- “Your Reviews” are now ordered by Date and reviews on each Title sub page are ordered by Helpfulness.We will continue to update functionality in the new year, starting by bringing back the ability to sort reviews from newest to oldest/oldest to newest. We appreciate your patience as we continue to improve the overall experience.
- We have removed the Index view.
- We updated the way that reviews with spoilers are displayed.
Karen
Karen, Employee
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Posted 2 years ago
Col Needham, Official Rep
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- As explained on https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/upcoming-changes-to-several-imdb-features-du6man1opd5q0 this is part of an essential technology migration -- there is no option to go back. We appreciate that changes to familiar interfaces are always difficult, and there are some painful casualties in terms of feature / sorting / filtering losses. However, we need to start with a common review platform across the main web site, the mobile site and the iOS and Android apps. Once we have this, we can build a better review experience for everyone more quickly than ever, providing review features consistently and everywhere instead of only on the web interface.
- One change already live in the latest app versions (updates to these are rolling out now) is that all customer reviews are now available on the popular IMDb iOS and Android apps as well as the IMDb mobile site. Until this change, only a subset of reviews were available on mobile. Far from limiting the audience of your reviews, we have more than doubled the audience with this single change. This also clears the way for reviews to be written and submitted on mobile which is also a popular customer request.
- The new system enables us to fix a longstanding issue with reviews containing spoilers; please see https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/reviews-without-spoiler-warnings-on-overview-page
- For those people who think reviews have been removed from the main title pages, this is probably because you are using the old, unsupported (7+ years out of date) version of IMDb. Please go to your site settings at https://secure.imdb.com/register-imdb/siteprefs and ensure both "Always display full cast and crew credits" and "Show reference view (old title/name page layout)" are unchecked. We will shortly be making changes to the "Always display full cast and crew credits" view which will move it onto the new technology platform and will restore more direct access to the reviews.
Col Needham, Official Rep
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If there is now a push to align the desktop site with the mobile app, then it devalues the desktop site.This is not always true and is something we are trying to avoid. Over on https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/update-to-list-pages we wrote this a couple of days ago:
"In the meantime, do you have an iPhone or iPad? The list implementation on our iOS app is actually the best one -- Android, mobile web and the desktop web are playing catch-up with the power of iOS. One the advantages of the new changes is that they clear the path for the same powerful list experience on all platforms."
The iOS app is already (IMHO) the best implementation for many other things, including: sorting & filtering filmographies; viewing showtimes; ticketing; box office; and locations.
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It won't solve the filtering issue though, so I'm not sure our reviews will have that much visibility. If people can't search for reviews by prolific authors, there's no chance to reach more users with that new format.
Seriously, all whining put aside, was that really necessary?
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Good things:
- I like the sexy little side popup of the “add review”; it is pure cosmetic but it feels swish
- I like the spoilers tag and the changes to how spoiler-tagged reviews are shown
Bad things
- Index view / view all etc of my user comments page: finding a specific comment of mine on most titles is now impossible without endless clicking. Index view made it hugely easy either with Ctrl-F, or listing all alphabetically.
- Sorting of title comments: I used “prolific commenters” and chronological and occasionally a few others. I really never used Helpful or Best since mostly the highest rated seemed to be those of simple thought who state popular opinion and get upvoted by the majority
The thing that strikes me the most I guess is how unsurprised I am by this. IMDb continues to move in a certain direction with a specific business focus which does not involve non-value adding elements. And as much as the user comments adds significant value to my IMDb experience, it doesn’t add value as defined by the business – hence it is gone, with the same “limits of technology” excuse rolled out...because apparently producing a list of titles in index view listed alphabetically is beyond the wit of man....
I appreciate the responses in this thread – we had a great community of individual user comment writers for many years, and it is sad to see that lost by this removal of features and functionality.
bob
note: I am not an IMDb employee, nor in any way affiliated with IMDb
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@Elshikh4 @Mark Grindberg @Theo
Thanks for the kind words; I think over the past 15 years I have had quite a handful of messages from people saying they look for my reviews – which was really encouraging to know.
I was lucky that having visibility has given me some credits on films/tv from filmmakers who checked out something I had written on their work. Ironically, it makes these changes sting more that nice little moments of community such as that are now gone.
Theo will confirm that I also had many writers (such as himself) that I regularly read for the pleasure of reading their opinions, or to see their thoughts on something I just watched. The only saving grace is that when I do that now for Theo’s thoughts on the original Doctor Who episodes, there are usually only a handful of comments – so not too much scrolling.
It is terribly sad to think that for any title of note, it will not be incredibly time-consuming to find a comment by a specific writer unless by chance it happens to be one they wrote very recently, or conversely to have been considered one of the most “helpful” ones.bob
note: I am not an IMDb employee, nor in any way affiliated with IMDb
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This is a very bad move, as the review index and sorting features are the fun parts of typing a review. Seeing the review having helpful likes, and looking at the review number I obtained (I know that's strange) are great motivating factors for me to contribute to this site. I noticed that the review number has disappeared from the comment approval confirmation email since a few weeks ago. I could still find the comment number from the review index, but now that is gone, and there is no way for me to find the comment number.
As others have said, there is now no way to find an old review - I have contributed almost 3000 reviews. I am not clicking "load more" several hundred times to find an old review.
The simplification of the review page may be easier for beginners, but it is seriously alienating the dedicated contributors. As your site has already been around for over 20 years and have a massive following, appealing to new users should not be a priority. Instead, looking after dedicated users and contributors should be the priority.
This site relies on the contribution of many dedicated contributors around the world. If the dedicated contributors leave, then the dream of having a comprehensive movie database will be impossible.
I strongly urge you to at least reinstate an option to bring back the review index and sorting functions. Thanks.
Col Needham, Official Rep
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I appreciate that you have responded to us. I think everyone knows and expects that it's a new format is a hard adjustment. Everyone knows there are usually "bugs" that need to be worked out. And, given some of the frustration and unhappiness in the world today, a "kneejerk" reaction to changes instigated by a large corporation comes from a suspicious place.Thanks for the feedback on this. One of the purposes of this thread is to gather exactly this kind of feedback from which we can build in 2018 when everything is on a unified platform.
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The changes to the user reviews page that I am unhappy with are as follows:
1) Reviewer star rating no longer graphical number of stars. Previously I could skim the reviews to look for low ratings to see why that reviewer thought the film was disappointing. It is often this type of outlier review that highlights overlooked aspects to the film.
2) Pagination, the set length page with navigation bar no longer available. Limits users ability to traverse reviews where there are many reviews and seek out specific times when reviews were written.
3) Although not every reviewer listed it I found the reviewer location very useful. If, for example I was interested in a foreign film from say the middle east I could determine those from that country or region to see their opinion of the film. This was very useful to discover if the film reflected the reality of the particular country of if the film was slanted against the country. Also if there existed a national, political or religious animosity on the part of the reviewer that went beyond the films content. Example some American reviewers who would trash a film made in China simply beacuse it is Chinese or Arab reviewers who would trash an American movie simply because it is made in America.
Small gripes, I know, but these features were extremely useful to me when deciding which movies to invest my time and money by viewing.
Could they at least have a button on the page that says something like "Revert to old style reviews page" that would take you to the old style version of the page. When youtube and yahoo mail changed they offered this option to users.
Only my 2 cents worth but considering the amount I have written I should say my 50 cents worth.
Regards
Paul
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Col Needham, Official Rep
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If the latter, can you please just tell us this is the case so that we can stop wondering and hoping?It is the latter ... from the (updated yesterday) text at the top of this thread:
"We will continue to update functionality in the new year, starting by bringing back the ability to sort reviews from newest to oldest/oldest to newest. We appreciate your patience as we continue to improve the overall experience."
so, yes, the sorting functionality will return. To answer your other question
If the former, wouldn't it have made more sense to hold off on releasing the updates until they're fully functional?At any other time, yes, however the systems powering over 210 features at IMDb are closing down on or before 31 December 2017. We have quite the incentive to be off them before this date, as the alternative is that anything still on the old software come 1/1 would simply cease to exist. The IMDb product and software teams have pulled off a minor miracle in already migrating / retiring / re-inventing 202 of the 210, mostly in the last 4-6 months so we have just 8 to go now and we will make it before the holidays.
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Hello
Many things on IMDb changed, but I am sorry to say that most of it made it harder and more complicated to use. Among several things I do not like, my main issue is how to access specific review of my own. So far I wrote about 500 reviews. Before I was able to go to Reviews quick link and get complete list of my reviews that I could sort in several ways, alphabetically or by date etc. When sorted alphabetically it was easy to find specific review I needed. Also, I could go to page for movie in question, click on write review, get answer that I already posted review for that movie and get options to either edit or just read old review. This second direct option is disabled now and I just get an empty box to write new review even if I already have one for that movie. And quick links review option gives me all my reviews ordered by date when they were written, so the only way to find specific one is to start from the top and scroll until I find one I need. Scrolling through 500 reviews searching for one that can be anywhere on that list is tough and complicated and I can just imagine how troublesome it is for guys with thousands of reviews. I hope this is just temporary issue cause by updating IMDb in progress, but if it is permanent change you should seriously reconsider it. Please tell me if I overlooked solution for my issue cause I really spent too much time already trying everything that came to my mind. Also, canceling sorting options for movies in My Lists was really bad idea too.
Thank you
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"We will continue to update functionality in the new year, starting by bringing back the ability to sort reviews from newest to oldest/oldest to newest. We appreciate your patience as we continue to improve the overall experience."
Needham has himself more than 10.000 ratings, and I'm sure he understands the needs and frustrations.
I trust that the migration is a difficult one, and that the changes was badly explained.
Advanced search could be better with a top choice "My ratings".
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All right, I've been doing reviews since 2010, suppose I sort them chronologically so I can either have the 2010 at the top or the 2017 ones, what if I want to read one of my 2013 reviews? If IMDb provides a system that allows you to have a full listing of your reviews at once, then it'll be an improvement... but there's more.
What's the point of allowing users to vote for helpful reviews if the reviewer can't sort his own reviews by helpfulness. Yes, we want to see the reviews that were better rated than the others, call it an "ego" thing but since we're dedicating a lot of time for something we're passionate about, don't get paid for it and don't care about not being paid for it, how about allowing us that bit of satisfaction.
And how about reviewers who want to give their reviews some publicity, one who wants to apply to a movie-related job and provides the link to his reviews or one who just wants to show his writing skills, this new format doesn't help at all.
It all comes down to a simple thing: we write reviews so that anyone can be read by anyone and that means us too, IMDb's previous format was the best, whatever changes they make now, it'll never be like it used to be, because you can't guarantee that every review you wrote can be found and read, so what I'm doing right now is protecting my work, for all it's worth.
Maybe migrating it is useless because it's just a matter of time before Letterboxd comes up with similar "updates" but I also copy paste them on Word files, I thought IMDb was the safest place to put my reviews (I really trusted it since I never copy-pasted any review before) but I was wrong.
There's no alternate scenario: the only way to make any review accessible is to get back to the old format, and that will never happen.
Col Needham, Official Rep
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It all comes down to a simple thing: we write reviews so that anyone can be read by anyone and that means us tooWe have heard the feedback in this thread, and as explained already, we will be adding sorting options in the New Year for both readers and authors. We agree it is important that people can access all reviews easily and we will look at the issues with navigation. However, from our earlier official reply to this thread, you may have missed this point:
- One change already live in the latest app versions (updates to these are rolling out now) is that all customer reviews are now available on the popular IMDb iOS and Android apps as well as the IMDb mobile site. Until this change, only a subset of reviews were available on mobile. Far from limiting the audience of your reviews, we have more than doubled the audience with this single change. This also clears the way for reviews to be written and submitted on mobile which is also a popular customer request.
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To be honest, I never felt that my reviews had a limited audience because they were less available via the mobile medium, and I don't know how their audience can double if you can only sort the reviews in order of helpfulness, the oldest ones are the most likely to be at the top, unless you write the review of a new movie at the very time of its release, but we reviewers review old movies as well.
And supposing our reviews have a bigger audience, so far there's no way to know it, you have to sort your reviews chronologically and check at the end of each one how many users found it useful, one by one... can you imagine?
In the old system, you sorted your reviews by helpfulness and could find which ones were rated or not with the "show summaries" and we could all tell when a movie was "upgraded" because it would always affect the order in the listing and it would show at the top of some specific pages. Anyway, in less than 20 seconds, you could see if there was some new ratings of helpfulness or not.
I had my "reviews" page on my mobile and any time of the day, I could do a little check-up. But now, whenever I get to my reviews' page, I find the oldest reviews I wrote and it's perhaps the order I'm least interested in.
Maybe the new features are more interesting for the review of a newly released movie, which might explain the insistance on writing reviews on mobile, like a gut-reaction after leaving the theater... but speaking for myself, I don't know how can anyone write a review on a mobile, I think it's really diminishing the 'intellectual' value of a review to assume it can be done on a mobile.
I could never have written what I just wrote to you right now on a mobile, how shouldn't that apply for reviews? If you can allow users to write reviews on a mobile, they will not be different from Twitter reactions.
And you should also understand why people are so perplex, there's been so many infuriating changes recently, the removal of the message boards being one of them, I used to invest a lot of time and intellect on IMDb, sometimes at the expenses of my professional responsibilities, just to be able to share some thoughts with fellow movie lovers and these exchanges were all erased from the memory of the website.
I spent time suggesting polls during the daily poll days and the history page has been completely erased, it's like everything we do for IMDb can disappear at any time, and I just don't want that to happen with the reviews.
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Please bring back this feature. As it is now I have really no way of knowing if I have already reviewed a movie; the panel comes up to write a new review regardless. I also can't just search through all my reviews either, as the site doesn't list them all on the one page (you have to keep clicking the button to make it load a few more each time).
Please bring this feature back so we can easily see and edit/replace our old reviews from the title's page.
Thanks,
-James
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I hate to go on about this, but I see that there's now a minimum of 50 characters for a review. Could you change this to, let's say, 200 characters? 50 characters is short, as short as this sentence. (!)
Note: This conversation was created from a reply on: New IMDb Help hub.
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With the 50 character minimum rule I could now take ten seconds to submit a review for Ingmar Bergman's Persona that only says:
'This film ROCKS my SOCKS! If you don't like it you SUCK!!!'
And that would qualify as acceptable. That doesn't sound like a step in the right direction.
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Anyway, I hope more people will speak their mind about the "50 characters is enough" rule.
(this post contains 208 characters)
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The new format sucks. Before I could quickly scan several reviews just by the number of stars given. Now you have to look for a numeric rating on a scale of 1 to 5 at the right side of the review. The new design makes it look like all the reviews are positive when they aren't.
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I am trying to add a review, where I wrote a list like this:
- argument 1
- argument 2
etc.
Everything else gets added, but all the points with " - " before it are removed? Do I need to list it with 1. 2. or a) b) ?
And second the reviews are sorted to "by helpfulness" I would like to sort it chronologically or by "hated it" "loved it", how is that possible now? Thanks for any help
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At this point, unfortunately it isn't.
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Where
-
would be the helpfulness for a given review
-
is the number of "Yes" votes for a given review
-
is the number of "No" votes for a given review
-
is the number of "Yes" votes plus "No" votes for the review with highest number of such
-
is some positive fraction significantly smaller than (like one thousandth) a whole number
-
is a fractional weight constant between half and one


It would seem that a similar formula has already already in place. I'm not sure how "helpfulness" metric is exactly determined.
The same message over again but using SVG instead of PNG...
Where
-
is the helpfulness for a given review
-
is the number of "yes" votes for a given review
-
is the number of "no" votes for a given review
-
is the number of "yes" votes plus "no" votes for the review with highest number of such
-
is some positive fraction significantly smaller than (like one thousandth) a whole number
-
is a fractional weight constant between half and one
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One strange change made to the User Reviews listing is displaying only a single star beside a user's rating, whether it's 7/10, 5/10, or anything else, instead of the actual number of stars. Why eliminate such a simple and convenient visual aid?
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Col Needham, Official Rep
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Col Needham, Official Rep
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Box Office -> https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/announcement-updates-to-box-office-on-imdb-title-pages-imdbp...
I think it's a misunderstanding. It is useful we have a really firm example here with which we can work though. Here is how things were before last week: IMDb box office information was available in three different places, with three different data sources: IMDb.com / IMDbPro.com / Box Office Mojo (remember we own BOM and the same software team is responsible for its upkeep). The layout of the old IMDb.com box office page dates back to when we launched the section in 1996 -- it had not changed in 20 years and has a simplistic data model; meanwhile Box Office Mojo has a superior data model and more information / reporting. The three systems (more than) triple the on-going support and future enhancement costs. Every fix we make to any box office feature (twice over) is time which could have been spent adding or enhancing something else instead. We are done with this old approach.
The situation we are in now with box office is better than last week, but it is still a bridge to where we want to go in 2018. We now only have two box office systems instead of three; on IMDb.com we have added more box office data to the main pages so more people will see / benefit from this than any updates to an under-used sub-page. Next we can tie all three sites better together, get things down to one underlying system, and enhance box office related searches across all three sites.
Nothing has changed in the fundamentals of what is in the Contributors' Charter @ https://contribute.imdb.com/charter nor what we are doing and what we are about in the help section (and history and press room) @ https://help.imdb.com/article/imdb/general-information/what-is-imdb/G836CY29Z4SGNMK5 -- the changes allow us to do all of these things better and faster.
Filming dates -> https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/announcement-updates-to-box-office-on-imdb-title-pages-imdbp...
Sorry this should have been covered above; the information on filming dates will return in an update to one of the other title sub-pages. The timing should be early in 2018.
[BTW these dates are not behind a paywall either; they are currently not in the IMDbPro data set either]
Company credits -> https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/company-credits-see-more-link
Thanks for the extra details on your usage. We have taken another look at this and the best way to build this with the new system would be as a search result. We already offer limited company searches on the advanced title search page at http://www.imdb.com/search/title so for example, wherever we reference "20th Century Fox" on the site, the company name would be linked to the corresponding search results, as in http://www.imdb.com/search/title?companies=fox
The same would apply for all companies, so in your examples, companies like JC Films, Fernsehen der DDR, MarVista Entertainment, Xces Film, Paramount Pictures, PETA, MPAA etc. would be linked to their advanced search results similar to Fox.
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Yoann Jean-Marie Shmuntal Larrieu
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Hello. It used to be possible to have an index in alphabetic order of all my reviews for quick navigating and scanning. Also it was possible to know whether I'd written a review already for a film on its page by clicking "User Reviews" and then "Add Review" and it'd tell me I'd already written one, now I've no clue and it would take forever to find out whether I'd written one for a given film or not. Please help, this is way too complicated for such an elementary task.
Col Needham, Official Rep
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Already implemented:
- Make all user reviews available across all IMDb platforms (web, mobile web, iOS, Android) [DONE]
- Allow voting for reviews from user/reviews pages [DONE]
- No longer display reviews with spoilers on the main title page [DONE]
- Integrate reviews into main IMDb database to improve management and processing [DONE]
- Add reviews and “Report This” to the “Track My Contribution” feature for better feedback on processing [DONE]
- On the iOS app, add sort orders: chronological, by rating given to title by reviewer, by helpfulness (all in both directions) [DONE]
- Fix “Load more” functionality on Internet Explorer [DONE]
- Allow IMDb mark-up in review text to link name/title pages from inside reviews [DONE]
- Increase default view of reviews shown before “Load more” from 10 to 25 [DONE]
In progress across Q1:
- On the web site & mobile web, add sort orders to the title/reviews page, ideas under review include: chronological, by vote volume, by rating given to title by reviewer, love/hate view, by volume of reviews by reviewer, by helpfulness (all in both directions)
- On the web site, add sort orders to the user/reviews page, ideas under review include: alphabetical by title, chronological, by vote volume, by rating given to title by reviewer, by helpfulness (all in both directions)
- On the Android app, add sort orders: chronological, by rating given to title by reviewer, by helpfulness (all in both directions)
- Allow review contribution from mobile devices (mobile web, iOS, Android)
- Fix known issues posting new reviews with certain browser / system combinations
Ideas for the longer term:
- Allow helpfulness voting on mobile devices (mobile web, iOS, Android)
- Improve the algorithm used to determine default helpfulness sorting
Please bear with us while we work through the above list (and equivalent lists for other impacted features). Our aim remains to make IMDb the best place to read, write and discover reviews of movies, shows (and other title types) ... both on the web and on mobile.
Finally a reminder from the above list: the IMDb iOS app already supports sorting of reviews by three options if you have access to an iPhone or iPad.
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- On the web site & mobile web, add sort orders to the title/reviews page, ideas under review include: chronological, by vote volume, by rating given to title by reviewer, love/hate view, by volume of reviews by reviewer, by helpfulness (all in both directions)
- On the web site, add sort orders to the user/reviews page, ideas under review include: alphabetical by title, chronological, by vote volume, by rating given to title by reviewer, by helpfulness (all in both directions)
That's good enough for me, thanks!
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Example. As Angelita in Maverick, The "Guatemala City" Episode, Linda Dangcil's Angelita is a Remarkably Precocious presence that invites one to connect with her on a multitude of levels. Angelita immediately shuts down Maverick's anger in one scene, Instantly reminding Maverick of the honor in being gentlemanly in non violent situations. Besides Dangcil's on screen high energy yet calming presence, in another era she might have been a Shampoo Ambassador for her unending but well managed Tresses.
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Col Needham, Official Rep
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Not saying that "spoiling" a documentary is as bad as spoiling the plot twist of a popular movie, or something, but I can certainly see the point behind a decision to also consider giving away certain details about a documentary could be construed as a spoiler to some.
gromit82, Champion
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