We view Superheroes and their alter-egos as two separate characters (as opposed to one character with two different names).

Sometimes, Superheroes and their alter-egos are manifestly distinct personalities – bumbling, clumsy Clark Kent vs. Self-assured, confident Superman, for example, and most of the time the alter-ego is literally playing a different character to disguise their superhero status. With this in mind, here is the updated Superhero character policy:

1.  Unless otherwise displayed in the credits, character names for Superheroes and their alter-egos should be separated by a slash on the site (i.e. Bruce Wayne/Batman).

2. If the character names are displayed differently in the credits, the ‘as credited onscreen’ rule applies. Example: If  Christian Bale is credited as ‘Bruce Wayne – Batman’, in the next Batman movie, then that is what will be displayed on the site.

3. If only one character name is displayed in the credits (either the Superhero name OR the alter-ego name), the ‘as credited onscreen’ policy again applies.

4. Where no superhero/alter-ego names are credited onscreen, one or both may be submitted.

5. In the rare cases where no screen credit exists in any capacity (i.e. both actor and character names are missing), one or both character names can be submitted with an ‘uncredited’ attribute.

It has also been agreed that alter-egos should have their own character pages.  This will be implemented soon.

Tweet This Post 

We’re about to make a behind-the-scenes change to the way we store titles which, to be honest, most users won’t notice but which will affect some submitters.

For years we’ve followed the standard practice of moving articles (the, a, an, etc) to the end of titles when we store them in the database. So, for instance, The Godfather (1972) has been stored as Godfather, The (1972) since… well, since forever. We even used to display it like that, although astute users will have spotted that we now swap the articles back into place for display (but only for titles in English). The advantage of all this article swapping is that it makes it easier to sort titles alphabetically but the disadvantages, especially when dealing with non-English titles, are many and varied.

The time has come, we’ve decided, to bite the bullet and store titles as written.

Little will change on the site because we display English language titles “naturally” anyway but it will make a difference in some places:

• submissions - if you refer to a title in a submission (including submitting a new title) you will now need to enter it in its “natural” form rather than swapping the article. For the majority of submitters this should be more intuitive and more straightforward.
• display - Non-English titles will display properly, so that, for instance, Buono, il brutto, il cattivo., Il (1966) will become  Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. (1966) and Boot – The Making of, Das (1981) will be stored and displayed as Das Boot – The Making of (1981) just as nature intended.
• “browse” pages – we don’t sort titles alphabetically in many places, but where we do (the various Browse pages or MyMovies, for instance) The Godfather (1972) will now be sorted under T and Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo. (1966) under I.
• ftp files – if you download our list files from the ftp server you need to be aware that the sort order of the titles will change in case this affects the way you use them.

The change will affect around 10% of the 1.3 million titles in the database and we’re hoping to make the swap during the day on Tuesday 7 April so that they’ll be visible on the site when the new version is published on Wednesday 8 April.

Tweet This Post 

A little while ago we made a slight policy change in the Spouse section of our name pages. Previously we only recorded details of “marriage” in the commonly understood, old fashioned sense, but we are now accepting all legally recognized partnerships (marriages, civil partnerships, domestic unions, etc – the exact terms vary by jurisdiction). The submission guide has been updated to reflect this change but the gist is: if it’s legal, we’ll record it; if it’s not formally recognized by the local authorities, we’ll take it as a biographical trivia item.

Tweet This Post