these movies have been deleted from trakt, one is a special that screened some episodes of a tv show as a movie in theaters and the other has yet to be released this year but i’ve already seen it at a test screening, both are real releases and i can’t add them again. why is that?
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Maybe they are actively removing content that doesnt have and tvdb or imdb id. In which case they should really scratch their head once again
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Hi,
Those 2 pages were hidden for not having an IMDB ID. I’ve unhidden the second one, since it has one now. Do you know if the first one is allowed at IMDB?
I’m seeing a massive data discrepancy on my account as well. My watched history dropped by 380 items, and my watchlist is down by 5.
I’ve confirmed that 325 of these 380 missing items are short films. As shown in the attached screenshots, I have a specific custom list where the header still shows 1,315 items (Image 1), but the actual list content only displays 990 items (Image 2).
This is clearly a direct result of the recent policy to purge entries lacking IMDb IDs. However, deleting user data without any prior notification or a ‘tombstone’ log is incredibly frustrating. With nearly 400 items gone, it is unrealistic to expect users to manually track down and fix metadata for every single title.
If I decide to switch to another service and use their ‘Import from Trakt’ feature now, will these ‘hidden’ or deleted items still be included in the transferred data? Or has this metadata cleanup permanently wiped our personal watch history for these titles from the Trakt database entirely?
What’s even more upsetting is the loss of the precise timestamps (date and time) of when I watched these films.
Even if I wanted to manually add 380 IMDb pages (which is an unreasonable expectation), I can never recover the exact moment I watched them. Trakt is a tracking service; deleting the very data we use the platform to track—without even a notification—completely undermines the trust we place in this service.
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yes since it was released on cinemas
but i agree with Ray_o, i’ve tracked this 2 items because i noted it was missing in my Seen in Theaters list, but what about other movies, tv specials, shorts, etc that are real releases and are just missing a imdb ID? i can’t remember all them by name to go add on imdb
I don’t think Ive ever downvoted a post by Sonply because they’re doing gods work but this decision is just ridiculous.
Totally not aimed at you but whatever powers that be should get their head out of their asses lmao
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The “right” thing to do would be for Trakt to add the items to IMDb instead of deleting them from here. Expecting customers to fix something they undid / deleted is insane.
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I also had many short movies and low budget local movies in my lists and history without an imdb page, i have no clue what data have i lost.
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Oh, so customer support does exist.
and it gets worse, 2 days ago i added the imdb ID on some concert films from brazilian artists i’ve already watched and it didn’t automatically appeared again
so we have to go and fix it on tmdb and report to trakt film by film? how’s that gonna work lol
Yeah, this is atrocious. As others have said, it’s one thing to change the policy for future titles being added, but to just delete the data from all accounts for all these old items without even notifying us about the specific removed items? There’s no acceptable justification for that.
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I was wondering why upwards of 1000 movies had disappeared from my history. Please tell me this is reversible! Frankly this new policy whatever it is has made importing such a chore, and for more obscure titles it’s next to impossible.
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WWE has taken a big hit too.
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I can’t know for sure the answers to those questions, but I can try to help you figure them out since the Trakt team doesn’t care to pronounce about it.
- Export your Trakt data (https://app.trakt.tv/settings/data)
- Explore your .json files: personally, for me the quickest and easiest way to do this is through JSON Editor Online website, using the tree mode (I think it’s okay to mention it, it’s not competition in any way, shape or form, just an online tool)
- You will find a file for your list “Short Films”. In this case, I think two, since each file caps at 1000 records. It is very likely that all your films are still listed on those files, even the hidden ones. At least, that’s my experience.
- Now, for the timestamps, there are two files you can use: “watched-movies” and “watch-history”. The first one will only display the last watched date, even if you have more than a play. The second one, or the multiple files with the second name, will have every single history record.
- Using the platform I aforementioned, there’s a search button you can use. Search for something unique, for example the TMDb ID (if the 3rd point was successful, you will have access to those IDs there). Well, if you find it, those records are, for now, not lost.
I’m sorry I can’t give you a straight answer, but hopefully this post can help you. Let us know if those records are still present, hopefully they are!
Thanks for the suggestions! I followed your advice and checked my JSON files. Since I have a lot of data, I used a Python script to cross-reference everything.
By comparing my list lists-list-short-films.json (1,332 items) against all 8 of my watched-history.json files, I found that 322 films are completely missing from the history files. As you can see in the screenshot, the script was still able to pull the TMDb IDs and Last Watched dates for these missing items from my watched-movies.json file.
This is a serious issue. While I personally watch movies only once, many users re-watch films multiple times. Since the watched-history files are gone, all those specific play dates and historical records are permanently lost. The watched-movies file only keeps the “Last Watched” date, which is just a hollow summary.
It proves they deleted my history logs but left the data in my movies list. The files are broken and don’t match.
I went even deeper and pinpointed the exact moment this happened by auditing my daily backups:
- March 5: My JSON backup showed 7,086 history records.
- March 6: The count dropped to 6,714.
This confirms that 372 history records were purged from my account in that 24-hour window. This is NOT a case of “hidden items”—it is a permanent deletion that occurred between March 5th and March 6th.
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Wow, that’s a whole other level, I’m just a basic computer user in comparison. 
But those skills seem very useful, especially now that I will have to explore and properly format all my exported files to correctly import to another platform, whatever that might be. But I’m going off-topic, anyway.
Thank you for confirming it for all that might be interested in this information. And I couldn’t agree more: this is indeed a serious issue.
Funnily enough, around the same time automatic backups were being sunsetted and started not working properly (again).
Here for reference:
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so they really gonna be silent about this huh?
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