Items removed from TMDB

I recently stumbled upon a ton of items that aren’t on TMDB anymore, but still on Trakt. The handling of those items seems problematic. They remain on Trakt until reported for removal. The report window has this info that sometimes items need to be merged and I’d assume that’s why items not available on TMBD anymore aren’t deleted automatically, but that procedure leads to A LOT of orphan movies and shows on Trakt. These shouldn’t be part of the database and clutter it up. Any ideas on how to handle this better going forward?

If we see this as a real issue, I would suggest a cut-off regarding the amount of plays. If an item has been removed from TMDB, but it has more than x plays on Trakt, it doesn’t get removed from Trakt automatically but is added to a pipeline for manual control to check if a merge is necessary, if it has less, it gets deleted automatically.

Data from trakt never automatically gets removed. It has to be reported and merged or deleted manually by trakt mods.

Yeah, that’s what I said. But do you see my problem with that? There’s sooo much content on Trakt that shouldn’t be there and no one can realistically go through all of that and report it/delete it manually.

Oh yes. I understand what you mean now. Yea it would be nice to somehow have some sort of logic to weed out the easy ones to remove. Maybe not done daily but maybe weekly or even just monthly.

Yeah, exactly

On the bright side the mod takes care of the reports quickly. I’ve reported hundreds of entries for deletion and they get deleted within 48 hours.

But yeah there really needs to be a way to mass report stuff or something.

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Yeah totally, I’ve also made very good experiences with the team. :slight_smile:

@Sonply You seem to be working in this area, what are your thoughts on this?

I think even if the entry is wrong and has low data (few people who watched it or collected), it is still better to have a human look into them before removing the page. A lot of those items are duplicates and need the data to be merged. I, for example, wouldn’t like my data to be auto removed simply because few people watched it and TMDB decided the movie was a special from a show and not a movie.

Those pages that were removed on TMDB basically don’t ever get updated anymore, since there isn’t a page to get data from on TMDB anymore.
I could ask the developers if it is possible to create a report if the system identifies that the page we are trying to update was removed from TMDB. And then I could look into them to see what should be done. Maybe that could help in those cases.

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Totally valid point, I failed to think about other people who also might be watching more exotic stuff.

I assume your proposed solution would generate a lot of reports but it would be a very good solution to the issue because then we wouldn’t have any duplicates or invalid entries anymore, just proper TMDB entries adhering to their guidelines and I’d assume some TVDB entries because we decided to keep them.

That is assuming the backlog wouldn’t be too large because of the new system.

To make sure it’s not forgotten: This would not only apply to shows and movies but also to singular episodes

@Sonply Any plans on that?

It’s on the list of things to do, so eventually it will be done. I can’t give any predictions on when that will happen right now.
I’ll reply here once we have something like that and explain how it will work.

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Great to hear, thanks a lot!