Updates to the Ratings pages and functionality

Hi ariad,

You can not currently filter your rating on your Ratings page. Fortunately, you can use the Advanced Title Search to filter your ratings.

For instance:
Most Popular Action Titles You Have Seen
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?count=250&genres=action&my_ratings=restrict&view=simple

To filter your ratings:
1. Select Advanced Search from the drop down menu next to the search box on most IMDb pages.

2. On the Advanced Search click Advanced Title Search.

3. On the Advanced Title Search page:
3a. Under Genres select a genre, such as Action.
3b. Under Your Ratings select Restrict to Titles I've Seen.
3c. Under Display Options select your display options. For this example I chose Compact 250 per page sorted by Popularity Ascending.
3d. Click the yellow Search button.

= = =

Admittedly, this is not as convenient as being able to filter on your ratings page. However, this provide similar functionality.

Thanks for the problem report.  We have opened a ticket with the appropriate team. 

As a workaround, the following advanced title search works as expected -> http://www.imdb.com/search/title?count=100&my_ratings=restrict&sort=my_ratings  

Similarly if you need a longer, compact view, here's a the same at 250 titles at a time -> http://www.imdb.com/search/title?count=250&my_ratings=restrict&sort=my_ratings&view=simp...

You can filter / sort your ratings on other criteria via http://www.imdb.com/search/title -- all you need to do is select the "Restrict to Titles I've Seen" checkbox in the "Your Ratings" section and then add other filters or change the results sort order as you wish.

This should be fixed now.  Thanks again for the problem report and sorry for the inconvenience. 

Fix confirmed. I get the second page of Ratings-ranked titles when I tap Next page.

Separate topic: when I tried Grid View, I was surprised that no rating is displayed, not even when I mouseover a poster or the title link beneath it. Is that the intent?

Using Chrome on a Chromebook, scripts/extensions turned off.

Sorry about that.  Please see the answer directly above for the confirmation of the bug and a temporary workaround. 

Col Needham, did you have a reason why the counter xxx/xxx was removed from lists? Seems like a pretty fundamental tool which now only exists for the top 250 lists.

This functionality is still there, for example, if you look at one of my public lists at http://www.imdb.com/list/ls027959285/ click the "Refine" bar and away you go ... more filters than before, and then see "You and This List"



The same filters are available when viewing your own lists too. 

It is no longer directly on the main list page for simplicity and scalability reasons, sorry.

Will it be back? Will compact view be back? Will both certainly not be back? Is it undecided?

That's great and all, but there doesn't appear to be any way to export your ratings to a list. In other words, if you want to refine your ratings in the way you could have previously, you now need to go through and manually add each and every rating to a list before you can do that. 

@Adam Garber
Advanced Title Search lets you sort and filter your Ratings in more ways than I'll ever use. Just select  Your Ratings > Restrict to Titles I've Seen
among the criteria.

I agree it's much nicer to select such things on the Ratings page itself, and hopefully they'll bring us the full Refine menu on the Your Ratings page soon. But you don't really need to create amother list of titles you rated just to Refine and Sort that data.

Thanks @bderoes I'm aware of the advanced title search functionality. The problem of course is that you have to go back and redo every search any time you want to further filter a list, compared to the refine menu which is one click.

For example, say you want to look through your ratings for movies that you have rated above 8.0. Great, you can go through advanced title search with 5 clicks and a bunch of scrolling. But now you realize how many movies you have and want to refine that to movies made after 2000. Well, now you have to go back to advanced title search and redo everything along with the new filter. This is the case for every single time you want to redo parameters. 

I don't think they have any intention of bringing the refine menu back to the ratings page. Remember, that menu used to be there, their elimination of it is what sparked this entire thread. 

@Adam Garber

I'm not so pessimistic about the Refine options never coming to Ratings, but I may be dreaming.

You don't always need to go back to the ATS screen to alter your search; you can alter the URL instead. With prior planning, and selecting all the parameters you might need, returning to the ATS screen can be avoided. Plus, I learned long ago that I don't have to scroll up and down when I want to change the Genre, because after making my new selection, you can put your cursor in one of the free-form boxes and hit <enter>. That will initiate the search without returning to the bottom of the screen.

But if you're familiar with ATS, what was the point of your post:

That's great and all, but there doesn't appear to be any way to export your ratings to a list. In other words, if you want to refine your ratings in the way you could have previously, you now need to go through and manually add each and every rating to a list before you can do that. 

Because it's also not true that to create a custom list of your ratings that you have to add each title to a list manually. At least that description sounds like you're going to open each title page, or maybe copy/paste each title into an Add title box (and that won't work for shorts and TV episodes right now). Instead, you can use the Watchlist as a holding cell for creating a new list. In fact, I've emptied my Watchlist for just that purpose (plus I wanted to pare down the number of titles in my wishlist.)

What I mean is: create a compact ATS list of your ratings, tap the add-to-Watchlist flag for each entry, then move them from your watchlist to your custom list of your ratings. A ridiculous amount of work, but if you really believe they're not bringing back Refine functions, and you really dislike changing your ATS searches, your new custom Ratings list is "only" n + n/250 + 6n/100 or so clicks away, where n = # ratings.
(n to add each title to Watchlist, n/250 to move to the next page of compact ATS search, 6n/100 to

1. select all 100 titles on a Watchlist page, then 
2. Move To, 
3. Select List, 
4. Save, 
5. ctrl-End, 
6. Next page.)

Hmm, (I'm entertaining myself here) if instead you export the ratings list, and copy/paste each title id into an Add Title box, that would be 3n clicks for each title (1. copy, 2. paste, 3. click on title found.) So the Export option would be quicker for 3n < n + n/250 + 6n/100, or 2n < 64n/1000, namely never. Unless I've not accounted for some steps in the ATS version.

If your point was to suggest they provide us with an easy way to add search results to a list, I'd support that request with gusto. I think we used to have that years ago, and maybe they found too many junk lists were being created. But storage is cheap, and IMDb is owned by Amazon, the biggest provider of web storage. So maybe they'll provide that again, especially since they are very focused on mobile apps. Tapping on each individual title in a search result sounds even worse on a phone/tablet.

Haha, I agree that that (emptying the watchlist and transferring) is an alternative. A really exceedingly bad, terrible alternative, but it does exist. At that point it's just easier to export to excel and use filters. We did use to have the 'add on mass to list' functionality as well, but that loss doesn't affect me like the loss of the filters does. My point was that IMDB is making things unnecessarily difficult for as far as I can tell no reason. 

Of course, you don't actually need to empty the watchlist to do what I describe. You can just remember the last true Watchlist entry before piling titles into it.

Their reason for stripping away features appears to be changing the back-end data structures to support the building of their Android app (they released a new version this month), and future desirable (to whom?) functionality. It's just a big growing pain inflicted on us, while they set the wayback machine to simpler times in order to re-develop the site with a more modern behind-the-curtain design. And maybe hope we'll forget some of the things they don't want to support anymore. Or use our complaints to determine which features are worth restoring.

I'm fascinated by how their new design has made it so very difficult to return the Your Rating column to a list Export. (I'd bet the missing 4 columns from Export were reported Dec 6 or 7, and 3 non-ratings columns were restored in a few days, but, just checked, nope, still no Your Ratings on a custom list Export on Dec 29. Holidays or not, what has prevented this fix from being implemented?)

So Adam, if you just want to register a complaint, maybe say so, and explain that you see workarounds, but you really blah blah blah. Just to prevent people from trying to "help" when your only purpose is to lobby for your favorite lost features.

The same filters are available when viewing your own lists too.

It is no longer directly on the main list page for simplicity and scalability reasons, sorry.

This function is not in your new 'refine' drop down list. How is having no way of seeing a simple fraction or percentage of the list watched simpler? How is moving the 'hide titles I've seen' behind a drop-list 'simpler'?

@bederoes Fair enough. I appreciate all of your help trying to find workarounds. But yes, ultimately I want to register complaints about the lack of functionality. And I want to do so loudly and frequently. I mean, to be clear, if there were a reasonable solution I would be all for it, I just don't think it exists right now. 

Consider your complaint registered, Adam Garber.

@Scott Fargas
Not providing multiple ways to see information is simpler for the developers, of course.

One of the reasons I got OUT of the programming game years ago is because I couldn't stop myself from providing additional functionality that was neato/keen. My customers just kept demanding more, it wasn't paying enough $$, and every extra bell and whistle caused maintenance headaches down the line.

The fraction and the hide titles checkbox is just a more convenient way and a nicer presentation of what Refine does. Providing it on the prior version of Lists was just a different interpretation of functionality they still provide. Do I miss it? Yes.

But I miss other things much, much more. Compact view, refine while in edit mode, drag/drop to change order are probably my top 3.

I can appreciate the need for IMDb to redevelop the site after 27(?) years. The spaghetti code must have been all melted together, awful to maintain. Unfortunately we the desktop users are going through growing pains now, because you can't really redevelop a little at a time. When you change data structures, you have to redevelop everything that uses that data. And you can't spend years remaking all the old stuff, you need to go live at some point. So you do it with less functionality than was available before. And you don't want to share your design specs and timelines with the public, because that'll just cause more debate and disappointment when targets are not met and priorities are redirected.

Hopefully we desktop users will start reaping the rewards in the near future. I like a few of the new features, and I've learned some great stuff that I never knew could be done: performing ATS on someone else's list(s) is a biggy. (That's not new, it just came up during discussions here since the Dec 6 update.)

BTW, I tried the new Android app, and came scurrying back to my desktop post haste. I need the wide open spaces and easy clickin' of a 15+" screen!

Your fifth paragraph perfectly nailed it from a developers perspective. It had to be updated undoubtedly and we are experiencing the inconveniences of change.

But perhaps I am missing something because both you and Needham have argued that the function still exists. Where can I now find my percentage watched in relation to a list?

@Scott Fargas
Percentage is not provided.

But under You and This List, you can select the Titles you Rated or didn't, or the Titles in your Watchlist or out. You have to remember how big the list was, then compare it with the Refined number. So you have numerator and denominator, not in one place and not simplified to a %. The absence of the % is provided as a feature to encourage users to hone their memory and estimation skills. </tongue in cheek>

I agree that the % and the number rated was nice, especially at a glance with no extra effort. But I'm more inclined to scan the release years and the titles quickly to see how many I know or would be inclined to watch, and make my judgement from that. (Besides, I've watched a lot of films without rating them. I hate that truth, but facts is facts.) So I was far more distressed to lose Compact Mode for its scan-ability (and other uses). And very very happy to have Jeorj Euler's bookmarklet to strip a title list down to its essentials for quick perusal:
https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/update-to-list-pages?utm_source=notification&utm_medium=...

Please see https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/upcoming-changes-to-several-imdb-features-du6man1opd5q0

@Col Needham

I wish you could add to the announcement at the top of this thread, and the Update to List Pages thread. In those addenda, please list the features you intend to restore, and rough timelines.

I think I understand why you've stripped some things out, but it would be nice to know which are the temporary omissions. And this thread is much too long for someone just arriving even to look just for official replies.

Of course, if we don't see our personal favorites, you'll hear from us. But it really does feel like you've downgraded the system. For people without experience as programmers on old large systems, the reasoning in your oft-cited post is difficult to understand.

Plus, I doubt that many of us understand just how large this system is. I know that I don't use a lot of its functionality, and haven't reacted to all the things you've taken away because I didn't use them.

@Joe Roguszka

Until they bring back the ability to Refine our Ratings, you know that you can get IMDb to tell you a lot of things through the Advanced Title Search, yes? When you've selected the rest of your criteria, just check  Restrict to Titles I've Seen  under the Your Ratings section.

Not nearly as nice as Refine for Lists, but no, you don't need to make tallies by hand.

Hi Sylvestre Genevier,

You can not currently filter your rating on your Ratings page. Fortunately, you can use the Advanced Title Search to filter your ratings.

For more information, please see this post in this thread:
https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/updates-to-the-ratings-pages-and-functionality?topic-reply-l...

Admittedly, this is not as convenient as being able to filter on your ratings page. However, this provide similar functionality.

Thank you for merging my post, I couldn't find this information and everything is explained here... however I'm really disapointed and I'm going to write why in an answer to the main post.

I have a workaround while we wait for a better solution. This ain't pretty, but it sounds like you have a lot of titles to distribute.

Use Advanced Title Search to create a Compact list of Your Ratings (or a subset if you want to use the Search rather than this URL:)
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?my_ratings=restrict&view=simple&count=250&sort=your_rat...
Tap the Add to Watchlist flag to the right of every title (and the 2 ratings columns). If you have other titles in your Watchlist with ratings, remember the first title you're adding so you don't go too far.
Then Edit the Watchlist, and copy/move titles to other lists as desired.

Going forward, if you know where the title will go when you're rating it, you might want to mouseover the Add to Watchlist button on the Title page to get the dropdown menu, and add the title to those lists at the time.

Are you sure you are in the 'majority'?  The number of people that have complained in this thread ab oput the functionality is less than 100th of 1% of IMDBs users.  Far far from a majority.  You and I are joining a very small subset of IMDB users who are unhappy with the changes.  

Most "customers" of IMDb don't even notice the changes, because they're not registered users and only take superficial glances at the site. While there are millions of registrants, a lot of them do not really make thorough and regular use of the site, or they use parts of the site that aren't being changed. The rest are people who do notice the changes, do not like them, but will not come here express their thoughts on the matter. More importantly, the changes simply are not significant enough to get attention in even social media and the blogosphere let alone media in general, like the press or television. It's simply not a notable event.

@Jeorj Euler,

As users of IMDb, we do not have access to IMDb's web statistics. As a result we do not know how most users use IMDb. However, based upon the posts on Get Satisfaction, what you have written corresponds to what I've observed. We can also use our experience as web developers to extrapolate to how people use IMDb.

You may find this Google Trends interesting:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=IMDb

@ Dan Dassow, Champion
If I understand the Google Trends correctly, it only reflects Searches for IMDb, not access to the site by bookmark or app. 

I sometimes search for things on IMDb using Google, but the majority of my access is via bookmark, and then links within the site.

And the worldwide searches that include IMDb could be favorable or unfavorable. Perhaps someone asks "why is imdb removing features". 

The Serbia/Croatia/Slovenia/Hungary dominance remains regardless of what timeframe I choose. That's pretty fascinating.

I recently saw an article about Alibaba's browser UC being dominant in other portions of the world, used more than Chrome. I don't remember if it said anything about which search engine was most popular. It did say that Google usage was related to Chrome usage.
https://www.mobilemarketer.com/news/report-alibabas-uc-browser-for-mobile-quietly-overtakes-google-c...

@Paul Cardom

Sylvestre Genevier said he was joining the "majority here" to complain.

I interpret "here" as meaning this thread on GetSatisfaction.com

@bderoes wrote:

If I understand the Google Trends correctly, it only reflects Searches for IMDb, not access to the site by bookmark or app.

That is my understanding also.

I found the Google Trends interesting. I was certain about its relevance.

On that note, there of course is also https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/imdb.com to consider. Indeed, I don't know for sure how "most people" interact with IMDb, but I've rarely seen hyperlinks around the Web to parts of IMDb other than the main pages of movies and personas, which basically does not include reviews, summaries, synopses, biographies, parents guides, lists, polls, FAQs or help pages. It's like IMDb exists inside of a bubble. A lot of the people I know in person only ever interact with IMDb by using their smartphones. Well, that's my anecdote (two cents).

First of all, I was indeed talking about the majority of users that took the time to express how they feel about this update. But I agree, this is not a good metric to look at since most of the people that like something don't go on a forum to say it... 

So it's pretty obvious that most people that came to comment this post are unhappy with the update.

Also, I realise that most of IMDB's user won't even notice this change, but that's not the point. The only users to take into account are the ones that used the features : do they prefer the new search or the old system? That's the relevant question for me.

And I feel that the answer to that question is that they didn't like having options removed or moved somewhere else. But I know I don't have solid data to proove this feeling.

But I'm pretty sure that removing usefull options for some people is never a good option if you are not forced to do so. Here, I don't understand why they wouldn't restore the ratings options. It would please all unhappy users like us and it wouldn't affect the ones that didn't use them...

Sylvestre Genevier mused:

I don't understand why they wouldn't restore the ratings options. It would please all unhappy users like us and it wouldn't affect the ones that didn't use them...

I wonder how the Ratings are stored now, especially contrasted with the past. They seem to have made it much more difficult to develop anything extracted from Ratings. Two prominent examples:

1. The Export of custom lists hasn't had the Your Rating column since the Dec 6 update. They restored 3 other missing columns within a few days.
2. The recently fixed "display page 2 of sorted ratings" which lost the Sort parameter.

Unlike all other lists, we can't append the parameter &page=2 to the url. That's because:

Ratings aren't a List.

So IMDb can't just apply the existing Refine and Sort software to them (unless they would create a temporary, disposable list on demand.) If the response time is reasonable, that sounds like a much better solution than re-developing the Refine and Sort features, which is what it appears they've done to View the Ratings. (Just look at the second page URL with that endless pagination key.)

So "why not restore the options?" Because it appears to be difficult and loads of development work (unless my suggestion above is reasonable.)

Hmmm... I don't know about that. From my developer point of view, it seems strange that they would change everything in a way that makes it impossible to restore this options (either you have the data to sort or not). But guessing that kind of thing is useless anyway, only IMDB can answer us.

But if you look at the ratings :

You can see that they still have, for each movie they display, the duration, the genre, the year. So it should still be possible to filter by year, to have a graph with ratings... that sort of things that I loved!

@Sylvestre Genevier; @IMDb (especially last 2 paragraphs)

I didn't say impossible. I said seemingly difficult.

It's not a matter of whether they HAVE the data; they do. It's a matter of how many different programs do you develop to provide these features: 1 for iOS, 1 for Android, 1 for desktop (any others?). So because Ratings are not a List, this is yet another application that needs 3+ versions. 

Yes, they are displaying the same information as they do on List View. But the page doesn't behave at all like List View for custom lists. Compare these 2 IMDb-generated urls for page 2:

http://www.imdb.com/list/ls027794353/?sort=list_order,asc&st_dt=&mode=detail&page=2

(I added a space to this one so GS wouldn't hide any of the code.)
http://www.imdb.com/ user/ur2875687/ratings?sort=date_added%2Cdesc&mode=detail&paginationKey=zfxjlj3fi62aqh65du7o2aoq5574k2ib36wxsotvw2dxztx4knu5kdgrxmbtoc34wjtsruxgtwll7hssuyej2k5yqdzopfbtjllx2zbf22ivk6usv3hkpws2ootagen6j3b4wqbcm7zihfwnb4sn4kqbul33pofg3f77ku7p2uul2lph2qfrkzgvkiratni4zqwdx3rzyzqiu&lastPosition=100

I believe they are retrieving the data from the master Ratings database for each page. I suspect they created a completely (or significantly) different program to display the List View for Ratings than what they have for Lists. 

They may have felt the need to radically change the way they stored Ratings, and felt their display on a page to an individual user was less important that their use system-wide. Obviously they didn't create a user list of the titles rated. Seems like that would be the simplest solution. Maybe they're in the process of building those lists, and we'll suddenly get all the standard list features.

I can't imagine that if they took my suggestion (below) that the response time would be too terrible: when someone requests their Ratings page, extract the data from the database, create a temporary copy of their titles in the same format as our custom lists, and pass that temporary list to the software that displays (and Sorts and Refines) custom lists. Actually, the version that displays someone else's custom list, because no editing need be allowed.