I should probably have posted this on support site, but I can’t seem to get password reset email to arrive (gmail, yes checked spam), so maybe that should be looked at too.
Anyway, the actual issue, Friends has 3 episodes marked as unwatched in progress view. Affected episodes are the ones that are two-parters. Also the first part episodes are now marked with 2 watches. This showed up a few days ago, maybe on Friday.
Was there a recent update on TMDB where someone mashed some two-parters into a single episode, consolidating your plays for both of them, then split them apart again, causing the second parts to become unwatched?
Seems you are right about it, on May 2nd someone removed the second part episode (didn’t check others, but expect same results): Bot Verification
This kind of sucks, if they keep changing back and forth, watch progress will keep getting messed up. Also, what will happen with trakt episode listing? And should I just fix the watch history manually now?
It appears TMDB has merged the double episodes based on new information from NBC (the original network). They have a discussion at Double episodes - Discuss Friends — The Movie Database (TMDB) about it. Their reasoning seems valid, but we are still investigating if we’ll merge data on Trakt to match or lock the show as is.
I understand if a show is airing or was never recorded in the database before that you want all that data to download and integrate into Trakt’s database as quickly as possible. But it’s another thing if existing data is changed, especially if data is removed. In those situations Trakt’s systems shouldn’t just absorb those changes unconditionally, rather flag the movie/show and let human eyes look it over to determine if the changes can just be applied as is or, as in this case, if some human intervention or manual merging/moving is required to prevent someone’s watch history from being screwed up.
Asking users to periodically check their entire history to make sure things didn’t mysteriously get unmarked or duplicated would not be an acceptable solution. Once a show has been completely documented, it needs to be soft-locked and updated manually to separate genuine corrections from another site’s edit war or sudden unannounced reorganization. It would also be helpful if Trakt remembered the old data for a period of time in case such a change is reverted shortly afterwards, because that data will not otherwise automatically go back to where it originally was.
Another way to help something like this is when a finished show is altered significantly, the users who have watch history there are notified to double check those pages for errors. Perhaps even show the user what their data used to look like so they have proper context.
A similar thing happened to me, the Celebrity Jeopardy tournament had originally been made “Specials” on the Jeopardy page, which is where I logged them. At some point, someone removed those “specials” and created Celebrity Jeopardy as an entirely separate show, of which I obviously had no plays, and the episodes that I had already marked as played were gone, so I couldn’t even go back and add the plays manually with any accuracy. I expressed my annoyance on these forums but no one ever got back to me.
We don’t automatically change it, it goes through out moderation process.
We’re still investigating the Friends changes to determine if they will be permanent on TMDB.
I think in terms of getting into the support site, when you click login, you gotta click the “are you a customer, login here” button, and then it logs you in through the background. I think you get taken back to the login page even though you are now logged in, so you just got to click the Home button or the My Tickets button up the top to continue.
Not sure if a decision has been taken here, but WB (owning the distribution rights for “Friends” on its platform - HBO Max, at least in Romania) has merged the last two episodes of the 9th season as well. There might be more examples, but I guess their statement is clear.
Is this likely to be resolved soon?
@justin Just resurfacing this. Thanks for all your hard work!
Looks like change on TMDB is permanent, can we expect an update of the show on Trakt?
Giving this topic a bump
This issue is still open after a whole year. When can we expect the moderation process to be finished?
Maybe this got lost in the backlog? Bumping again
Just bumping this inquiry. Seems like the TMDB listings have been finalized and the 2 part episodes are seen as one hour long episode.
Can this be properly reflected on Trakt as well?
the data was refreshed today, i just triggered another refresh to be sure. It should be matching TMDB unless support needs to do anything else on the back end
Thanks for triggering another refresh. I can see the data was recently refreshed but it still doesn’t match TMDB for whatever reason. This has been an ongoing issue for months now since switching from TVDB.
I’ll try contacting Support and see if they can take a look.
I reported the individual episodes using the “Report episode” function on the episode pages.
They don’t match up because Trakt doesn’t automatically delete episodes that are deleted on TMDB (to prevent data loss) as Justin said in 2023. And they probably lost track of this specific issue.
Yeah, the answer for why these episodes don’t match TMDB right now hasn’t changed, it’s the same as Star Trek: Voyager. TMDB used to list the episodes like this, them they combined them, and on some seasons they reverted and on some they didn’t.
We were waiting to see if the changes were definite before doing anything, and now that they seem like they are, we are still deciding what to do with them.