Quoting Prof. Kingsfield:

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(...) just like the automated upload you weren't told, so of course you wouldn't think that there was one, it took about 4 hours to upload my entire library at that time, some of them were not accepted because one of the other users had gotten theirs in first.. (...)

Four hours seems to be incredibly long for an automated upload of an admittedly large collection. On the other side four hours seems to be a reasonable time for the manual upload of ever single profile, which had involved at least in my case several mouse clicks per profile.

One thing has been automated though. Invelos has accepted every contribution of a new profile automatically and they have declined every update to an already exiting profile automatically as well. So, the manual screening process has indeed not yet been established on the server side. But contribution on the client side has still been manual, at least for me.

Quoting RHo:

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Quoting Prof. Kingsfield:

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(...) just like the automated upload you weren't told, so of course you wouldn't think that there was one, it took about 4 hours to upload my entire library at that time, some of them were not accepted because one of the other users had gotten theirs in first.. (...)

Four hours seems to be incredibly long for an automated upload of an admittedly large collection. On the other side four hours seems to be a reasonable time for the manual upload of ever single profile, which had involved at least in my case several mouse clicks per profile.

One thing has been automated though. Invelos has accepted every contribution of a new profile automatically and they have declined every update to an already exiting profile automatically as well. So, the manual screening process has indeed not yet been established on the server side. But contribution on the client side has still been manual, at least for me.

Not when you consider that back then I was still dealing with dial-up, Rho. DSL didn't come here til 2006.

Quoting RHo:

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Quoting Prof. Kingsfield:

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Tim: Auotmated means you set it up and walk away from it, you evidently weren't given that option. (...)

Ken, could you please confirm or deny the fact if you have been giving an automatic option to a selected user base at the first days of Invelos?

There really isn't any need for him to confirm it as I was one of those users.  If I remember correctly, it was a link of some kind that allowed you to upload your entire collection at once.

Quoting T!M:

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Quoting TheMadMartian:

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If I remember correctly, it was a link of some kind that allowed you to upload your entire collection at once.

Yes, I pointed that out earlier: not some kind of "link", but simply the ability to flag your entire collection (flagging was an entirely new feature in Invelos's first DVD Profiler release, which is why some people may remember it as "special"), and then submit all those flagged profiles with one click. Since no contribution notes were required (nor possible), that was it. And again: this procedure was available to each and every one of us.

And if I remember correctly, you still had to confirm a lot of things on the web site part of the contribution process. And I also remember the server to be very flaky and it had been restarted by Invelos several times during my contributions.

Quoting T!M:

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Quoting TheMadMartian:

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If I remember correctly, it was a link of some kind that allowed you to upload your entire collection at once.

Yes, I pointed that out earlier: not some kind of "link", but simply the ability to flag your entire collection (flagging was an entirely new feature in Invelos's first DVD Profiler release, which is why some people may remember it as "special"), and then submit all those flagged profiles with one click. Since no contribution notes were required (nor possible), that was it. Effectively, that "allowed you to upload your entire collection at once." That procedure was available to everyone.

Tim,

Sorry, but you are wrong on this point.

There were a few select users, including me, who Ken provided a plug-in to, so that we could upload our collections without any manual intervention of any kind.  Fully automated.

IT WAS NOT AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE, regardless of your insistence.  Since you were not among the few who received this tool, you would have no way of knowing about it, since Ken specifically told us not to share it with others.

Ken later provided the "upload flagged profiles" function for everyone, but it was AFTER many of us had uploaded our complete collections.

Consequently, I uploaded ALL of my profiles in March of 2007, to the Invelos database without checking a single one!  The result of that was that I, too, propagated some IMDb data inadvertently since I had not fully audited every single profile in my local database first.  At the time, Ken expressed an urgency to get the new database built as quickly as possible.  That was the crucial driving factor at the time.  Skip was far from alone in uploading existing profiles with IMDb data in them.  That does not mean that HE actually created that profile in the first place, or that he placed the IMDb data in the profile originally.  He just happened to be the one who uploaded that profile during the "mass upload" frenzy starting on March 13, 2007.

On the topic of the "Guidelines", the Martian has graciously posted the relevant section regarding entering cast.  We have always been instructed to enter the cast exactly as they appear in the credits and in the same order.  This tells me that cloning IMDb into DVDP has never been allowed, even if the "Guidelines" did not specifically prohibit it, unless of course they just happened to exactly match the film's credits (pretty rare in my experience).  Back in the day, I used an IMDb scraping tool which created a spreadsheet of all cast and crew; but I always went through the actual credits and made all necessary corrections before entering them into DVDP.  This was the process that I used all the way back to when I started using the program in 2002.

These little "gotcha" games that people seem to want to engage in, seem pretty immature to me.

Quoting T!M:

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Though I honestly couldn't care less about the whole thing, and while I don't understand how we even came to talk about this, I will reply one more time, by assuring you that I did the exact same thing, and that's why I don't buy it.

I find this statement very troubling.  I have told you exactly what happened.  You apparently were not given access to the tool that I am speaking of.  What would be the purpose of me making up such a story?

I find it rather curious that you cannot simply say, "Oh, I didn't know about that", instead of implying that I'm making up a story. 

Quoting RHo:

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Quoting RHo:

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Ken, could you please confirm or deny the fact if you have been giving an automatic option to a selected user base at the first days of Invelos?

Ken, I personally would like to get confirmation or denial from you since there seems to be some confusion here.

No, there is no confusion.  There is only cynicism! 

"cyn·i·cism  (sn-szm)
n.
1. An attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others: the public cynicism aroused by governmental scandals."