@HankN said:

@superboy97 said:

All the moderators read the forum topics.

But what about the admins? The community wants to appeal to a higher power.

The administrator is more likely to read the "General" forum. Someone has already created a topic there on this subject.

@superboy97 , I just tried to post over on the topic you referenced, but it says "Discussion Is Invalid" (hehe, you're telling me!) - can that discussion be opened up so we can move the discussion to a place where the administrator will read it?

@Dragonwyntir said:

but it says "Discussion Is Invalid"

When this happens, the only thing that you can do is waiting a few hours and retry. I can't do anything about it. This also happen sometimes to us, the moderators.

OK thanks, it's working now.

@Dragonwyntir said:

@superboy97

Do you have a similar article for Plex? Also, can this be escalated as we've asked? The community does not prefer this usage, and isn't this entire website built for its community?

@Tim: If it's any help. my Plex uses Plex TV Series for scanner and agent with TMDb for episode ordering. "The Nevers" is listed in the correct season/order but (currently?) lacks episode titles.

Thank you @M.LeMarchand, I'll give that a try.

This is another example where a minority of mods with unorthodox ideas create problems for everyone in the community for no good reason. Here again TheTVDB and IMDB list the episodes correctly as episodes 7-12 and not as Specials. I think this should be escalated and hopefully will be corrected by someone higher up.

The other issue that should be corrected as soon as possible is air dates for Late Shows that air past midnight (e.g. Late Night with Seth Meyers). Setting the air-date to the next day goes against established conventions and creates inconsistencies with every other data source.

Most people who use the data on this site do it to have a good experience while watching their media collection. They are not interested in details like "did the show air before or after midnight" on monday night. Or "Did all episodes air on the same network". You have to stop making the community pay for issues that are caused by limitations of your current database structure. Both problems can be easily solved by updating your data structure. There is no reason all episodes of a Season/Show have to air on the same network. There is also no reason why an episode can't have a air-date (following the networks air-date information) AND an air-time information that follows the actual physical time and date of the first broadcast (GMT). So users can select which information they want.

But please stop fixing stuff that is not broken. Fix it once your data structure is ready and allows to fix it properly.

As I wrote here:

The rationalizations being offered and the digging in of heels about some reified "rules" in this thread are egregiously and wildly inappropriate, and, quite frankly, disgraceful. Philosophically, this is just about the same thing as defending some kind of horrifically immoral act, just because it is permitted by law. I am in favor of strong rules and consistent loyalty to them. But they have to be rational rules that serve the purpose of the rules. The rules are not an end in themselves; they exist to support and enhance some further end. In this case (and it seems in at least a handful of others), the rules frustrate their intended purpose, and I'm struggling to come up with a legitimate, beneficial reason for the rules as written. We can be consistent about the application of the rules and avoid one-offs by having more carefully crafted rules that reflect reality.

Another deeper issue here is the utter intransigence I'm observing. I would have been much more accepting of a response that was along the lines of "You're totally right that this is an example of where the rules lead to a really unintuitive result that ends up conflicting sharply with other data sources. For now, we need to be consistent about applying the rules as written, because one-offs create a lot of administrative problems, but this is really good feedback, and we'll consider how we might be able to change the rules to be more useful in the future. Thank you so much for surfacing this!". Instead, we got some condescending "But them's the rules.", accompanied by legalistic intellectual gymnastics, and that really doesn't sit well with me. As a product manager in tech myself, I know that I can't always give my customers what they're asking for (especially not right away), but when they're right, I'm absolutely willing to validate and acknowledge the correctness of their feedback.

the mods here and over there (looking at you thetvdb) represent all that is wrong with people having power and bath in it...

And then they went and messed Firefly up now! TVDB and IMDB go off the DVD/Blu-ray release (you know, the total number of episodes released as a Full season) not aired (the way it should be, the way everyone is going to watch it today). Episodes Aired should be a separate category, who cares about that anymore!

@CptTwinkie said:

I'm unable to scrape the entire season in kodi since the last time documentation on tvshow.nfo files was updated they didn't support the new json format. If this has been fixed since then I'm unable to find any information on it and it seems to be the only way to get the episode group to work. If anyone has any information on how to trick kodi into using the episode group please let me know.

Unrelated/off topic but, sometimes I like to read the discussions on this site, but I can never understand some of them when people start mentioning API, metadata, plex/kodi... what is "scrape the entire season in kodi" mean? I guess people must be using apps or some kind of technology with their movie/tv show watching habits that I dont. The only thing I use with themoviedb is trakt, just to keep track of what Ive seen. And if episodes of a season that was cancelled early ends up in the specials, I just go to the specials season and clicked on "watched", so it doesnt cause me any issues. Ive asked this question before, but I still dont get what exactly people are talking about lol. I understand that Kodi/plex has got to do with watching movies/tv on like a TV. But I guess I just dont really know anything about TVs. Last time I watched TV on my own probably like 15 years ago, and the way I understand how TVs work is you turn it on and it has channels you flip through. I guess it must have changed since then lol.

@softpillow said:

Unrelated/off topic but, sometimes I like to read the discussions on this site, but I can never understand some of them when people start mentioning API, metadata, plex/kodi... what is "scrape the entire season in kodi" mean? I guess people must be using apps or some kind of technology with their movie/tv show watching habits that I dont. The only thing I use with themoviedb is trakt, just to keep track of what Ive seen. And if episodes of a season that was cancelled early ends up in the specials, I just go to the specials season and clicked on "watched", so it doesnt cause me any issues. Ive asked this question before, but I still dont get what exactly people are talking about lol. I understand that Kodi/plex has got to do with watching movies/tv on like a TV. But I guess I just dont really know anything about TVs. Last time I watched TV on my own probably like 15 years ago, and the way I understand how TVs work is you turn it on and it has channels you flip through. I guess it must have changed since then lol.

I don't have any personal experience of Kodi but I believe it, like Plex which I do use, has amongst its many functions the ability to play (and provide across a network) media that has been stored on the server. So you might rip your disk of, say, Firefly, and store it in your Plex/Kodi. Or you may have a TV card and record stuff to the disk. Obviously, there are "other" ways to source media that we won't go into here.

TMDb can be used as a source to order your shows, so if the data doesn't match the desired format then you could end up with it showing the broadcast order of "Firefly", which is not the intended order. In the case of "The Nevers" episodes 1 to 6 will be in the correct order, whilst the others are listed as "specials" which spoils the "flow" of the show. Imagine if your Season One of GoT: https://s3.amazonaws.com/digitaltrends-uploads-prod/2014/05/Plex-Chromecast-screenshot.png ended at episode 5.

All that said, as annoying as it is, it doesn't happen with many shows and it's possible to make manual tweaks. My "The Nevers" shows in what most would say is the correct order, even though TMDb is my "first choice" for data. I just tweaked it.