Am I the only one bothered by the obvious check count padding going on here? It’s one thing to have a page for a TV show (or maybe even complete seasons/series), but every episode?!
I’ve watched most, if not all of the episodes here, but the very title of this site implies MOVIES.
I’m interested in comparing my checklist against others on this site, but am often discouraged and put off when I find that the larger check counts are bloated with episodes.
If you only want to see movies on iCM, where would you draw the line? Are mini-series just long movies? But if you allow mini-series, you should allow TV-series as well. The line between those is very unclear. So are episodes the only concern left? But if you ban all episodes, you’ll also lose episodes of series where the episodes are actually stand-alone movies. Some of those are even on official lists. I think the best solution is to keep episodes on iCM just as it is now.
re:mini-series
These are listed as a mini-series, not by the individual parts. These are fine.
re:TV series
I didn’t say I had an issue with listing the entire TV show as one page (one check). I have checked several TV shows that I watch(ed) regularly. This isn’t my issue.
re:episodes
This IS my issue. I cannot think of a good example of an episode in a recurring series that is a stand alone movie. Using my linked examples of Star Trek episodes, there were several two (or three) part episodes that were a fantastic story line, but they weren’t movies. They were longer episodes within the series.
The individual episodes ARE the issue that I’m seeing here. Mini-series – give each incarnation of Lonesome Dove a page. TV series – one page for the entire show makes sense to me (6 incarnations of Star Trek); one page per season/series seems a bit silly to me (e.g. 30 total seasons of Star Trek), but fine. One page for each episode (e.g. 712 combined episodes of Star Trek) is absolute overkill.
I agree with you. There are some TV series where the individual episodes are entirely stand alone, like http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165592/ but I think those could be allowed on a case by case basis without having all these episodes like in your example.
It doesn’t bother me that much because it doesn’t affect official check count and it’s not hard to see whether a user checks episodes or not. Perhaps there could be a separate check count for movies that doesn’t include episodes.
Why stop with ICM? After all, IMDb is the Internet MOVIE Database, not the Internet MOVIE and TV database, yet they allow TV episodes to be listed. It’s a conspiracy and we must get to the bottom of it. Besides, the real check padding comes with all those official shorts.
The problem with going case by case is that it would mean manual work. By going with IMDb-data, it’s possible to exclude a complete category (like video-games are excluded). If we would exclude episodes but allow some of them, we would make those pages manually and that probably would mean Marijn has to write some code for that to be possible.
@Scruluce:
I got that your problem is with episodes and not with mini-series or TV-series. My point was mainly to make clear it’s hard to decide where to draw the line. You draw the line at episodes, but other users might want to exclude TV-series at all, because it’s icheckMOVIES. Another example: what about stage-performances, like Richard Pryor: Live in Concert? It’s an official check, but I would never call that a movie. Should we exclude those as well?
I don’t want to draw the line. Users can choose for themselves whether they want to check episodes or not. The total number of checks doesn’t really mean a lot anyway. Look at Armoreska for example. Over 30k checks, but that’s mainly because he tries to watch almost every short ever made.
yeah, just following IMDb apart from video games is good
Am I the only one bothered by the obvious check count padding going on here?
No, this question was asked times before.
I’m interested in comparing my checklist against others on this site, but am often discouraged and put off when I find that the larger check counts are bloated with episodes.
That’s what the officially listed count is for, I guess. There are still 1500 available shorts of varying length.
By the way, I’m in the middle of watching Star Trek TNG.
Some people want us to make every check official, but if we did, I would have a problem with episodes inflating the official check count. You can’t please everyone. I’m fine with the way it is, since it doesn’t affect the rankings. The Marty [tv movie] (https://www.icheckmovies.com/movies/the+philco+television+playhouse+marty/) is a television episode on two official lists. It’s more accurate to list that episode than it is to list the entire series.
If the episode checks counted for anything, then maybe I’d see this as an issue, but I’m certainly not bothered by @Armoreska 's checks. If iCM works for him to keep track of what episodes of The Powder Puff Girls he’s seen, all the better - it’s no skin off my nose and doesn’t effect my rankings since none of those checks are official.
Is there really any serious discussion of non-official checks counting towards rankings?
No, not a remotely serious discussion, although the idea occasionally rears its head when discussing the addition of new official lists. There are basically two camps, those who want all checks to be “official checks” and those who feel that the addition of new lists “dilutes” the exclusivity of official checks because the number of official checks usually increases with each new list. Okay, there’s a third camp, the one which doesn’t really care all that much about the second camp’s concerns and don’t think all checks should be official. I’m guessing that camp is fairly large and fairly quiet in general.
@WalterNeff:
your snarky pedantic remark aside, this site, respectfully, is not IMDb.
IMDb listing TV shows, by episode, doesn’t bother me at all. IMDb is an exhaustive résumé of almost anyone that has ever been on screen. (my chief complaint there are the erroneous pages made for rumored films, especially those that never happen, but that has no bearing here.)
@joachimt:
until I saw others mentioning “official” and “non-official” checks, I was not aware of any difference, hence my frustration with the inflated numbers when reviewing the list of users (by checks). Furthermore, I only moments ago found the charts that distinguish between the official and total checks. As far as I was aware, that WAS how users were ranked.
re: drawing the line
I get that everyone will fall into a different group on how to handle this, however it feels lazy to mass import everything from IMDb. My vote, for what little it matters, would be to exclude anything categorized as an episode. I imagine that would be similar to the way IMDb video game entries are also filtered. .
Take it, or leave it, those are my thoughts. If nothing else, I’m content to see others weighing in on the topic.
This is an interesting aside, because I would have thought if people only saw one ranking list it would have been the official checks one, since it’s the one that shows up in your profile. I’ve only just now remembered that the “All profiles” link doesn’t let you sort by official checks, I hardly ever go there except to sort by awards. Always useful to have these reminders that people use the site differently and that some things which may seem obvious to one person may not to another.
Gone in 60 Seconds: The Ride
this was a 3D ride at Universal Studios amusement park, here in California. Riders would sit in a small theater, of sorts, in front of a large screen. For the duration of the ride, the seats rumble and hydraulically move in sync with the film. This gives the rider the feeling that they are driving (aside from being in a room with 30+ other people.
Stuff like that is hard to filter (if we decide to do so), as long as it’s on IMDb.
iCM is highly dependable on IMDb. One might argue that’s a bad thing, but overall it saves us a LOT of work. We don’t have to import every movie manually and have mods review those submissions, like on Criticker for example. For us, it’s just a matter of entering an URL and it’s done. I’m glad we do so. Sure, it has some disadvantages. Anything wrong on IMDb will end up wrong on iCM. But overall I don’t want to do otherwise.
If we want to manually filter out episodes or borderline stuff like your example, we either should loose the connection to IMDb or Marijn should write some code to be able to blacklist certain URLs. Then mods could blacklist stuff like this manually.
I don’t think this will happen though and you just have to accept there are certain weird entries on iCM.
Well, the one issue with ‘dropping’ episodes from iCM figures is simple - I’d have no ability to find missed items. Why? Well right now my personal database, iCM, and IMDb all agree - they have the same number of titles marked as seen though admittedly, there are titles in my spreadsheet marked as not rate-able since they weren’t in the IMDb database when I saw them. I compare my numbers a few times a week and a couple times a month they are off. Quick comparison between the three provides access to the missed item. So I’d say there is value in leaving it how it is, but that’s not to say a better job couldn’t be done acquainting new users with how things work on iCM. It took me many months to figure things out for myself - I didn’t know about the forums initially.
he’s seen, all the better - it’s no skin off my nose and doesn’t effect my rankings since none of those checks are official.
