The Movie Database Support

Hi,

I'm seeing data for movies where the vote average is zero and the vote count is greater then zero, and I don't think this is useful data.

When you compare user scores with other sites like NetFlix, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic or IMDB they don't report zero scores for any movies.

Zero is problematic as a visual indicator for movie scores. It means both no votes received and no one likes it, but does not distinguish between the two. The other problem is that zero greatly drops the average score of a move. One a ten point scale including zero turns the scale into an 11 point scale.

You're going to hate this request, but can we either purge zero votes from the system or bump them all to a 0.5 value?

I can exclude the displaying of vote averages that are zero, but once you have a vote average of say 0.5 then I already know it's inaccurate. As there could be a number of zero point votes used to calculate it.

If I am in error please let me know, but this is what I've seen today in the data.

Thanks,

3 replies (on page 1 of 1)

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Here's an example of the problem.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/337844-in-dubious-battle

The above movie has not been release yet, but it has a user ranking of 0%. This is based upon 5 user votes of zero.

Shouldn't these votes be rejected? The movie hasn't been released so it's very unlikely these 5 users have even seen the movie, but now after it's released it's score will be lower as a result of these 5 zeros.

When I query the next movies releasing from Feb 14 to Mar 30. I find 20 movies of which 6 have no votes, there are 8 movies with a vote average of 0% and only 6 movies with vote averages above 0%. So this appears to be a bigger problem then I first thought.

Also, finding 20 movies that are current in theaters (today's date and back) there are 5 movies with zero averages.

Is it possible to have an extra vote calculated that represents the median instead of average? We could call this new column the vote_median?

I'll leave the technical aspect to Travis, but thought I should comment on this:

The movie hasn't been released

It has screened as several major film festivals so a couple of thousand people should have seen it already. For comparison, Letterboxd has 27 ratings so far. Still strange with so many zero votes though. I expect that to change when more people watch it.

Okay that's fare that my example has been released, but I can find many other movies with no releases that have zero votes.

Is it possible that there is a rouge app out there using the TMDB API and pushing zero votes when it shouldn't be? I'm hoping that the vote history is kept in the database, and maybe there can be some kind of audit to verify these votes are coming from real users.

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