With the new season of Big Brother well under way in the UK (BB11) we need your help adding release dates, cast, nominations for evictions… all the usual stuff to this iconic series. Don’t be afraid, just click the Update button and tell us what you know.

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Our Awards list is one of the oldest and most complex parts of the database and it’s long overdue for an overhaul. Everything about the list, from the way you send us the information, the way we check it, the way we store it and even the way we display it, would benefit from some modernization.

It’s not a simple task but we’re suddenly in a position to give it that much-needed attention and we’ve had to make a tough decision about how to go about it. Upgrading things on a live website like ours has been likened to trying to change the tyres on a Formula 1 car while it’s still going round the track and so we’ve decided to simplify the process a little by temporarily closing the list. We estimate that the work will take 4-6 months, during which time we’ll not be taking any new submissions of any kind (including corrections) for the Awards list. No data will be lost and the existing information will still be visible on the site, you just won’t be able to add to it or change it for a while.

So, from 10.00 BST on Wednesday 31 March we’ll close the Awards list to new submissions. We’ll process everything that’s already been submitted, then we’ll start work on revamping the whole thing.

It’s only temporary, and it will make things better on this much-loved list.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, there’s a thread about this on the Contributors’ Help message board.

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We list people on the site by their professional name (stage name, best-known public name, what have you) and this, obviously, isn’t necessarily their real name. If you happen to find out someone’s real name, please don’t try to change their name on the site with a “name correction”. Instead add it as their “birth name” under Biographical Information.

And while we’re on the subject of names, one of the many fun things that the Interwebz have taught us is that very few of us have unique names. Please be careful when you spot that Ethel Doofenshmirtz was the costume designer on a French film made in 1930 that she really is the same Ethel Doofenshmirtz that we have listed. Take a quick look at her page – if her credits are as a stunt performer in American films in the 1990s, the chances are very high that it’s a completely different woman, no matter how rare the name. We have tools that can help us spot these anomalies, but you can help us greatly by having a quick delve and seeing if you can resolve the complication yourself.

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If you’re sending us links to reviews of TV series, please remember to send them to the right place.

• if the review is of an individual episode, send the update from that episode’s title page
• if the review is of a whole season, or of the entire series, please send it from the main title page for the series

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Please take a look at the Movie-Connections (movie-links) guidelines for how to connect a series of
movies.

If you have Movie A and it has two follow-ups, you may think it is correct to
just add those two movies to Movie A with “followed by” connections.  That
would be incorrect.  What you would end up with would be:

Movie A followed by Movie B
Movie A followed by Movie C

On the site, Movie A and Movie B would be connected, and Movie A and Movie C
would be connected, but Movie B would not be connected to Movie C.

The correct way to submit the connections is to go to the page for Movie A and
submit that is is followed by Movie B. Then go to the page for Movie B and
submit that it is followed by Movie C.  What you would end up with is:

Movie A followed by Movie B
Movie B followed by Movie C

Our software will automatically make the connection between
Movie A and Movie C.

Think of a series of connected movies like links of a chain, each one
following the previous one.

The submission guide can help answer questions, and many experienced people
are available to help on the contributors help message board.

LINKS
submission guide
contributors help

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Are you submitting links to YouTube clips of yourself for your name page? Rather than sending in links to loads of individual clips, it would be much easier for other users to find stuff if you collect all your clips together onto one YouTube channel and send us the link to that instead.

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It’s perfectly fine to add an attribute to note the color process used.  Common examples are:

• (Metrocolor)
• (Eastmancolor)
• (Fujicolor)
• (Technicolor)

But please note that Technicolor was only a process until the mid-70s, after which they only processed Eastman/Kodak, so these should go to the technical list.

A mistake we often see is to add the name of the film laboratory as an attribute in the Color Info list.  These should go to the technical list. Common examples of labs would be DeLuxe, Rank and Movielab.

Also note that in most cases we don’t accept episode level color data except where special episodes are different from the rest of the series.

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We recently noticed that for a good long while we’ve been spelling the abbreviation of “microphone” as “mike” instead of the more commonly used “mic” in the pull-down menu for goof submissions. From 14 January 2010 it will be changed. For reasons of consistency, you understand.

Happy New Year

That is all.

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This is a quick note to announce the top 200 data contributors to IMDb for 2009. The list and more details have just been posted on the IMDb message boards — thanks and Happy New Year from everyone at IMDb!

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Thanks for all your contributions throughout 2009. We’ll be operating with a reduced staff over the Christmas and New Year period so it might take longer than usual for us to check and approve your submissions. Please bear with us – we’ll all be back in 2010 full of vim, vigour and far too much festive food.

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