The Movie Database Support
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Movie IDs are reused?
posted by bren717STAFFMOD on July 18, 2017 at 6:14 AM
We're having trouble when fetching some movies.
We internally save the movies with the TMDB IDs to update the metadata later, like reviews.
But in some cases, we discover that the ID of the movie was changed and reused for a different movie.
For example, The movie "Gone Girl" had the ID 294736 before, and now, the id for that movie is 210577 and the old ID 294736 is used for the movie "Misfire".
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/294736-misfire
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/210577-gone-girl
Gone Girl => Before: ID 294736, Now: ID 210577.
Misfire => Now: ID 294736.
There is any change that you are changing the id of the movies and reusing it?
We don't have a problem if the movie is removed, but the expected behavior should be "404 not found" instead of receiving a different movie with the same id.
The problem is that when we update the metadata, like reviews and scores, we are mixing the metadata of different movies.
I hope that you can help us,
Thanks in advance!
Brenda
Reply by lineker
on July 18, 2017 at 4:47 PM
Hi, I just did a quick check on the changelogs for those entries and there was no evidence of any changes relating to the issue you describe. The entries have kept the same IDs over time. Something must have gone wrong on your end to cause the mix-up.
Reply by Travis Bell
on July 19, 2017 at 11:17 AM
Hi Brenda,
To re-iterate what @lineker said, we've never reused or switched an ID. Gone Girl has been id 210577 since day 1.
Reply by bren717
on July 20, 2017 at 2:40 AM
Thank you for your fast reply, we're going to check on our end what could have happened.
Thanks!!