Quoting CharlieM:

Quote:
I Would have to disagree.  Unfortunately the way it is now, we have an all or nothing system for contributing to the online. 

If that were changed to an item contribution, I think more people would participate, knowing they could contribute per se a simple spelling correction for one role, without having to justify everything they have altered in their local.

I agree... if  indivual changes could be contributed, that would solve the problems I mentioned.  But let's not overwhelm the database with new crew unless we can contribute individually.

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Just so there is no misunderstanding.

I am for a base profile with the extension of open credits in well defined categories.

That being said, with the way the server client is written today would not work except for the most ardent user.  I believe that with todays software configuration, any change to open credits would drive people away and would be the downfall of the program (for those that know the reference "JUMP THE SHARK")

For open credits to work, and keep people and even expand the user base would require a complete rework of the software (both server and client) to make contributions and updates a lot more selective.

Unfortunately, I am not sure that Ken would even want to move that way or not.  He is the only one that could actually decide that.

Unless the basis for the contribution system were to change, in my opinion "Open Credits"  will not work.

Charlie

by the way...


A heck of a feature request (rewrite the software from the ground up)

Have asked for categorised open credits before, most seemed to think it was a good idea but nothing ever happened with it 

Quoting Addicted2DVD:

Quote:
Completely serious here... but why would I want to limit it to the top few? If someone actually wants to go through the trouble of adding that many for a correct section we contribute... more power to them.

Well, one reason might be that it virtually means: birth years for everyone. If we're going to go into that level of detail, you'll find that there will be hardly any unique names left. Of course, for most of these people, we won't be able to find birth years, and so the crew turns into a huge mess.

As such, I really think there are some other, more pressing basic features of the software that would need to be addressed first, before we're going anywhere near all this. For instance, as long as there isn't a good way to separate two BY-less people with the same name, I'm definitely against adding thousands and thousands more people like this. Also, the whole common name thing really becomes an epic fail: how do I research the common name of some gaffer, best boy, accountant, carpenter or sign writer? What sites offer sufficient documentation on that?

Also, I think we need to get our priorities straight. The average user really doesn't care too much about crew - maybe the director, writer and composer, but really: to most users it's completely immaterial who was the sixth sound editor or the fourth make-up artist. There may be a few very vocal voices here in the forums, but in general, crew has already gotten far too detailed for the average user. Interesting poll here. Rather than keep adding more and more to that, I'd really prefer some work on more important issues, like the common name system, the birth year system, fixing the most obvious CLT flaws, having the ability to deal with re-releases under the same EAN/UPC (which would allow people to have the cover in the profile match their own DVD), and other stuff like that. Those things, to me, are far more important than adding the ability to track even more crew than we already do.

Everything would be so much easier if we just had two options under crew...

Crew Member - Role

That way all crew members could be captured if wanted and these problems would be solved as you could enter the role exactly as described in the credits. Sometimes, simplicity is better IMO.

Quoting T!M:

Quote:

Also, I think we need to get our priorities straight. The average user really doesn't care too much about crew - maybe the director, writer and composer, but really: to most users it's completely immaterial who was the sixth sound editor or the fourth make-up artist. There may be a few very vocal voices here in the forums, but in general, crew has already gotten far too detailed for the average user. Interesting poll here. Rather than keep adding more and more to that, I'd really prefer some work on more important issues, like the common name system, the birth year system, fixing the most obvious CLT flaws, having the ability to deal with re-releases under the same EAN/UPC (which would allow people to have the cover in the profile match their own DVD), and other stuff like that. Those things, to me, are far more important than adding the ability to track even more crew than we already do.

Quoting ninehours:

Quote:
Have asked for categorised open credits before, most seemed to think it was a good idea but nothing ever happened with it 

I, personally, am all for categorised open credits. Good idea! I would however made this modification (crude photoshop work, I know):


What I would like, is that the crew role list would be populated within its category, much like actor/crew-name database is whenever we add new actor/crew-entries into the database.

We would have the most common "default" options with radio buttons, such as "Director of Photography" in this example, under those you would have a drop down menu containing every different specific role in that category, that you have in your database (populated as mentioned above).

The order of entries in drop down menu could be customized, based on their popularity in your database, or alphabetically. This could be a user-customized option.

Under this drop down menu, you would then have a line to write a new entry into the category (with "Add"-button, as in Add-studios menu).

All this would minimize the risk of typos in open credits. After a while, we would be able to select most credits from the menu and not having to type them every time.

Of course Art-category would soon have probably thousands different entries due to all "Make-up for N.N."-credits, but since we have already tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands names in our crew/actor-databases, I don't see that posing any problem. You just needed to type in a bit more entries in that category.