists by usefulness, but you CAN put the lists with no commentary behind those that DO have commentary.  Lists with a description and a comment for every entry should be at the top, useless lists with no commentary at all should be at the bottom, and everything else should be in between.  If not usefulness, sort them by EFFORT. 

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4.6K Messages

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236.3K Points

Didn't you already say that? And didn't Dan agree? ;)

I agree too!

1 Message

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86 Points

7 years ago

I agree with you. Lists with over 100 movies should be put in a separate category. "Movies I've seen" with a 10 000 titles are useless for other users. No one is going to browse through that.

159 Messages

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6.9K Points

7 years ago

Idea: A feature could be created that categorizes user-lists according to the number of entries it contains. For example; 1-100, 101-200, 201-300... etc. And where a list is initially created with 100 entries and then updated by the listee, that list automatically falls into the applicable category. This change, alone, I believe, will be a vast improvement over the existing means of viewing lists.

For other ideas, please refer to this previous thread: https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/imdb_advanced_user_list_search

8 Messages

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142 Points

1 year ago

All lists should automatically be Private and there should be a vetting process for lists to be made Public. The lists feature is completely useless currently since there are thousands of lists that people have made because they either don't understand that they could use the Advanced Search to create that exact list for themselves at anytime, or because they think anyone else on this green planet would care about which tv series they specifically watched in 2017. 

The value that the lists feature could offer is completely negated by the immense amount of work it takes to find anything even half useful. I say kill it until they care enough to do it properly.

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@anotherwhitemeat​ ,

IMDb polls are based on IMDb list. Although it would be helpful to better curate lists, making lists private until they are vetted would make reviewing poll suggestions a significant challenge. Likewise, vetting list would take a significant amount of effort that would likely fall upon IMDb staff.

A better option would be an option to be able to search lists within IMDb.

In the mean time, each name page and title pages has lists of lists and polls associated with the person and title respectively. You can also use Google search to find a specific list:

site:www.imdb.com/list/ [keyword]

or poll:

site:www.imdb.com/poll/ [keyword]

Example, search for lists and polls with the keyword Michael:

site:www.imdb.com/list/ michael 

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.imdb.com%2Flist%2F+michael

site:www.imdb.com/poll/ michael

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.imdb.com%2Fpoll%2F+michael

8 Messages

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142 Points

@dan_dassow 

Appreciate the feedback and I can see how automatically making lists Private would create problems.

The solutions that you're offering to get past the uselessness of the List lists are not worth taking in my opinion. If I'm on Google already, I'm not searching IMDB for their lists. There are 100's of different options at that point. 

I'm sure they don't want an entire taskforce taking care of this either but if you had one person going through periodically and just switching out some of these lists to Private it would benefit the entire site. 

Imagine a "All the Movies I've Seen" list by some random user that has over 4,000 movies in it. Making that individual list Private would remove it from 4,000 movie pages that have to list that List as one that contains that movie. You've solved 4,000 problems with one switch. If someone spent 8 hours doing that for one day you'd be able to clean up a significant portion of the site.

It feels like an easy task with absolutely no detriment to it. The list still exists for the user that made it. And I would only do this to the meaningless lists that serve no purpose. If there's even a question of value, I'm fine with leaving it. But a list of Every Horror Movie is literally available to search through the Advanced Search. Click Feature Films. Click Horror. Done. We don't need 100 of those lists that serve no purpose other than standing in the way of finding a list that actually has value, whether it's solid information ("Every Movie with a Vampire") or opinion based ("Friday the 13th, Ranked").

If you made every "Movies I Own" list Private, that alone would be a significant dent in the refuse that is scrolling through Lists currently.

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@anotherwhitemeat​ ,

I agree that many user created IMDb lists are not worth the electrons sacrificed to create them. "Movies that I've Seen" is a prime candidate.

I suspect many people do not really want or need their lists to be public, but don't think that their lists are only of interest to themselves or to a limited group of people.

Maybe an option to share your list to select user IDs would be helpful.

(edited)

8 Messages

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142 Points

“I suspect many people do not really want or need their lists to be public,” - agreed. That’s why I thought the standard setting of Private vs. Public might help.

There are two enemies here, one is plain ignorant and the other is disillusioned into thinking we actually are interested in their list of “TV Shows watched in 2017.”

It would be nice if people labelled their lists, I can’t tell you how many “Horror” lists there are. Ok, horror you like? Horror you’d recommend? What do these 35 unmarked and randomly listed horror movies mean to you and what should they mean to me? 

That’s why I think some oversight is needed. There will always be these two types of people, they just need to be roped in a bit so they don’t ruin the site.