Ratings: Import history and data from other sites

Indeed. All we can do is keep pointing people at this thread and hope it gets enough +1s to rise to the top of the heap and get more attention from staff. As I say, just allowing people to import lists they've exported from IMDB would be a great first step (and would allow some information from other sites to be imported as well, with a little tinkering). After all, it seems odd to have a way to export your list, but not to import that very same list.

I'm not really familiar with these IMDB lists, as I said I don't really use the site yet because of these rating exporting/importing problems... but if it is as you stated - and I don't doubt it, some of the simplest feature as this unfortunately are commonly neglected in big desorganised sites - they could easily change it, and it would be a huge and simple implement...

Indeed, but one of the advantages of their using this site, is they can see what is popular and they can prioritise the most popular ones. So with a bit of a push this could get implemented, it wouldn't be too difficult.

This would be a useful feature.

Unfortunately, this is not currently possible. This has been suggested: Importing other sites' history to IMDb https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topi... Please +1 that thread if you would like to have the ability to import lists.

no its not possible

I'm just echoing Dan at this point in hopes of getting a tiny bit of attention from IMDb. There's a thread here: https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/importing_other_sites_history_to_imdb Add comments to it and let's see if we can get IMDb to add this feature!

check this out: https://github.com/StegSchreck/RatS Maybe this is what you need.

I do not think it would be so easy to implement this feature in the case of lists that only contain the name, director, year, etc. Today, when you add a movie on any list on IMDb, usually a window appears with more than one film to choose, because many films have the same or similar names with others. I think it would be easy to implement only on one condition: if the list had a field with IMDb ID. Consider the following situation: I saw a thematic list which I liked, but did not agree with the inclusion of five films in it (the list in total has for example 100 films). I could export the list to a CSV file, remove these 5 films of it and use that file to create a new list, my list, with 95 films. This is because the lists exported from IMDb comes with the ID, which avoids any need for "scraping" the data. Like many other websites and also external programs use the IMDb ID in their databases, I could get movie lists even outside the site and include them in IMDb, if this feature was available. Today, it is necessary to include film by film. Fortunately the editing window allows you to paste the IMDb ID, speeding up the process a bit. PS: When you talk about "external programs", you are referring to programs such as Ant Movie Catalog, right?

A great pity. Why offer the option to export a list, if you can't import it again? Just offering that as an option would be very handy in case of disasters.

Although it is tedious, a user can manually reconstitute a list from the exported comma separated variable (CSV) file. I've done it and it is not fun. Admittedly, it would be a lot easier to import the list from the CSV file. The following fields are exported for each type of list. The name, description of the list and comments are lost. When manually reconstituting a list the most relevant fields are const and description. One can use the tt-constant (Title), nm-constant (People), ch-constant (character) and rm-constant (Images) to directly look up the respective list item. The search results should be unique. The description can be pasted into the description editing box. If/when IMDb decides to implement a list import feature, the simplest version would be to emulate this manual process. Titles (movies, TV shows, TV episodes) position const created modified description Title Title type Directors You rated IMDb Rating Runtime (mins) Year Genres Num. Votes Release Date (month/day/year) URL People position const created modified description Name Known for Characters position const created modified description Name Images position const created modified description url

Really this should be a relatively straightforward script to put together, I'm sure we could cobble something together that you could slot the necessary details into. Granted it'll still need a bit of time from the development team still but it'd lower the barrier for this.

I'd assume they have systems in place to stop people from being able to automatically run through films and add ratings, because the companies offering hundreds of votes on IMDB would have a field day if they could automate the system.

No, it used to be possible but they removed the URL interface years ago. That's exactly what I used to do! http://www.imdb.com/rg/action-box-tit... used to do this! That was the foundation of my complaint in the other "Import a list" thread.

abbyb, thank you for the information. I was not aware of that functionality.

Obviously, there's still a piece of JavaScript that does that now (the add to list buttons). If we could wedge in there, we'd back on the air, but I hadn't explored too deeply yet.

Yes. In theory you might be able to tap into the AJAX used to add films to a list. If you have a list of films with the IMDB ID you could just export the IDs as CSV (easy enough to do in a spreadsheet) and if you could get a script to allow you to import it, that could then (possibly) run through the IDs activating the form field to pump in the list of films. It might be there are measures in place to stop scripting exploits and/or flood controls but there is certainly a possibility there and a way to start simple then build up the functionality if it works. I did some digging and found this script that does seem to allow people to add films to lists from just about anywhere (including Google results): http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/3... Which suggests it is possible and, with the right knowhow someone could adapt what is there to get the first stage sorted out at least.

Does that thing work? It keeps telling me I need to log in to IMDb. Tried logging out and back in and it still says it.

I don't know, I've not tried it yet.

If his description of the protocol is still right, I can probably fake something up. I'll try to take a look this weekend.

I look forward to it. I installed the script and got the same error as you, seems the recent changes at IMDB broke it and the script needs updating: http://userscripts.org/topics/126533

OK, needs a little work, but I have adding things to a list remotely almost working. Behold my new list: http://www.imdb.com/list/PWsOMuoNqv4/. I think you can see the times things were added and tell I didn't do it the hard way. :-) I'm not sure my method will help you, but let me do some more testing and I'll share with the class.

Spiffy, what was the original list format that you imported?

Excellent! It took only 102 seconds to upload 420 items. Manually this would have taken me between an hour and two hours.

I added like 1100 DVDs to my other list too. It's similar to how I was doing it before, but I don't know if I can do more than one at once (with the old CGI interface you could add as many as would fit in a URL). I'll try that tonight. That'd be better for large numbers of items.

Looking forward to seeing this, as it might help with my fixing this problem (as copying across to another list would be slower than exporting and importing it): https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topi... As long as you can import from exported files.

Any progress on this? I am familiar with JavaScript (I just wrote my first GreaseMonkey script the other day) and could cast an eye over it if there are any issues that might need a second set of eyes.

Sorry, been busy with other stuff. I got my old script working and wanted to put some error handling in before sharing it. Hadn't had time to get back into the GreaseMonkey or anything, but I'm guessing the URLs can be tweaked and it'll work. Hope to look at it this weekend.

Super. Looking forward to it.

I have a Perl script that works for adding titles to a list, but you need to have previously saved out your IMDb account credentials to a file. That's a pain to explain, but if you can do that, I can hook you up. I'm working on making that cooler, but figured I'd update here in case anyone was interested.

abbyb, Thank you for the update.

abbyb do you have that script somewhere that it I can download it?

Recently (within the last month), my technique stopped working. I'm back on the case to get this working better for everyone. Who wants to help?