List counts, official check counts WRONG

#1

For weeks now, two MAJOR site functions aren’t calculating correctly. And I wonder why there’s not more uproar.

  1. Official-check counts for a given user are usually way off. Observe your displayed number of checks in the rankings and then compare it to how many official checks you see if you sort your checking history by “# official lists” and note where the zero-list films begin. My own count is currently 15 checks too high, and I don’t even know when it last was accurate. And I checked the discrepancies with the top-ranking users and found some gaps that were much worse. The worst of all was “blueboybob,” who is displayed with 9298 official checks but actually has 9657!!!

  2. Countless films are wrongly displayed as being on 0 lists. I mean zero official AND unofficial lists. Currently, only about 94,700 films out of 781K are calculated as being on at least one list. This is far, far off. I just went to a totally random page of films on “0” lists, and 10 of those 25 films were not actually on zero lists. Bar Bahar (2016) was the worst case – this is listed as being on 0 lists but is actually on 22.

My watchlist currently has 169 films, and a whopping 64 of them are wrongly displayed as being on zero lists. One film was actually on 33 lists. Do you see how prevalent this problem is?

#2

Thanks for constantly banging the drum on this one, Ebbywebby.
I’ve been using I check movies for 7 years, never felt the need to post on the forum about anything. However, whenever I’ve worked a list, I’ve always switched to the top lists setting. This pushes the more familiar films that I’ve probably seen to the top and the less familiar stuff to the bottom. Try this now on Edgar Wright’s top 1000, a list I particularly enjoy. All films after 2013 are bunched at the bottom and, oddly, the final dozen films have no top list number at all. This is particularly annoying even though lists which terminate before 2013 are unaffected.
I, like you, wonder why this isn’t more commented upon as it’s been about a month or more now.

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#3

It’s possible that the official check totals are correct while the check histories themselves are inaccurate. For instance, are we sure the history is updated correctly if a title gets unchecked? My personal history differs from my official toplist check count by only 2, which (like your differential of 15) amounts to far less than 1% of my total. Plus, few people bother to verify their official check counts through their history. So while this is definitely an issue, I think those are the reasons for lack of an uproar.

As for your 2nd item, my assumption is that the “All” tab is a sum of the “Official” and “Personal” totals, and that the “In Lists” tab should always match the “All”.

image

Clearly this is broken for movies like Bar Bahar, and I’ll wager the list sorting is driven by the incorrect “In Lists” total. Is it possible “All” is always 0 if “Official” is 0? Have you seen any cases of “In Lists” being correct when “Official” is 0? Conversely, have you seen any cases of “In Lists” being incorrect when “Official” is > 0? So far, I have not.

I would also like to note that these are both issues with poor calculations leading to incorrect ranks and/or sorting, which is exactly the case found in the thread Awards Count Inaccurate.

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#4

Sam:

  1. I really don’t think I’ve unchecked as many as 15 films, and certainly not within the couple of months when this check problem has been evident.

  2. Going back to my watchlist (just because that’s a convenient set of films to sample), it has 137 films on 0 lists. Of those, 77 have the correct # of lists displayed (including some films that really ARE on 0 lists) and 60 say 0 when the tally is non-zero.

And I thought maybe all the “official checks” would have the right number of lists, but two of these 32 films also had wrong tallies.


#5

Well, the check-count problem remains, but it appears the second problem with zero-toplist miscalculations is finally fixed. Before, I said about 94,700 films were labeled as being on one or more toplists…now the count is properly about 227,600. Just a wee little correction.

#6

Thank you for reporting these problems. It’s been brought to Marijns attention.