Quoting Unicus69:

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So they only require that you verify it the first time it is entered, but not if you want to change it?  I agree, that isn't the way I thought it worked either. 

It does make sense though, since the presence of one birth year means it was established to be "necessary". What then remains to be checked, is whether a second or third birth year is sufficiently documented.

My 9***fakes dates I only use where a credit is listed only by “Common Name” like ‘David” or ‘Susan’ or where the name is exactly the same but can’t find any dates to identify them but is clearly different, say a musician from the sixties and an ‘actor’ is from the eighties…

Quoting Gerri Cole:

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What do you use the fake birth years for locally? Just to differentiate for those that you don't know the year of birth of?

Yes, that is what we are doing.  As an example, it was easy to find a BY for Bruce Campbell of Evil Dead fame.  There is another Bruce campbell, who is now deceased, that did bit parts in Stargate SG-1 and Double Jeopardy.  I have yet to find a BY for him.  For some reason, even though I know I have changed it, the Bruce Campbell with the BY occasionally replaced the one without and I have to change it again.

The only way to prevent that is to add a fake BY to the one who is less famous.

Quoting m.cellophane:

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Quoting Gerri Cole:

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What do you use the fake birth years for locally? Just to differentiate for those that you don't know the year of birth of?

Yes. If you identify 2 or more names that are the same and you want to use birth years for differentiation, many times you can't find a birth year for one or more of them. I have some same-names for which I don't know real birth years for any of them.

Indeed. Here's a real-life example, Gerri.

Is it possible to change the BY field to accept question marks for unkown birth years?

There's a big problem with same-name performers in adult films. And determining a "good" BY for an adult performer is even tougher than finding one for the "legitimate" performers.  There's on SAG that the adult perfomers belong to that has rules for people using the same name, so there's a lot of confusion with regard to who is who -- and how to have good linking.  Using fake birth years is the only way to handle most of these issues -- that and not contributing any adult titles.

Sometimes an adult performer uses the same name as a "legitimate" one (e.g., Cindy Crawford).  So I give a BY to the adult Cindy and none to the "legitimate" one, but I don't fully understand the implications of having a Cindy Crawford in my DB with a BY and another Cindy Crawford with no BY.  Doesn't the system sometimes add the by to a new addition to my local DB?

Quoting Northbloke:

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Unfortunately the program doesn't see a name without a BY and a name with a BY as two separate entities.

This is why I'm concerned.  And I hadn't thought about T!M's issue with restoring from a backup.

Quoting m.cellophane:

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Quoting kdh1949:

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Doesn't the system sometimes add the by to a new addition to my local DB?

What I have seen is that if you have a name with two different birth years and you download a new profile or an update to a profile that includes that name, but no birth year, the system will assign the lowest birth year to the new data.

If you have a BY and a blank, and you download a blank, it goes to blank. But if you have a BY 1965 and a BY 1969, the blank BY becomes BY 1965.

Hmmmm...