I have to say, I’m agree with childofkorm on this one.
I have a lot of movies and a couple of tv shows I watched twice or more that I simply marked on release date because I simply don’t know when it was.
It’s important for me to know which ones I watched more than once or not. Perhaps an exception rule that makes the “wipe” not apply to release date option?
I understand the implementation, but I think it’s going to affect (negatively) more people than expected. Me included.
This is a very good thing.
Although some people haven’t realized that it won’t affect their data, only the duplicate plays mistakenly entered by third-party apps and various tools.
I’ve been using Trakt for years, and I would often get duplicate plays, and I always thought something like this was needed.
Great Idea and just to show what a problem this is for me below are a number of spurious duplicates that I have had “added” to my account by outside sources (Series Guide, Cinema HD etc.) for some reason or other.
And yes the dates are a over a year ago but I got fed up logging them but they continued throughout last year hopefully today it stops.
Manually deleting 2022 duplicates was a pain in the rear end.
Not only will this free up space on the servers it should also make things quicker and give more accurate results.
Sorry if for some reason you want to have the same episode logged at the same date and time for multiple plays but I am pretty sure that the majority of us welcome this move to make Trakt more reliable and accurate.
Date Items Plays Diff.
23/06/22 53,411 53,537 126
24/06/22 53,421 53,547 126
30/06/22 53,515 53,592 77
01/07/22 53,526 53,585 59
05/07/22 53,571 53,630 59
06/07/22 53,577 53,578 1
07/07/22 53,589 53,590 1
24/07/22 53,759 53,791 32
25/07/22 53,785 53,817 32
29/07/22 53,786 53,864 78
31/07/22 53,749 53,882 133
01/08/22 53,760 53,893 133
03/08/22 53,747 53,782 35
05/08/22 53,611 53,766 155
06/08/22 53,554 53,618 64
10/08/22 53,439 53,600 161
03/09/22 53,659 53,970 311
20/12/22 55,376 55,554 178
21/12/22 55,384 55,396 12
01/01/23 55,492 55,493 1
16/01/23 55,669 55,675 6
04/02/23 56,559 56,801 242
Total of Plays Manually Deleted 2022
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.
@justin it has failed 
(EDIT: apparently not, 13 seconds difference).
I have just checked my history and have found 3 extra plays.
1 is a movie:
Sicko but has different dates and times - Not sure why this has been added but understand this would not fall in the “duplicate removal” category.
2 are TV Shows:
Vietnam in HD played 01/07/24 @ 17.29 for both plays (hence the failure!)
The Traitors NZ played 01/07/24 @ 16.13 but the other is 16.14 so understand why this would not work but still not sure why it has appeared today.
I did allow Cinema HD access to my Trakt account yesterday so this may be an explanation.
I will wait a few days for you to see this in case you want to investigate then I will delete them myself.
Isn’t this just double added after the performed deletions?
It’s supposed to be on going not just a one off.
aha, I missed that, as that wasn’t mentioned in the first post 
The plays are 13 seconds apart, sent by 2 different apps. You can see the exact date in the HTML code or via your API data.
data-date="2024-07-01T16:29:17Z"
data-date="2024-07-01T16:29:04Z"
Ah, OK thanks for looking at it.
I’ll disable Cinema HD and delete these items.
Thank you @justin
As long as it’s not multiple movies of different titles with the same watch date/time. I’m putting all my unknown watch dates under January 1, 1950 at midnight.
@Amon_101 I do this as well and seeing your message I have just checked my history and No it is not happening.
I still have many movies all with that date and time still in the history.
Maybe this is a seperate bug, but reading the forum it seems everyone is being pushed here. My views were removed but there is no wy they were duplicate. Example
I watched this entire show and each episode I know I manually checked on the website because I watched them sitting at my computer. There was no app or anythign checking for me. It was me checking.
BTW this happened to ALL my shows. I already re-checked some (had to do “on air date” instead of when I actually watched them)
Here is what I’m seeing for example for survivor. I have definitly watched and checked manually every episode of that show.
EDIT: This has been fixed by the higher ups. I was special, nothing to do with “duplicate watches”
I now can no longer load my dashboard, getting 500 errors. Could this be related to the change? I can hit the homepage, but as soon as I log in (regardless of browser or OS) I am getting the 500 errors. (I emailed support too)
I hate the change!
I have used the “release date” to mark as watched more than once… For me wasn’t a duplicate. And now I lost a lot of views I marked as “release date” in this almost 10 years member … And I know I’m not alone on this.
You could at least consider that all “release date” is not a duplicate.
I love this site. I spend hours here. But every time you guys “change the rules” I fell betrayed. 
Yeah, I’m in the same boat. We were told to use Release Date when we don’t know the date, and I’ve done exactly that to mark multiple views, and now they’re all gone.
Most movies predate Trakt, so how in the world should I have marked them to keep the data safe?
I really enjoyed looking back on old movies and seeing how many times I had watched them, and what movies I had watched the most times.
After 12 years of building my data like this, it’s been erased in seconds due to making your data more accurate.
There were so many better ways to do this. Making it optional or just filtering it on the backend. You should never delete data that you don’t understand. If you wanted to not count duplicates in your data, just filter them out instead, and leave my data alone.
But I guess it was never my data to begin with, at least that’s clear now.
Thanks for all the memories Trakt, shame you deleted them though. I’m out.
It is a holiday in the US, but we’ll be discussing the release date duplicates early next week to see what can be done.
For context, we are talking about tens or even hundreds of millions of duplicate records. To increase performance and reduce the data size, it can’t just be filtered out unfortunately.
In general this is fine. The issue is multiple plays for a single movie/episode added on the same release date and time.
I get it, I didn’t know the data issue was that large, but to punish good data (and users) to remove bad data is a step too far, especially (basically) without any notice.
Thank you for responding and looking into a possible solution though. (The saying “Good guy Justin” holds up it seems.)
I’ll do my part and think of some possible solutions:
I’m sure you have more/better ideas yourself as you know the data, but I’ll add more ideas if I think of them.
Have a nice holiday.
Nice one 
What, if anything, came of this discussion? Since Trakt adamantly refuses to support plays without a timestamp (requested in several places over the years, now canonically here), the best workaround we all had to track things from before we joined the site was to pick some past date.
This deduplication has wiped out all of the extra plays I added for shows or movies I watched repeatedly, for example reducing my play count of every pre-Discovery Star Trek series from 4-5+ to 2 or 3. I could go back and re-add things with the times incremented by 1 minute for each repetition, but I’d like to find out if there’s any forthcoming solution first.
