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Why is J. Reifel the 94th name listed numerically on the site?
If you look at the first names listed numerically, they're all super famous. The URL ending 0000001 is Fred Astaire, 0000002 is Lauren Bacall, 0000003 is Brigitte Bardot. When you get to 0000094, nestled between Brad Pitt and Woody Allen, you see an obscure writer called J. Reifel. He wrote four poorly received sci-fi movies between 1996 and 1997. I've spoken to Reifel and he'd like to know as well. The only reason he could think of was that his films were some of the first to be released on DVD. I'd love to hear from someone who worked at IMDb 1996-1998. Was it an in-joke? Was someone a fan?
Accepted Solution
Col_Needham
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16 hours ago
@jeeperscripes Thanks for the interesting question, and well-spotted in the sequence of names. The quick history here is that originally in 1990 (and for many years) IMDb did not use fixed numerical IDs for neither names nor titles and a person's identifier was literally the text of their name. Around 1996 we started to need a method to lock specific credits or name spellings in cases where there was confusion or a dispute over these credits leading to frequent flip/flopping of contributions to edit/delete them when we already knew they were factually correct. It is a little more complicated than this, but someone on the team came-up with the idea of adding a lock to such credits by adding a hidden note in an unpublished field and we needed a short key to identify the name in the lock field so we created the a numeric identifier. The first block of IDs is alphabetical by last name so each person had a credit somewhere in IMDb which needed protection. After this initial batch, each time we needed a new lock, we would assign the next free number to that name, so Reifel must have had a credit which needed a lock (or possibly the spelling of his name itself). When we introduced the "nm" identifiers for all names on IMDb, we used the numeric sequence which was already in place for names with these locked credits.
Hope this helps [I am the Founder an Executive Chair of IMDb and so I have been here since 1990]
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