I regularly go to festivals and many of the films I watch there haven’t been added to Trakt or TMDB.
In those cases, I’m happy to contribute and add the films on TMDB, even if it is a considerable amount of work to gather all the information and appropriate images. Sometimes the films are shown way before their theatrical release and there’s very little information or images online.
With the new requirement for titles to have an IMDB id, this has become much more time consuming. Instead of adding the title on TMDB, waiting a couple of hours and importing it on Trakt, now I have to add it on IMDB, wait for the addition to get approved, add it on TMDB, wait for the caches to updated and finally import it in Trakt. Not to mention that IMDB and TMDB have very different workflows to add data and different rules and requirements.
Note that those festivals (Japanese film festivals, documentary film festivals, Locarno film festival, etc) show a lot of international non-mainstream films. While IMDB might be good and up-to-date for US films, the data is much more spotty for international films. While you’ll likely find all upcoming Hollywood films already on IMDB, the same is not true for upcoming international films. The new requirement really skews towards US and mainstream cinema, where IMDBs coverage is best, and penalizes international and non-mainstream films, which explicitly are a focus of TMDB.
So, please add an alternative for the IMDB requirement. I would love to continue to contribute but spending many hours over many days after a festival to get all the films I’ve watched on Trakt is simply untenable for me with the current system.
You could e.g. allow Trakt users with good standing to import TMDB films without IMDB id. Or require a minimum TMDB content score or check the experience of the title’s contributors.