Well said Hal, on all your points, Agreed completely

Quoting Addicted2DVD:

Quote:
Even if anywhere on the cover wasn't there... this part of the rule would kick in for the majority of them... and still be uinrated...

"an alternate version of a film which previously received a theatrical rating"

Yup, the section that requires the contributor to have knowledge not only of previous releases of the film, but how they were rated.

Sorry, but that's probably one of the worst parts of the Rule, IMHO.

The thing that I find the most troubling about ALL of this more than anything else is that Ken is adopting a Win-Lose scenario, when there are many Win-Win scenarios. It tells me that Ken has no interest ineven attempting to serve ALL users, and that makes me sad.

Quoting hal9g:

Quote:
Quoting Addicted2DVD:

Quote:
Even if anywhere on the cover wasn't there... this part of the rule would kick in for the majority of them... and still be uinrated...

"an alternate version of a film which previously received a theatrical rating"

Yup, the section that requires the contributor to have knowledge not only of previous releases of the film, but how they were rated.

Sorry, but that's probably one of the worst parts of the Rule, IMHO.

Well, it doesn't "require" anything.  It's similar to the regions today.  If someone doesn't have a DVD-ROM to read the regions, they're permitted to contribute what's on the cover.  That can then be overwritten by more accurate data at a later date.

In this case we may get some Unrated stuff slipping through the cracks because someone didn't realize there was a rated theatrical version.  But someone else will come along at some point with more accurate information and fix it.

The end result is more usable data in the long run even if there was a mistake or two earlier in the process.

Quoting Mark Harrison:

Quote:
Quoting hal9g:

Quote:
Quoting Addicted2DVD:

Quote:
Even if anywhere on the cover wasn't there... this part of the rule would kick in for the majority of them... and still be uinrated...

"an alternate version of a film which previously received a theatrical rating"

Yup, the section that requires the contributor to have knowledge not only of previous releases of the film, but how they were rated.

Sorry, but that's probably one of the worst parts of the Rule, IMHO.

Well, it doesn't "require" anything.  It's similar to the regions today.  If someone doesn't have a DVD-ROM to read the regions, they're permitted to contribute what's on the cover.  That can then be overwritten by more accurate data at a later date.

In this case we may get some Unrated stuff slipping through the cracks because someone didn't realize there was a rated theatrical version.  But someone else will come along at some point with more accurate information and fix it.

The end result is more usable data in the long run even if there was a mistake or two earlier in the process.

That's a pretty good analogy. Like I said earlier, it doesn't matter if it's local or online for me as long as Ken initiates it, I'll be happy, but I'd obviously be happier with online. Your analogy is a pretty good reason why it could very well be submittable.

Green for you, sir.

Considering that the lack of a rating is, by definition, not a rating at all, it's quite fortunate for us that the publishers didn't decide to use the phrase "the infinite void" to denote the nothingness of no rating.  Then we'd actually have people arguing for this language in the list.  Perhaps in the future some canny DVD publisher will put "there's no rating here, idiots" in the box just to drive pedantic folks extra crazy.  Maybe we should just lobby for an open text field, since it's not what order things are ranked that's important, but rather the slavish recreation of the formulation of some letters.

Most accurate DVD database perhaps, but quicly becoming the most useless. 

Quoting hal9g:

Quote:
To do it correctly, does in fact require exactly what I described.  Anybody can enter garbage data into the database and let others fix it! 

Mark.  Perhaps you can explain to me what the sudden urgency is to fix this problem, which has been present since the introduction of the ratings system years ago.

Why implement a half-baked solution that actual instructs us to enter incorrect data into a field, when with a little time and a possible program change, the problem could be resolved without screwing up the data?

I'm sorry, but I do not understand why this has to be fixed today?

I see a big difference between someone entering garbage and someone doing the best they can.  Mistakes will happen.  I rather someone try and get it wrong than not try at all.  Otherwise we wouldn't have a database because none of us are perfect.

As for your question of urgency, you'd have to direct that to Ken.  There is no urgency on my part.  An idea came up and it has my support.  Ken asked for input and I'm giving it.  If he suddenly decides that this would be better off waiting for version 3.7, I'm fine with that too.

And we're not screwing up the data.  Ken already indicated that in a future release he can do whatever he chooses with these Unrated entries. Up to and including setting them all back to NR if need be.  Heck, you could use the copy / paste feature in the program today to set all Unrated back to NR if you try it and find it to be a bad idea.

The only data that is screwed up is if you prefer to mark it as NR if the cover says that regardless of content. Then I would agree that the current wording of the rule would clearly be less than ideal for your collection.  But I fail to see how that brings value to the data, so perhaps that's my hang-up here.

Maybe useless to you, midnit, but the fictional data folks are useless to me. We can't have users just flying around and entering whatever they want to enter in whatever way they want.