argman's profile

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Sunday, May 10th, 2026

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External Review Title Rejected, Why?

I frequently add external reviews for films in IMDb.

I started recently a project called "0 Absents from Movie Nights" where I watch a movie every night, I review them, then add the link.

The title I've added is formatted in this way: 0 Absents From Movie Night: Movie Title (Movie Year) [Writer's Name]

What I got:

 Declined

Reason: Badly Formatted.

Your contribution has been declined. Your contribution did not meet our formatting standards. Please review our submission guides.

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Since then, I've tried to shuffle words here and there, and it gets rejected every time. I even started to use the old formatting that I used for more than a year successfully, and it got rejected. I didn't find anything in the submission guide that speaks for this.

What's wrong with this format?

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Employee

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7 hours ago

Hello argman, 

Can you help us posting the 18-digits submission reference number for the contribution.

You can find the submission number in the Contribution History page.

Champion

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5 hours ago

argman: I am not certain, but I see a couple of issues here.

If you look at an External Reviews page such as https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12042730/externalreviews/ you will see that the description is given as:

Website Name [Writer's Name]

and the title and year of the film are not included in the description. 

Examples:

  • Always Good Movies [Filipe Freitas]
  • Amazing Cinema [Daniele Buzzurro]

The title and year of the film are already taken into account by the fact that you are submitting your review to the page for that particular film. No colon is needed in the description, either.

The other concern I have is that your project is titled as "0 Absents from Movie Nights". By beginning your description with a zero, some contributors might think that you are trying to push your reviews to appear at the top of each list of external reviews. (Digits precede the letter A on those lists.) If this really is the title of your website, I could accept that, but I would want to see the website to see if that is really true. 

(edited)