On Monday July 1, 2024 we’ll release some backend updates that will remove duplicate plays on all Trakt accounts. Any movie or episode plays with the exact same watched date and time will be combined into a single entry.
The duplicates are typically created by media center apps (sometimes mobile apps) and is a bug with those apps not correctly verifying your watched history before syncing. Sometimes the apps sync and re-sync the same data over an over, which created all these duplicates.
UPDATE July 1 11:15am PST
This change is now live. The new de-duplicated data might be a bit slow while it reads in.
If you have any specific issues, please DM @support or email support@trakt.tv and we can look into your account specifically.
Will this affect my stats?
Yes, it could. When duplicates are removed, the play count and total time watched will reduce.
What about multiple plays with different watched dates?
Multiple plays in general are fine and won’t be affected. Only plays with the exact date and time are removed and combined to a single play.
But I want to keep all my duplicates!
There isn’t a valid reason for allowing plays with the same watched date and time. You can only realistically watch a movie or episode once at a specific date and time.
Why are you doing this?
This will greatly improve the data accuracy on your accounts, and reduce the data size behind the scenes.
I love this! I think there will be a small amount of folks that don’t because they may have in fact watching an episode or film twice in a day. But a vast majority fall into the error category. I have always looked at the history of other users and been annoyed to see the same item played over and over on the same day. Question, if there was a major uproar, could this be reversed by you?
This is actually ok and still allowed to watch the same item throughout the day. The duplicates being remove are only if the watched date is exactly the same.
By episode plays with the exact same watched date, you are referring to the same episodes, correct? Sometimes, I batch-update episodes of a TV show when I’m done watching 2 or 3 of them. So they would all have the same time stamp, but they’d be different episodes. These are safe, I assume?
That’s probably a stupid question, but I thought I’d ask anyway. I have to go back and fix some movies now, because I sometimes also add movie plays in batches when I rewatch classic movies I’ve seen before but haven’t added yet.
@justin you say you will remove if the same day but then say it will be fine if it is watched twice on the same day.
Do you need to clarify that it is only plays with the same date AND time!
And not if, for instance, a movie is watched in the morning and then in the evening, same day but different time is OK?
I do not believe I have any duplicate plays as I keep an eye on them but just for clarity for those that do.
The only reason I could think of that this might not be desired is that the app allows you to manually set a time. If somebody wanted to set 2 watches and was lazy and didn’t set the time to 2 different times, one would get removed. Definitely a niche use case though. Can’t see it strongly affecting anyone.
You might have misunderstood, they will only remove tracked duplicate watches of the same item with the exact same date- AND timestamp.
Please give an example where you need to track when you watch multiple streams of the same movie at the same time.
I’m aware of how it’s going to be implemented. I have quite a few shows/movies that are marked watched via release date. If I’m unsure of previous watch dates/times, then I will just use “release date” as a marker.
Okay, but what is the value in knowing how many times you’ve watched something when you don’t know when you saw it last? And how can you be sure how many times you’ve watched something if you don’t remember when you’ve watched it?
A lot of the other stats are messed up when items are marked as watched multiple times with the same timestamp.
Don’t forget it will only remove duplicate entries if it matches the same criteria.
Episode/movie
Date
Time
Why does it matter how many times the same exact movie or episode is matched watched at the same exact date and time.
Seriously. Let us know what is the benefit of knowing you watched say The Boy S01E10 on 1/1/2023 8:46pm ten times. Or captain marvel on 5/8/2020 10:10pm 50 times???
You can mark everything say 1/1/1980 12:00am and it won’t be affected because it’s a different episode or different movie. This change is only for matching same episode or movie as watched same day and same exact time.
Perhaps if you haven’t already got a backup of your data (https://trakt.tv/settings/backups) or a manual csv export (via https://trakt.tv/users/me/history) you can get a version of your history with those duplicates and add the ones you care about back at some point with some different dates to keep your play counts, using an import tool of some sort.
