Not to crap on the hard work many do to make this a better database, but I've been noticing so many updates which are just assigning birth years for very slim and often unnecessary reasons. I've held my tonuge and just used my locks til now, but it's really getting out of hand.

Prime example and what drove me over the edge:
James Woods. Not to knock on anyone's tastes or interests, but do we have a huge gay porn membership here? Even if so, this guy has one movie which isn't even out on dvd, anywhere! Why do we need a BY for the famous guy? Is this gonna be a concern for anyone if that movie ever comes out on dvd? Can we at least limit the BY's to people who share a name AND have credits here that need to be separated? There's a million other porn stars who "borrow" names of the famous everyday, some even have dvd titles, do we want a BY for everyone?

Just checked all James Woods' profiles with my trusty ol' CLT+ Tool. There's one pending UPC profile, which will probably be available tomorrow.

Having said that, we (read:Invelos) REALLY need a better way to distinguish crew/cast names. James Woods has 1411 profiles, and 1 of them is the adult actor. There are a few James A. Woods [James Woods] profiles, but the majority is regular James Woods. Surely there's an easier way to distinguish 1 profile from the other 1410, but in DVD Profiler-world we rather change 1410 instead of 1. 

Or how about this one, for improving results? Group all profiles with the same title (or original title)/prod.year combo:



and clicking on them will fold them out...

Quoting marcelb7:

Quote:
Here's a thought for improving the database. Incorporating the idea of the CLT+, so more info will be seen by the user.

One thing that would really improve the CLT is to have separate searches for cast and crew.  These are kept separate in the program, why not in the CLT too?

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What bugs me when I look at the online bd, is all the entry with no rel;ease date and other glaring ommissions.

Quoting bigdaddyhorse:

Quote:
Not to knock on anyone's tastes or interests, but do we have a huge gay porn membership here?

We probably have a huge gay membership here. A huge gay membership here would lead to a huge gay porn membership here. The same way that having a huge straight membership here would lead to having a huge straight porn membership here. I mean, this site is mainly made up of men, and really, what man doesn't watch porn? Let's be serious there. 

In all seriousness though, it's probably a lot larger than some of the straight members here might expect. For the "gay" titles I own in my collection (not porn titles... who the hell buys porn anymore with the internet now    and even if I did own porn titles, I probably wouldn't use DVDProfiler to track them, just a personal preference of course) when I do updates to them, I regularly get 10/15/20/25/30+ votes on the title, the same as I do for mainstream Hollywood films.

THAT being said (and it's not even close to being the main point of the topic) I agree with the original point.

I'd say at this point, about 50% of the updates that come through my local, I no longer accept simply because they're additions of birth years, and I'm another voice that thinks it's unnecessary to add a birth year to 1400 James Woods profiles simply because there's ONE profile that contains a porn actor that used the same name a single time in his career. Hell, I don't even add a birth year for two "legit" actors if I don't have both in my local.

And I also agree with DJ Doena that the way of accepting birth years into your local is HIGHLY flawed. We can filter out New Birth Years when accepting an update to a profile, but not when downloading a new profile??? That's not incredibly bright (sorry). And when adding that new profile with a Birth Year, the Birth Year now filters to every single profile with that actor (and if you do have multiple actors with the same name, that Birth Year is now attached to both or more?). That needs to be corrected and frankly should've been corrected years ago. It would help (not solve, but at least help) with the problem of invalid birth years getting recontributed over and over again (seriously, who's not sick of removing a birth year for Samuel L. Jackson from their local).

I agree with the common name issue too. I'm one of those people that starts and takes part in common name threads (and will continue to do so), but don't think I don't realize the futility in it. Just working within the system we have now.

I don't really expect any of this to change soon though, so take all my gripes as you will. 

Quoting Merrik:

Quote:
Just working within the system we have now.

Have you never thought that this attitude might be the main reason why Ken has not yet (and probably will never) improved the system ?
I think that if nobody contributed anything to a now useless online database, Ken would really take things in hand.

BTW, the best way to avoid undesired BY is to never download anything from the online. You will also avoid many other "rules generated" errors. For my local, it works quite well...

Quoting DJ Doena:

Quote:
Suddenly you need to play Towers of Hanoi:

You create a second Kevin Smith with an illogical BY, like 9999.
You edit Die Hard 4.0 and replace "Kevin Smith (1970)" (his actual BY!) with the "Kevin Smith (9999)".
Now you edit "Kevin Smith (1970)" to either "Kevin Smith" or "Kevin Smith (1963)" (Ares' actual BY)
And now you can properly edit "Kevin Smith (9999)" back to "Kevin Smith (1970)"

That's a bit overcomplicated thinking.
In fact all you have to do is edit your Kevin Smith entry to having BY 1963.
Next you open the Die Hard profile create a new Kevin Smith with BY 1970 and replace the 1963 one.
Done.

But I agree that this automatic import of BYs is not the best of all possible solutions, for not saying it is more like one of the worst.