gromit82's profile
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Saturday, January 4th, 2025 5:33 AM

Solved

Rejected submission: "Badly formatted"? I don't think so

An upcoming TV special has been entered into IMDb as a TV series by mistake. So I submitted a correction:

Contribution Confirmation #250102-051435-175000

Bill Maher: Is Anyone Else Seeing This?

Items submitted: 1

Edits: 1

  1. Title Type:

    • Before

      • Title Correction: "Bill Maher: Is Anyone Else Seeing This?" (2025)

    • After

      • Title Correction: Bill Maher: Is Anyone Else Seeing This? (2025) (TV)

And I included the following explanation:

This is not a TV series; it's a single TV special (a single stand-up comedy performance). See http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news/2024/12/23/hbo-original-comedy-special-bill-maher-is-anyone-else-seeing-this-debuts-january-10-163415/20241223hbo01/ for confirmation.

My submission was rejected with the following "explanation":

Reason Badly Formatted.

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

If the IMDb software is going to reject correct submissions such as this one, shouldn't it at least give a better explanation than "badly formatted"? The formatting of this submission was perfectly fine. If the submission had really been badly formatted, it would have gotten a "red" warning and not even been submittable for processing.

I'm not looking just for this title to be corrected to a TV special. I'm also requesting that the rejection notices generated when a submission is rejected should be more relevant and accurate.

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14 days ago

Hello gromit82,

I have re submitted the updated on your behalf and it is approved, the changes will be live on the site shortly!

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Thank you, Fran.

Could you also put in a bug report to do something about the incorrect use of the "Badly Formatted" rejection notice?

Employee

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Since the Title was submitted as a TV Series first and a episode was already live, the system was marking your update as badly formatted, I have taken the necessary actions! Thanks for the data correction.

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Fran: Please be aware that submission #250104-161923-346000 which was submitted by IMDb on my behalf was also rejected (this time as "unable to verify"). 

I have just tried re-submitting the Title Correction. However, since the title is currently entered as "Bill Maher: Is Anyone Else Seeing This?" (????), I had to re-submit it as Bill Maher: Is Anyone Else Seeing This? (????) (TV), and only after that is accepted -- if it is -- will it be possible to submit a Release Date to get the correct year into the title.

(edited)

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@gromit82​ Hi-

Apologies for this! I have now approved your re-submission and the changes will be live on the site shortly for that title. 

You can then add the release date, let us know if you need further help with this!

Cheers!