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But Aesp, you can go to your God and track 10,000 titles for free, why monkey around with profiler, when your God is so much superior, in your eyes.

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Quoting Woola:

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The good news is that the monster is beatable.

Woola, I admire your optimism    I don't think you will ever reach the goal of having all profiles correct per the rules. Many of them are clearly abandoned and will never see another update. Does this represent a problem? Not really! It's only a problem if you think the purpose of the CLT is to list a person's most commonly credited name. If you see the CLT only as a tool to allow all users to select the same variant as the common name, which is what it was designed to be, then errors in unused profiles become a non-issue.

Quoting Woola:

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I see a lot of people who want to go on and on about how wonderful they think IMDb, which makes me ask why they are here then

I'm not advocating getting IMDb data into the DVDP database. What I praised IMDb for was their strong focus on providing value to their users. This has made IMDb a tremendously successful web site with a user base DVDP can only dream of. You may scoff at this, but I'm sure Ken does not.

To give a practical example: Consider how often you turn to Profiler to find out what roles a certain actor/actress in your collection has played. Then consider how often you use Profiler to find out exactly how those roles were presented in the end credits. Myself, I do the former all the time, but very rarely the latter. As a rough estimate maybe 100 cases of the former for each case of the latter, meaning the exact presentation of the role is not very important to me. Would I like to see the exact credited role? Sure, it's an added bonus, but hardly the be-all and end-all of DVDP that many make it out to be.

Another example: I want to find the DVDs I own that feature François Truffaut as director. So I type in "François Truffaut" in the crew filter. Done! Except ... I can't really be sure that I see all my DVDs with M. Truffaut. I have to consider the possibility that his name was listed capitalized in some of his films. So I need to make another filter, this time entering "Francois Truffaut" to see the rest of the profiles! This constitutes a broken user experience in my book. Fixing this problem has a higher value to me than maintaining strictly as credited roles. If forced to choose I know what I would sacrifice.

In the above example there's no reason why we can't have both effective filtering on accented names and capturing on-screen roles. It is more an illustration that there are more important concerns than whether profile data is copied exactly as on screen.

And before you pounce: I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself. I realise that the relative importance of individual features will vary from user to user and Ken has the unenviable task of deciding what aspects of the database should be given priority. I don't expect the result will fit my usage pattern exactly, but I can always hope. 

Thanks for listening!

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Sure, DVDP is a collection program for DVD's (and BD's / HDDVD's), but what is on those DVD's? Movies! So if it can be a collection tool for DVD's & movies, how great would that be?

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Quoting Dag Ove:

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To give a practical example: Consider how often you turn to Profiler to find out what roles a certain actor/actress in your collection has played. Then consider how often you use Profiler to find out exactly how those roles were presented in the end credits. Myself, I do the former all the time, but very rarely the latter. As a rough estimate maybe 100 cases of the former for each case of the latter, meaning the exact presentation of the role is not very important to me. Would I like to see the exact credited role? Sure, it's an added bonus, but hardly the be-all and end-all of DVDP that many make it out to be.

To answer your practical example, my answer is 'never'.  I do not use Profiler to find out what roles a certain actor, in my collection, has played.  To be clear, the only time I even care, is when I am watching a show and see an actor that I recognize, and wonder where I know him/her from.  On those occasions, I look up the show to see who the actor is, then pull up IMDb to see what other films/shows that person was in.

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Another example: I want to find the DVDs I own that feature François Truffaut as director. So I type in "François Truffaut" in the crew filter. Done! Except ... I can't really be sure that I see all my DVDs with M. Truffaut. I have to consider the possibility that his name was listed capitalized in some of his films. So I need to make another filter, this time entering "Francois Truffaut" to see the rest of the profiles! This constitutes a broken user experience in my book. Fixing this problem has a higher value to me than maintaining strictly as credited roles. If forced to choose I know what I would sacrifice.

As in the previous example, I would never use Profiler for this purpose.  There is already a db that does this, and does it quite well.  I, and I suspect most casual users, use profiler for the reason it was designed...because, "Put simply, DVD Profiler is the best way to track your DVD addiction!"

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In the above example there's no reason why we can't have both effective filtering on accented names and capturing on-screen roles. It is more an illustration that there are more important concerns than whether profile data is copied exactly as on screen.

Not trying to be an arse, but how do you know there's no reason why we can't have both?  If there weren't, I am quite sure that Ken would have added that ability some time during the past 10+ years that I have been using Profiler. 

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In my case, the answer is very often. I carefully work on linking of actors, because I'm interested by movies in which they play that I can watch, so that are in my collection. I do not go to IMDb for this information since IMDb doesn't filter on movies I own.

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Quoting surfeur51:

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In my case, the answer is very often. I carefully work on linking of actors, because I'm interested by movies in which they play that I can watch, so that are in my collection. I do not go to IMDb for this information since IMDb doesn't filter on movies I own.

That's fine but, the point I was trying to make is, not everybody does it that way.  Some of us use Profiler just to track our collection.  Can it be used for more than that?  Of course it can but, in my opinion, when you use it for more than that, you are no longer a casual user.

Peruse your collection with ease <--

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As for films that I can watch, when I look up actors at IMDb, once I get to a title I recognize, I usually know whether or not I have that title in my collection.  I may not be able to recite every title in my collection, but I know one when I see it.

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Regarding the correct linking of cast and crew, I think we can agree that there is a group of users that don't care about it all (like MadMartian) and there's also a non-negligeable group that wants to use the software in that way. Implementing correct linking wouldn't hurt the first group (since they don't care about it anyway) but would make the second group happy.

Same thing about technical DVD aspects. Some users don't care much for that, like Yves. Others on the other care a great deal about that (correct aspect ratio, correct type of cover and case, etc). Again, I can apply the same reasoning: it doesn't hurt Yves if it is implemented, since he just chooses to ignore it but it makes the group that does care about it happy.

The way I see it is that for the DVD technical aspects, those wishes are for a great deal already catered to. Now if we can add the correct cross linking as well, all groups would be happy. Everyone benefits and nobody is disadvantaged.

Personally, I count myself in both groups that cares about correct DVD data but also correct movie data with working links. So I'd be happy to help and try make both groups happy and I try to do so by trying to contribute according to the rules while adding ideas for future rule updates.

At least, that's how I see things. There's no need to bicker, let's just work together to achieve the common goals of the userbase. 

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Your point is taken that we don't all use the program in the same way, but those of us that want to improve the linking feature are addressing a basic feature of the program.