Wow, what a horrible, terrible decision. If I don’t know when I exactly watched something, but I do know I’ve watched some movie or episode once, 3 times, or maybe more, then I have checked in that movie or episode 3 times on ‘release date’. Now it’s all gone. It’s as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Thanks a lot for considering human use cases as opposed to media center apps I’ve never used, which you definitely have logs of which you could’ve cross-referenced with in order to apply deduping in a targeted way. You could’ve also simply checked if these duplicate check-ins happen to be exact matches to the release date or a previously set release date to prevent false positives.
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.
This is poor reasoning, there’s a perfectly valid reason above for you. Barely any user ever actually watches something on the exact selected time of release, so with your above reasoning you should’ve started by removing that checkbox. You don’t have an “unknown” option and instead of implementing one you do this kind of destructive action and then think of poor counter arguments in advance. I deduced it over the past months as I noticed repeated check-ins with ‘release date’ selected would not appear. And I noticed many movies or TV shows I have watched more than once were now marked… as only viewed one time. I know Trakt has caching issues and connectivity issues now and then, but this was too consistent of a bug to not trigger my suspicions. Sadly, I was right.
The correct way to make behaviour altering changes like this is to make a change going forward and make it clear in the UI. You haven’t even bothered yet to add a new ‘check-in time already exists’ error. You could’ve targeted the unlikely use case where someone has checked in to the same thing over 10 times, especially when these 10 actions were taken within 10 seconds or whatever you could suspect buggy media center apps behave like. But you forgot that users use this platform for tracking, just because you never bothered to check in things you’ve watched before you joined or started Trakt.
Executing untargeted destructive actions just to save meager kilobytes is not worth it. This makes the platform unreliable. Also this textbox is tiny as hell (why even block resizing it), but I think I removed most of my cursing. Typing it in helped with the months of frustration. I really like Trakt, but what a poor decision this was. I needed to rant. I hope some of it can be considered useful feedback. Fuck.
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???
Why does this site exist? To track what I’ve watched, how often I’ve watched it and when I’ve watched it. It’s fine if you don’t rewatch anything, if you don’t care about your watch statistics, hell maybe you are here just for reviews or meming on the forum. All good. Many users have many use cases. Yours is as valid as mine.
I get that it sucks for repeat past viewings but it’s not correct data either.
I try to check in at the correct minute. I’m willing to bet you’re nowhere as precise as I try to be, so I really do appreciate your appreciation of correct data.
If I can’t pinpoint the when but I am forced to choose a when, then I’ll go with the one date I know is a placeholder: release date. The amount of times watched will be correct and, let’s be honest, that (hours/number of times watched) is more important to most users than getting the precise minute correct.
If Trakt is unable to determine whether adding x repeat watches was a manual action or done by an unreliable third party app, they should not conduct destructive deduplication. It’s as simple as that.
I suspect making dates optional saves more kilobytes.