I am pleased to announce that I have created a report based on the proposals and discussions presented in the "Gold Audited Profiles Proposal" thread and poll, and the related thread "The real problem with the database, IMHO".

I would appreciate your review and any comments and suggestions. When I feel that the dust has settled, I will then dub the report "Final" and submit it formally to Invelos Software, Inc via a Support Ticket, as well as an email to Ken (I am also sending him a "heads up" email prior to that.)

I will update the document as necessary as I get enough changes accumulated to make it worthwhile. The same link can be used for the updates.

Document link: Statement of Requirements for Improvements to the Invelos Software, Inc. DVD Profiler Contributions System and Online Database.

I want to express my appreciation to The Team, and share my wish for a significant and timely response from Invelos Software, Inc. You will likely recognize aspects of your thoughts and suggestions throughout the document. With a couple of exceptions, I have elected not to explicitly quote members or provide thread links, for my convenience and ease of reading, but the original threads are available as documentation of all the excellent collaboration that occurred. It goes without saying that the contents of this document are the product of our mutual efforts, and not mine alone.

Thank you for this very clear and precise document. It is an excellent summary of all problems that appear within the contribution system. Your implication is all the more oustanding that I know you are at present time very occupied by the precautions needed by the approaching storm. I really hope that there will not be too many damages for people in your area.

I have always been very concerned by the (de)capitalization problem, as I think it is a major cause of non linking problems. You correctly explained the problem, but some solutions that you propose simply cannot work.

For example :"Modify existing rules for capitalization so that ALL fields to be entered exactly as entered on the DVD metadata or Cover. Existing profiles are grandfathered to be fixed as users find time. DVD Profiler will have a new feature called “Aesthetic View” which will apply an automatic (de)capitalization filter to user selected fields."
No automatic (de)capitalization filter could ever work. Just an example, the all caps form of the French word for "event" is "EVENEMENT". Decapitalized form is évènement. Notice that an E became é, another one became è, and the two last ones became e. I cannot imagine any automatic filter that gives in all cases an "aesthetic view", the ugliest views being those with spelling mistakes. Applied to cast lists, nor the "as credited" form, nor the filtered form will ever allow correct linking.

It is not yet time to discuss how to solve this problem. At present time, I think the most important is to have Ken's view on your ideas, and indications about where he wants us to go. Working on new rules to see them refused by Ken would not have any efficiency.


L'Insoutenable Légèreté de l'être

Quick overview:

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A discussion of the perceived issues with the Contributions Process, details of my proposal, and other prosed solutions by Team members are presented later in this document.

prosed >> proposed

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If a collector has a complete profile that does not meet existing Contribution Rules, there is no way for him to automatically submit the minimum subset that does meet the rules. So many profiles created by experienced users do not get submitted because of the double work it creates for them.

Should be joined as a single sentence:  "rules, so"

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Submissions requiring disc ID cannot be done by people without a Blu-Ray computer drive. This is especially true of Blu-Ray titles.

The first "Blu-Ray" should be removed.  Disc IDs can be gotten from DVDs without a Blu-Ray drive, assuming the user has a DVD drive.

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There needs to be a way to reduce the amount of duplicate effort in cases where the same movie is released in two territories, or even just a re-release in the same territory, that means a lot of data has to be entered multiple times, and there's no direct means of updating all of the others if a fix is made to one of them.

Run-on sentence.

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Other situations requiring the need to replicate or clone data for the purpose of creating child profiles or copying the profile to a new locality.

Incomplete sentence.

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How do we deal with older films whose credits do not match the chart.

Phrased as a question, but ends with a period.


Re: Contribution Wizard -- A simple 'new entry' wizard might be nice as well, to allow setting the minimum required fields for contribution, and maybe some of the simpler, quick-and-easy items.

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DVD Profiler will have a new feature called “Aesthetic View” which will apply an automatic (de)capitalization filter to user selected fields.

That sounds quite impractical.  EG: would such a feature capitalize the word "bill"?  Depends on if it's "Bill Clinton", or "a dollar bill".  Natural language processing is an incredibly complex field, and only gets more so if you try to handle multiple languages.  The idea of adding it to DVDP as if it were a trivial feature is a bit laughable.

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Ability to handle accented characters in the Cast / Crew database.

Not useful until accent-agnostic searching is implemented.

You mean you were able to read through all of the chaos and work this out from it?

That alone is worth a medal

It doesn't like you KinoNiki 
Works for me! Excellent work mediadogg!

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Date: October 29, 2012 (Fist Draft) © 2012 by the listed members for exclusive use by Invelos Software, Inc.

Fist >> First

Quoting W0m6at:

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Quoting Kinematics:

Quote:

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Submissions requiring disc ID cannot be done by people without a Blu-Ray computer drive. This is especially true of Blu-Ray titles.

The first "Blu-Ray" should be removed.  Disc IDs can be gotten from DVDs without a Blu-Ray drive, assuming the user has a DVD drive.

How about "Submissions requiring disc ID can only be done by people with an appropriate optical drive."?

This covers DVD, HD-DVD & Blu-ray (and CDs for bonus discs), and is phrased more positively.

Sounds good.

Thanks all. Closing up shop for tonight. My servers are shut down and I'm only running battery - backed equipment at the moment. Haven't lost power yet, but the UPSs are clicking every time there is a wind gust. I have made the document edits, but since they are not severe, I won't bother to upload until tomorrow hopefully.

I'll probably turn in early and do some reading. My bedroom lamps, clock and tablet power brick are all on UPS in case the power goes out, I can keep going for awhile.