One of the most annoying things about Trakt is how movies/TV shows/episodes will have ratings before they have been released. Could you change this label to something that makes it clear that the number associated w/the rating doesn’t reflect the quality of the product until its actually come out? Maybe even change the icon from a heart to a flame before the release date, too.
Obviously, folks like to register their excitement or disapproval of projects, but it also allows for lots of trolling. And those pre-release ratings end up having an effect on the overall rating once people who’ve watched the thing start adding their feedback. So any ratings logged before something has been released shouldn’t count towards the ratings score once its come out.
I also like the idea of not even allowing people to add ratings to things until they’ve logged that they’ve watched them.
@zax2000 I am sure you aware that some episodes appear on streaming apps before they are “officially” released so you would need to be aware of any “blocking” of rating a show/movie before release.
But I do agree it would be good that an episode cannot be rated until it is marked as watched or as I have my settings set on the web/app so that as soon as I rate something it marks it as watched.
And if an item is subsequently marked as “unwatched” then the corresponding rating should be removed as well.
This. I would actually take advantage of this when I clean up my watches when I have to move my history from a dead or incorrect item to the right one. Automatically killing the rating would save me a step.
Another idea would be to have a new search page that shows users the most anticipated shows and movies that are coming out next, based on the ‘pre-rating’ they receive here. “Recommendations for the Future”, or “Mark Your Calendars”, or something.
Yeah while Trakt has made some good improvements in this space recently, with ratings being hidden on unreleased content (sometimes, not sure sometimes it looks like it works othertimes not). But there might be more they can do, not sure what exactly, maybe something like this, but it’s just one of the minor things that annoys me the most is when people rate something a 1 or a 10 based purely on the network it’s on (check most AppleTV shows before release), a casting decision, a trailer released etc.
It’s tough to enforce strict rating rules around the release date since there are different worldwide release dates and streaming vs. traditional TV air dates.
As to the original post in this thread, early ratings being hidden (https://trakt.tv/settings#global) should already help deal with this. I agree it’s not perfect, but still a lot better than displaying them all.
Preventing ratings is an interesting idea and something we can consider for the Trakt website and official apps. It’s not really possible for us to enforce that for 3rd party apps since that would be a breaking change with how the API works.
I mean technically you could accept the API request and then just immediately delete the rating, and just update the api documentation to make it clear that while it won’t break the apps, app developers should update their code to restrict ratings before release date for the best functionality.
I can see how this is a challenging thing to get right on Justin’s end. The way I use Trakt, the ratings don’t matter (maybe kind of fun to see how I felt vs the “wisdom of the crowd” after watching something).
It’s annoying to me that I get prompted to confirm a checkin to a movie that I’m seeing in an actual theater, not as part of a film festival, because some metadata claims that I’m watching it before its release date.
I was checking out The Flash to set my rating today and I noticed that the top comment was from 2016. That’s pretty crazy. (The second most-liked comment is from 2017) And with 49 likes it’ll take a long time for that to be displaced. It kind of devalues the comment feature. There’s got to be a way to mitigate this.
Could there be a way to perhaps set any pre-release comments to the bottom of any sorting list after the movie/show/episode has come out? Or maybe add a filter for people to hide any pre-release comments from view?
@changnoi
But I do agree it would be good that an episode cannot be rated until it is marked as watched or as I have my settings set on the web/app so that as soon as I rate something it marks it as watched.
And if an item is subsequently marked as “unwatched” then the corresponding rating should be removed as well.
I strongly disagree with the idea of not letting you rate something unless you have marked it as watched. It is a fairly common occurrence where I watch half or 2/3 of a movie and I really don’t like it. If I know how I feel after having watched the majority of something, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assign a rating, even if it’s admittedly an imperfect one.
If this were implemented, I would simply be forced to mark that movie as Watched so I could rate it – which I’d prefer not to do, seeing as I hadn’t actually finished it.
@justin
Preventing ratings is an interesting idea and something we can consider for the Trakt website and official apps. It’s not really possible for us to enforce that for 3rd party apps since that would be a breaking change with how the API works.
I would honestly see this as a bug, not a feature… This would just push me to use a 3rd-party app to add my rating.
Just hide the percentage for everyone until the release date(unless there is none) while still allowing for early ratings. No satisfaction of seeing a rating drop/raise. If implemented highly suggest #2 as well.
A way to show you are interested/disinterested before release I believe would work well combined with #1 and divert spam ratings while adding a feature. You can still show your support or lack thereof without affecting the rating system poorly.
Forcing the item to be marked as watched if you rate it instead of the option that we have now in the settings page would also probably help solve the issue too. Or at least set it to default.
I found that the more votes that Trakt has after release the less early voting matters. So maybe find ways to get more users to vote on content.
An integration of all 4 I believe will fix the problem relatively well.
Agreed, most theaters near me air movies a day or so before the official release date. I just saw Guardians 3 a day before it was supposed to release. (AMC btw)
Actually they don’t really change much. See below. I am proud to say that my estimations from 3 years ago held up quite well. Even though some of the movies did end up performing lower than the reference films, the important numbers were still very close…
If you use this math problem you can see the rating of something without early votes.
(Total Rating x Total Number of Votes - Early Rating x Early Number of Votes) / (Total Number of Votes - Early Number of Votes) = Rating Without Early Votes
Rounded to the nearest hundredth of a point rating without early votes…
Avatar 2 would be at 75.96% with 12,836 votes, so -0.04 point change*
After We Collided would be at 60.51% with 1,648 votes, so +2.49 points change*
The Flash would be at 69.70% with 1684 votes, so -0.30 point change*
Mulan (2020) would be at 65.96% with 10,399 votes, so -0.04 point change*
*subject to change
I also would like to make a retraction/update.
The only time early ratings appear to affect average ratings at all is with After We Collided. The rating was only 2 points off when you round to the nearest point. So still not very significant. But I wanted to see why.
I went back and researched, apparently this film had premiered early in Hungary Aug 20 2020, 9 days before my original post. So some of the early ratings were likely actual ratings.
On another hand this movie did poorly, after having a much higher rating to start with. This could not happen the other way around. If the film did better, the extra votes added would cause the early ratings to be have even less of an effect.
You make an interesting point on this, perhaps instead of what I had suggested before, we should just go with the latter part, where the feature is enabled by default but can still be changed…
Forcing the item to be marked as watched if you rate it instead of the option that we have now in the settings page would also probably help solve the issue too. Or at least set it to default.
The default setting for everyone is to hide ratings for unreleased items. There are good points about allowing early ratings and not tied ratings and watched together. This is ultimately where we end up too and it makes it tough to actively prevent data from being entered.
Hiding the ratings was the best step we could take without affecting the site and 3rd party apps. It’s possible we make other adjustments in the future, but I don’t anticipate blocking ratings being one of them.
This is why I still wish the old trakt V1 rating breakdown would be back in full. Justin added the individual rating count but still not who voted and when Show statistics breakdowns
You wouldn’t have to guess much to find out if these ratings were real if you could see more context.
