Do you have any idea what the heck is going on with the seasons over at Gintama? https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/57041-gin-tama It's a huge mess. (I'm gonna cry now.)

A big problem with anime entries is fans splitting things into seasons based on story arcs or how the DVDs are labeled in countries outside Japan. I'm guessing that's the root of this particular hot mess. A LOT of anime here are that way, but it causes enormous work to fix them and creates some problems with cast listings. So in this case, the mess at Gintama has to be fixed with the episodes put into the proper sequel numbers.

I hesitate to call Gintama 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 as seasons because they really aren't; they're sequels. In the past, sequels were universally treated as such, and not as being something analogous with the Western concept of TV seasons. The term was used only by Western licensors for marketing purposes and only used informally by reliable sources like Anime News Network. It's only in the last couple years ANN has started truly calling things like Gintama 5 "season 5 of Gintama" instead of just calling it a new Gintama series. This has made it very difficult to decide how to handle these situations on this site. As an old school anime fan since the 90s, listing them sequentially as seasons is weird and feels wrong. To me, Gintama 5 is a new series (as are 2, 3, 4) and should be on a new record. But, newer fans familiar mostly with Western releases feel differently. So, situations like this arise. At present, it's not worth trying to split Gintama into 5 separate entries but the mess at the main Gintama record has to be fixed.

I'm physically unable to fix it presently due to an injury. Every episode has to be moved manually, including the titles/descriptions for all 11 languages present on the record. Any registered user can make those changes. When finished, a moderator can delete the erroneous seasons/episodes. If people continue to add the newly-aired episodes to "season 8", it just causes more work for me or some other person down the line.

I haven't watched more than a couple episodes of the show so I'm certainly not willing to do any changes. And lets be real, this mess was not created by the users - this is all still leftover stuff from the initial TVDB dump Travis did to "create" this half of the site. With no guidelines and effort put into getting things consistent nothing is obviously going to change. Your proposition to split up Gintama into separate entries is for me however completely outlandish. This isn't a concept created by Westerners but something Japan itself does with cours. Season productions carry titles anyways, and Gintama does that too and it would be wrong not to follow them. (TVDB created absolute numbers to keep in line with the JP numbers http://www.tv-tokyo.co.jp/anime/gintama/episodes/episodes26/, they do however split stuff in certain arcs to not technically overcramp stuff (but they're aware of this). )

See also https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5873f0559251410e6d010d3e#587b810b9251413ecb00f018