We hear you and are working to improve the TMDB transition process through support and some backend merging tools. Kate is doing a great job handling the high support load. Sean and myself are responsible for the more advanced data fixes and we are honestly way behind on those and working to juggle them with our other responsibilities.
I’ve been out of the office recently and delayed on responding to a lot of things, I’m sorry for delays. The TMDB transition is a high priority item and we’ll formalize a “rule” set soon for how we will handle things. I’m not going to dive too deep into the behind the scenes, but we’ve had many conversations with metadata providers and app developers which helped us reach our TMDB transition plan.
To address some more specific questions:
- Agreed that full metadata comparison is more then just season numbers, episode numbers, and titles. That is our initial check though and it works well to see if a show’s structure can remain intact when switched over.
- If specials are re-arranged on TMDB, we will adjust them on Trakt to match.
- A show that only exists on TVDB will remain on Trakt, but stop getting updates if no TMDB entry exists for it. Not sure beyond that yet, but maybe we can use TVMaze or OMDB as a fallback for some of those shows?
- We have episode IDs for Trakt, TMDB, TVDB, and IMDB. Coverage depends on what TVDB and TMDB have. It will require manual adjustment for us to move episodes to the TMDB structure in the “Case Closed” example. The actual episode records will still be the same, so they will have any IDs already attached.
- TMDB allows TVDB IDs to be entered in the external ID section. Trakt will store those if entered. Any existing TVDB IDs will remain.
- Existing shows with airtimes will keep those. New shows imported from TMDB will check TVMaze for airing info. If that doesn’t exist or is wrong, we can manually fix a show via support.