The fact I am using XBMC seems to have unfortunately hijacked my greater point twice now (both here and in the animation show thread). As I stated over in the other thread, I am not under the impression that this site exists to serve xbmc. I do feel that every point I have made above stands on it's own even if you completely strip the words XBMC out of the post.

I hope to clarify that I am not making these posts for the sake of XBMC, I am making them from the perspective of someone who has literally made thousands of edits to fix/add this information over the past 2 weeks.

There are some simple facts here: A: There are a megaton of PPVS B: It is not a valid solution from a sorting or stability standpoint to have them all in a giant collection C: Wrestling PPV's are melodrama that exist in a sequential order, just the same way as any serialized movie collection

And here are some of my opinions: D: Lists are an unpoliced and wildly arbitrary means of sorting. While fine for finding out all the films that one person deems to be related, it is not accurate enough to base any sort of ordering on E: Either grouped as a giant set or left totally ungrouped, both methods leave the 300 or so WWF/WWE (not to mention UFC, WCW, ECW) PPV's in an unusable order.

I'm not trying to change the site guys. Above I gave my perspective. When asked for details I provided them. And then I received some response about how this site isn't here to serve XBMC... which I am baffled by as I never suggested it was. But since it does keep coming up, lets address it.

What separates TMDB from IMDB? Scrape-ability. tmdb wouldn't be the default scraper built into XBMC if it weren't for the fanart, the posters, and the format of the data. Statements about how this site is not concerned about scarpers seem a bit disassociated. Honest question: If all the traffic that comes from media scrapers ceased, would it have no affect on viability of the site? Based on the fact that the TMDB scraper is currently the default movie scraper enabled on XBMC combined with the number of active XBMC users, I would find it difficult to believe that this has nothing to do with any success the website has achieved.

In regards to any scraper using the lists, it creates a simple 1 to many problem. Which list does a scraper choose to tag the nfo file with? If it tags it with all of them, then the front end either has to choose to sort the movie to one of them, or put the movie in all of them - potentially creating several entries for the same movie. Not to mention the fact that if a guy comes along and makes a "Favorite Action Movie List", then suddenly I have my action movies getting tagged with "Russel's favorite Action Flicks!" You guys stated yourself that lists are to be used when creating arbitrary connections between movies. So to suggest that a scraper use this data is to suggest that it scrape arbitrary data. That doesn't make much sense, and I doubt anyone here want's our collections getting sorted 15 ways to Sunday. Quite a few WWE PPV's are already on multiple lists, and many of them have just been created. Give it 2-3 years and imagine how many lists there will be. Do you guys see my point or do you just think I am being argumentative here?

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I fully agree with Travis's last sentence. Perhaps, in the end, we may have to accept the fact that not all content can fit the current setup of the site.

Do I need to stop updating these then? I have put in nearly 80 hours in the past two weeks, so I not happy with the idea of suddenly being told the contenr doesn't fit the site, especially after mec!as specifically wrote:

Sport events do have a special place in the movie database and so tmdb is keeping them"

The content does fit the site. It is one of four notable exceptions for TV content. I just meant that it is highly unlikely that we would change our collection rules just because of WWE or other PPV events. That's what I meant when referring to "current setup". Sorry if that was unclear.

I'm still not clear why you don't think lists do the job here. Take a look at my Best Picture Winners list. You can sort the list by title and release date. I'm not suggesting you have to create 1 giant list for WWE, you can do it by decade, or by year, or by event. It's completely up to you.

But lets imagine for a second that XBMC supported lists. You right-click on one of your WWE events that got scraped into your library. There'd be an option to see if that item was on a list, they search and boom, the list you created shows up. You click "import". It maps all of the local copies of the movies on the list and now you have a nicely organized, named and sorted list in XBMC.

There is two other improvements that can be made to help out with the "how do I or XBMC choose a list" problem. First is by having "official" or "blessed" lists. This designation would be allocated to lists that represent something real in this world and not just personal preference. The Oscars, Golden Globes or these WWE lists would be good examples. They would always be returned first in the query on both the website and API. They'd be treated as almost collections in a sense, but still let collections be what they are today.

The other way would be for XBMC to support some account features. I've already mentioned this to them in the past since we want the ability to rate movies from within XBMC. Since you can favourite lists, it would be very easy to login to your account in XBMC and simply pull up your favourite and/or created lists.

All of this in my opinion strengthens the point you made about scrape-abilty. TMDb is popular because we have all of these really awesome features accessible via an API. It's our job to make sense of this data and make it easy for users and developers to use. I'm not convinced that the problem in this case (with WWE) is anything but the lack of better support in XBMC.

Do I need to stop updating these then? I have put in nearly 80 hours in the past two weeks, so I not happy with the idea of suddenly being told the contenr doesn't fit the site, especially after mec!as specifically wrote: >Sport events do have a special place in the movie database and so tmdb is keeping them"

Sporting events are indeed the biggest exception to the "has to be a movie" rule we have and that's not changing. TMDb is built on top of the efforts like yourself and I am not trying to discourage the contributions. All we're saying is that collections are probably not the right fit for WWE PPV's. I'm not clear if you can use local NFO's to build XBMC sets but if you can, that might be the simplest thing for you to do.

The lists don't do the job because they don't work anywhere outside of the site itself. I'm not aware of any scrapers that support them. I don't use the tmdb for browsing, I use it to power my media collection.

Yes, i can use local nfo's to build sets. At this point I am likely looking at completing the addition/edits to all the PPV's, running a program like media center master to scrape all the data to local nfo files, and then editing them to fill out the set field with a year as that is the agreed upon sort order we have come up with in the WWE/Wrestling PPV's in XBMC project I am working with.

That said, I'm not really interested in hand editing 300 nfo files, so I will have to try an come up with a script that goes through and can hopefully automate this to come degree.

In regards to lists, the account based functionality is intriguing. Ultimately however, if I or Deano, were to make a list we would want to other and anyone else who follows the tutorials Deano has posted at XBMC to be able to access the list as well. You spoke of "official" lists. I think there is merit to that. Either that, or the ability for an account owner to make a list as "preferred" and then have the scraper access via ones account and take "preferred" lists into account.

I'm not sure how flexible the guys behind the tmdb scraper are, nor how fast they move on these sorts of things. I think I may try to take this another route and see if the guy who is behind Media Center Master would be willing to add functionality like this. In his case though, it would likely work best if the site had "official" lists rather than the account based "preferred" lists. So I would want to verify that functionality of that sort was going to be added before I started knocking on his door requesting features that the site doesn't support yet.

If either official lists or account starred/preferred lists are to be supported as a feature of tmdb, please let me know and I will do my part to get such features recognized and supported by the various scrapers I am aware of.

Side question: I got a note that the animation show thread I was involved in had a response, and yet when I went to check it was gone. I suppose the thread was deleted? That's odd...

I'm hearing valid points from both sides here and will just reiterate that we're grateful to have a home for WWE content. I propose a compromise.

Collections were never meant to contain such a large amount of entries, but it would be beneficial for some of the end users if there was a degree of automation for their WWE media. How about splitting the collections by decade?

You can ultimately build your sets by editing the nfos in XBMC, it just seems like a long winded process when some would be happy with maybe two or three larger sets that would be scraped automatically.

A split by decade would require just as much manual work to get into a yearly set as a completely un-categorized set. And by Decade, that is till 100+ PPV's in the 90's alone.

Doesn't seem to be any resolution here yet, are we allowed to create a WWE Mega-Set?

For now I think it's a no.

I have just created a WWE Wrestlemania Collection on Moviedb and I was hoping all my WMs would go into one set on xbmc but pretty much every WM is individual. I'm not asking for a lot a just want a WM box set. Can anyone give me some advise

use a program like media center master to create a local nfo file for your wm stuff. Then go in an manually add each one to a movie set. For my own I went in and added the year to each movie as the set. Then, to make them display chronologically I added the muber each ppv aired before the title under the "sort" field. This sorts them in order when sorted mby title, but still displays the proper name without any prefix.