The Movie Database Support
Support → General
Exasperated!
posted by Matthew SandersSTAFFMOD on May 19, 2013 at 3:31 PM
::sigh::
I often visit the site when organizing my movies so I can get details and artwork. This should be a very quick process, but I end up staying up to 10 minutes per movie reporting bad covers and fanart and replacing them.
1) Why are the most common offenders not banned already? Why, when there is such a big problem with inappropriate artwork, have these people been allowed to continue polluting this database? How is it possible to resize an image and NOT notice that you've squished it? How can an user look at the image they've produced, notice the stick figures they've created and say to themselves, "Yes, this is appropriate for theMovieDB. Other users will want to download this image."
2) Why is there still a foreign genre? This makes zero sense.
3) There is also a minimum resolution requirement for covers and fanart. Why am I often seeing incredibly low resolution images (499px width and less) on movies created after the requirement was put into effect?
Reply by Travis Bell
on May 21, 2013 at 1:54 PM
Hi Isaac,
I can try to offer as much insight as I can to any of this. Unfortunately though, at the end of the day you've stepped on what is probably the #1 hardest thing about running any kind of crowd sourced project. Anyone out there running something like TMDb will agree. It's one of the biggest problems a site like Wikipedia faces, and we here at TMDb are no different.
They need to be reported, warned, be a repeat offender, warned one more and then, is probably when we'll ban the user. Honestly, we barely even get to the report stage. In 5 years I've only banned 2 users but they need to be reported first. Most of the time when the user has at least been contacted, they respect our request and obey the rules.
Nothing about reporting a problem attaches any kind of "scorecard" to the user to let an admin know if they are a repeat offender. Easy example is the squished images you mentioned. It's reported, an moderator comes in, deletes it and moves on. Unless someone picks out that user in particular, this cycle would continue forever.
Lack of resources. Is the genre being present annoying? Yes, I've always said that nothing to dispute here. How important is it on my list of things to do? Very low. There is just so many higher priority things.
You'll have to show me these, as I am not aware of any and the validations should be catching them.
Reply by Matthew Sanders
on May 22, 2013 at 11:21 PM
Thank you for replying Travis. I reported many frequent abusers in this thread and this thread.
Right now the values that are attached to a report are the username of the reporter, the movie id and the date/time. Since individual pictures are not reported, but the movie itself, this requires moderators to search for the picture(s) mentioned in the report.
In addition, because reports are movie specific and not picture specific the user that uploaded the duplicate or inappropriate picture is not a value sent along with the report.
I won't propose you change something without volunteering to do it for you. Below is my solution. Let me know if you'd like me to code it for you. You should have my email address.
To solve both of these problems either place a green cross in the top right of every image on :hover or, when browsing the covers and fanart, remove the report link in the navigation and place individual report links below the locked icons of each image. [CSS triangles are here and the cross to match your style is here.
Either way the values attached to the link should include the user id of the user that uploaded the image, the user reporting the image, the movie id, and the date/time.
You already have a script that posts a report into the sub-forum. Right now that script builds the post as:
This is fine for reporting items. For reporting cover art or fanart from an images' individual report button it could be:
(The image isn't showing in my example, probably because it's a remote link, but you get the idea). As you can see the thumbnail is embedded in the post as a link to the fullsize image. The moderator opens the thread, reads what is supposedly wrong with the image from the details, clicks the picture to see for him/herself then clicks reject or accept. Accept closes the thread, removes the image, and adds a strike against the image uploader in the user table of your database. Reject prompts the moderator for a thread reply and closes the thread.
In the user table another field, for example, "strikes" could be int(1), default at zero, and increase incrementally as the user accrues warnings. At x warnings/strikes the username is banned.
What do you think?
...and I can remove all instances of the foreign genre from your code, too... hehe... It's strange. I removed every single foreign genre tag from all movies in all 25 pages over 2 days and in the next day every single tag was back. I doubt a human did it. There has to be something in your code that put those genre tags back for some reason.
As for the low resolution cover art I found 3 recently in the The Brain 1969. Check the French and Czech cover art images. Widths of 425, 400 and 430 are there.