The genre filed is locked to prevent people from adding every genre under the sun, which often happens.

Before I lock the genres I usually seek three independent data sources about the film and use the genres common in all three. Selecting genres seems like a very subjective task, so that's my preferable way of doing it when I can.

Clearly you are not much of a sci fi fan and would not know a sci fi movie if it fell on your head. Your process is not working. You need to either figure this out or get out of the way and let others fix it.

WDTV (this media streamer and others like it that rely on this db) uses this database and because of your actions this database is useless to us all for sorting by genre. That is probably several million end users that you are writing off.

I have about two hundred sci-fi movies in my movie collection of over 3000 movies. You have locked many classic sci-fi movies like Enemy Mine, Blade Runner, Terminator, Star Wars etc as everything else but sci-fi. But this issue is not exclusively a sci-fi movie problem.

Ask yourself why would anyone want to have 1000 films listed as action and 1000 films listed as drama and about 1000 listed as comedy?

What use are all the other categories if films only every get sorted by three categories?

You need to consider HOW this database is being used.

These are insane numbers to have to scroll through. Meanwhile all of your other categories end up having a pitiful few films in them and might as well not even exist as genres. How is that facilitating a workable sort function? Do you want people to keep using this database, or is it your agenda to drive them to seek alternatives?

Perhaps you do not realize that the multiple genres can not be used for sorting by devices like the WDTV; and when people put in two or more genres, no matter which is put first, it ends up sorted alpha, and hence the secondary genre is pulled by the media streamer and the sort is rendered useless.

I registered here with great excitement at the idea of contributing to cleaning up this database, but you seem to want to make this into a horrible resource that is not really open and user maintained. If you want this db to become obsolete then carry on in this way. I will await your answer, before looking into new alternatives to what looked like a great idea.

I suggest you enforce a ONE genre rule, and make a second field for entering secondary genre information.

Also I suggest that you create a category of Romantic Comedy - this would allow about half the comedy to be split off into this new category and make the numbers of film easier to search within. Also recommend you replace Music with Musical. Movies can be musicals but only music videos are music and this is a MOVIE database.

And stop being anal about what other sites categorize as the genre. Half the time they are wrong. I suggest you either trust your end users to maintain this site accurately to their satisfaction, or just lock it down and stop pretending to be an open user maintained site.

Clearly you are not much of a sci fi fan and would not know a sci fi movie if it fell on your head. Your process is not working. You need to either figure this out or get out of the way and let others fix it.

Hi. When speaking to other members of the community please refrain from using ad hominems. Not only is your opinion on how knowledgeable you think you are, and how little you think the other person knows totally irrelevant, it is not going to make any case you're trying to make any more compelling; in fact I suspect it will probably have the opposite effect. We want to maintain a community where issues and difference of opinions can be discussed without personally attacking other members. Stick to facts and valid reasoning.

You have locked many classic sci-fi movies like Enemy Mine, Blade Runner, Terminator, Star Wars etc as everything else but sci-fi.

Checking all those films you cited, they are all listed as sci-fi and have been for some time! Also, please reference each film's changelog before being accusatory. I'm not sure why you're personally blaming me for all this seeing as I haven't had the time to lock or edit much of anything in the past half-year.

These are insane numbers to have to scroll through. Meanwhile all of your other categories end up having a pitiful few films in them and might as well not even exist as genres. How is that facilitating a workable sort function? Do you want people to keep using this database, or is it your agenda to drive them to seek alternatives?

Perhaps you do not realize that the multiple genres can not be used for sorting by devices like the WDTV; and when people put in two or more genres, no matter which is put first, it ends up sorted alpha, and hence the secondary genre is pulled by the media streamer and the sort is rendered useless."

Perhaps you do not realize that this site is not built to cater to the gripes people have with how WDTV or any other one third-party chooses to present its data. TMDb provides data to many other web sites, apps, and media centers. How WDTV decides to parse and present the data they fetch from TMDb is an issue you need to take up with them, not us.

And stop being anal about what other sites categorize as the genre. Half the time they are wrong. I suggest you either trust your end users to maintain this site accurately to their satisfaction, or just lock it down and stop pretending to be an open user maintained site.

You are requesting that we stop referencing other web sites [such as articles where a director states their film's genre, a film's official site, Wikipedia references, etc.] to corroborate that our data is accurate. Suggestion noted, and personally dismissed.

To expand on what I said in February: Data that is verified gets locked to prevent tampering. In my experience this is usually done by only a few select users who take it upon themselves to consistently change large amounts of data to suit their own personal preferences over accuracy.

To add a little bit of technical information here, we did have a bug that prevented genres edits from saving permanently. The thread about that is here. The official fix was pushed sometime in April but the thing to remember is that some movies would have had their genre fields locked before then. Meaning, some edits didn't stay around yet, the genre field stayed locked.

And stop being anal about what other sites categorize as the genre. Half the time they are wrong. I suggest you either trust your end users to maintain this site accurately to their satisfaction, or just lock it down and stop pretending to be an open user maintained site.

At the end of the day, we try to play it safe. We've had way too many users come in and destroy the correct contributions from hard working volunteers. With so many companies depending on our data, we just can't leave everything at the whim of just anyone. It's just the reality of the project.

OK I will dispense with the ad hom and sorry, but you may not appreciate how frustrating this is. I suppose I deserved your snark over "my opinion on how knowledgeable (I) think (I am)", but I don't see why you should feel you are more qualified to make these subjective decisions either, and what you consider to be vandalism others might rightly consider to be valid edits.

However it seems you did not hear my complaint so I will restate it more clearly, and if you are the wrong person to direct this too then just ignore it.

Yes I can see also that these sci-fi movies have sci-fi listed AS ONE of their genres.

The point is that your site allows multiple genres for one movie and your system is designed in a way that they are sorted alphabetically: there is no way to make one of them the primary genre for that movie and the others a sub genre.

The end result is that they are NOT listed as sci-fi by any external app that uses this db and queries this field. Instead they are listed as being in the first alphabetical genre, which invariably falls into the uselessly large buckets of Comedy, Action, or Drama. As I noted, almost all of my scifi collection ends up not being listed as sci fi. Same goes for westerns, and many other genres that you have available to use.

THIS IS A DB DESIGN ISSUE

This is not an issue that WDTV can fix. You can not write a db query that will look at all these genres listed in one record and guess which one is the most correct. This is a db design problem, not a device issue.

I hear your statement that you do not care about WDTV users. But this is supposed to be a user maintained site and here I am, a user with no ability to make appropriate edits to this field. I am not sure why you would not care about us, or why you think other machines also might not have the same problem with your database, but I would think that you would want to make your product as useful as possible to as many of your users as possible. Perhaps you could explain how you think having so many genres listed in one DB field is supposed to be useful to any other devices that reference this db. Frankly there are many sites out there as you noted for information on films for look-up by humans, the primary value of this site is for apps like in the WDTV that need to do a db query. If I want to read a review or get more granular I can go to IMDB - all I want from TMDB is to facilitate sorting my movie collection automatically for easy search and viewing of movies, as I am sure would appeal to other device users.

If your response represents the official policy of TMDB then I guess that I will just have to move on and have to maintain my own record locally on my machine, instead of investing my effort in changes here that would benefit many others like me. That is a sad statement that TMBD does not care about a significantly large group of users.

Thank you for clearing this up.

The point is that your site allows multiple genres for one movie and your system is designed in a way that they are sorted alphabetically: there is no way to make one of them the primary genre for that movie and the others a sub genre.

I don't think we'll ever support the notion of a primary genre but I am happy to create a ticket for us to consider adding the ability to sort genres. You can follow it for updates.

That sounds like it might be one good solution Travis so I look forward to it.

As I noted, you can not write a db query that has the intelligence to make these kind of subjective decisions. I can make my query pick what field to retrieve, but i can not make my query smart enough to make a subjective choice between content in fields that requires human thinking. These decisions need to be made when the db is setup.

I believe you noted elsewhere that there is a trend of people entering lots of genres for a movie - showing how hard it is for even a human to make this kind of subjective decision, but at the end of the day if you forced people to have to pick just ONE it might result in better and more usable data.

If the sort genre ticket does not go forward please re-consider restricting things to one genre per film. Alternately you could consider a hybrid approach by introducing compound genres like sci-fi action, sci-fi comedy, sci-fi drama, sci-fi horror, while still restricting each film to one genre listing. Personally I have not found this to be needed in genres like sci-fi where there are so few films to start with, but I have found it useful with larger categories like comedy which I currently split into comedy and romantic-comedy. My action collection was one of the first things that I had to split up thematically to keep the folder size manageable. But if your genre field could be used to do this by filtering my collection it would be a much more elegant approach than having to maintain a separate folder in my media library for each genre.

I am not sure how other people and apps are using this field, but I imagine that people also want from it what WDTV wants - the ability to filter a large collection down to a more manageable size in order to pick a movie to watch. Sticking with the Sci-fi example - if I am a sci-fi fan and I want to find a sci-fi movie to watch, this is the field that I want to filter my collection by first. Information about it being sci-fi action, sci-fi comedy, sci-fi drama, sci-fi horror is useful, but does not help if the filter ignores the sci-fi part and sorts only by the second descriptor.

Paszt - it is not a problem with listing a movie with having multiple genres.

If the issue was that simple I would have complained to WD in their forum.

The WDTV uses this field to allow users to sort and filter their collection into different folders.

Frankly I am not sure why anyone would want multiple categories for one movie's genre - as you note it is a subjective decision so its only real value is in classifying movies so you can sort them. I am not sure how other players handle this, but when you get over 3000 movies in you collection it is not fun to have to scroll through a list that is 3000 movies long, you want some way of arbitrarily cutting that number down. Like in those old video stores so you go to the "action" section or the "comedy" section to pick a movie - you may not agree with how they organized their movies but it does work very well for helping you pick something to watch right now.

[1] I think a primary genre is a horrible idea.

Even if TMDB did implement a primary genre solely to cater to WDTV's genre limitation, how is a primary genre determined? What of films that legitimately have multiple genres? Eg. Animation/action; comedy/holiday; sci-fi/horror; short/animation; short/animation/sci-fi; etc. Is primary genre decided by community vote? What if you disagree with the primary genre? Will you complain to moderators because you think it is incorrect that, say, AvP got placed in your Action or Horror playlist instead of your Sci-Fi playlist? How are you going to justify a complaint to the moderators when, and as you agreed, it is a subjective decision?

A primary genre doesn't solve your problem unless you personally get to decide what that primary genre is, and it creates a problem for TMDB imo.

[2] The design flaw is with WDTV since apparently they are displaying only the first value from a multi-value field. The issue is as simple as requesting WDTV to modify this flaw. Or switching to something that actually caters to your specific needs.

Many third party apps do use the genre field to create genre playlists. If a genre has multiple values, the film gets placed in it's respective multiple playlists. Simple. Many music management programs do the same with regards to musical genre. Even iTunes which used to be limited to one musical genre has finally added the ability to have multiple genres. Moreover, if you dislike a genre, the firmware can be taken one step further to allow the user modification of metadata. Many third-party apps also have this option. If you are particular about your metadata, and it seems you are, maybe you should be using something that empowers you to have control over it. That seems more sensible to me than frustrating yourself trying to get the provider of that metadata to implement silly workarounds to cater to one device's design flaw, which wouldn't solve the issue anyhow unless you were the sole arbiter of genres.