Yesterday I reported this item Auralnauts Star Wars - Trakt since it does not have a TMDB page. I thought that was our main criterion for the removal of items. Now it wasn’t removed because it still has a TVDB entry associated with it. How do we handle such cases in general? Do we usually say there’s a reason behind the fact that there’s no TMDB page and adhere to TMDB’s general guidelines or do we keep items as long as they have either a TMDB or a TVDB page?
Btw I’m not trying to challenge the decision, I’m just trying to understand.
We usually keep pages that are only linked to TVDB if they have good data and a lot of plays. If they really don’t exist we can remove, but we don’t want to delete user’s data specially if that show has already ended.
I see that point. The thing is that this logic also applies to many items that were previously on TMDB and aren’t anymore, because many of them do actually exist in some form (and therefore have plays associated with them), they just don’t fulfill TMDB’s requirements to be listed.
Do we have our own guidelines for when an item should exist or not? TMDB’s ones can be found here New Content - New Content Bible — The Movie Database (TMDB) under “Not supported”, whereas I couldn’t find such clear rules for TVDB. It certainly would be good if we had such rules to make it clear what is listed on Trakt and what isn’t.
Adopting TMDB’s guidelines (if we were to fully agree with them) could also help with Items removed from TMDB.
Any further work in this area to get a consistent set of guidelines for which items are listed on Trakt in general or do we accept that Trakt lists “TMDB items and some exclusive TVDB items with many views”?
For now it is still the same. We can still update those TVDB pages and I’ve been migrating the ones that are possible. Some people also report pages that still use TVDB after fixing their TMDB page, so that helps.
Basically, we prefer TMDB pages, but valid TVDB pages will not be removed if they aren’t allowed on TMDB. There have been cases that some exclusive youtube show wasn’t allowed on TMDB and then a streaming service eventually released it, and then TMDB allowed it. We don’t want to just delete data if people are marking it as watched.
In cases where items are not on TMDB but are on TVDB, it’s common to retain them as long as they have a valid TVDB entry. TMDB is typically the preferred source, but TVDB can sometimes serve as an acceptable alternative. For example, much like how spider identification apps might rely on multiple databases to identify species, using both TMDB and TVDB helps ensure a more complete catalog, even if some items aren’t listed on TMDB.
